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Driskell, David Clyde  

American, 20th century, male.

Born 7 June 1931, in Eatonton (Georgia).

Painter, draughtsman (including ink), collage artist, print artist, sculptor, collector, art historian. Religious subjects, figures, portraits, figure compositions, scenes with figures, landscapes. Designs for stained glass.

David C. Driskell earned a BFA at Howard University in ...

Article

Fashion Moda  

Karen Kurczynski

Alternative art space founded by Stefan Eins (b 1943) at 2803 Third Avenue near 147th Street in the South Bronx, New York, from 1978 to 1993. Eins arrived in New York from Austria in 1967. He referred to Fashion Moda as a museum of “Science, Art, Technology, Invention, and Fantasy,” the title of its inaugural exhibition in 1979. He had previously run a downtown storefront art space called the Mercer Street Store at 3 Mercer Street from 1971 to 1978. Black downtown artist, poet and musician Joe Lewis served as Co-Director of the space with Eins, and William Scott, then a teenager from the neighborhood, served as Junior Director. Their collaborative ventures attempted to connect the street culture of the South Bronx, by then a neighborhood in the midst of massive economic decline, to an international cultural scene.

From its opening in 1978, annually funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts and other sources, Fashion Moda held auctions, performances, seminars and other events. Joe Lewis described it as “an outlet for the disenfranchised, a Salon des Réfusés that cut across the uptown/downtown dichotomy, across the black/white/Hispanic isolation.” Although its glass storefront was located in a neighborhood far from the Soho gallery district, its impact has been measured largely by its effect on the more mainstream art world of the 1980s and early 1990s. It introduced and exhibited a number of artists including Charles Ahearn, John Ahearn (...

Article

Golden, Thelma  

Josie Roland Hodson

(b Queens, New York, Sept 22, 1965).

American curator of visual art and museum director. She received her BA in 1987 in Art History and African American studies from Smith College, Northampton, MA, where she was a student of James Baldwin. Early in her career, Golden was a curatorial fellow at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1988 Golden was appointed as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In 1989 Golden was named Visual Arts Director at Jamaica Arts Center in Queens (now Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning), working under Dr. Kellie Jones. In 1991 Golden returned to the Whitney Museum, where she remained until 1997, becoming the first African American to hold a curatorial position at the institution. This appointment launched her preeminent career as a curator of modern and contemporary art and, in particular, as a champion for Black visual artists globally. During her tenure, she was one of four curators of the landmark ...

Article

Harlem on My Mind  

Ella Turenne

Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City which opened on January 18, 1969. Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 was mounted as a photographic exhibit accompanied by other multimedia elements such as video, sound, and text. The exhibit garnered critical attention for a number of reasons. It was the first exhibition at the museum to feature only photographs at a time when the museum had not yet accepted photography as a mode of artistic expression. A great deal of controversy also surrounded the exhibition for its exclusion of African American artists as well as the catalog introduction that was deemed antisemitic. Curated by Allon Schoener and under the direction of Thomas Hoving, Harlem on My Mind was the first show at the museum to address Black life and culture.

The exhibition was organized chronologically and thematically by decade: 1900–1919: From White to Black Harlem; ...

Article

Harmon Foundation, The  

Nicholas Miller

American philanthropic organization supporting African American art from 1922 to 1967. Real estate mogul William Elmer Harmon created the William E. Harmon Foundation, or the Harmon Foundation, in 1922 to promote African American self-determination and community building, and to recognize outstanding individual achievement within African American communities. While an early focus of the organization was constructing recreational spaces such as playgrounds in Black communities and offering financial assistance to college students with need, the foundation is primarily known for their annual award celebrations. In 1926 the foundation created an annual awards program that recognized notable individual achievements within the following fields: literature, music, fine arts, business and industry, science and innovation, education, religious service, and race relations. The award winners typically received a gold medal, monetary gift, and widespread recognition in the Black press.

The awards and the recognition played an integral role in helping to support and publicize visual artists emerging during the ...

Article

Just Above Midtown  

Josie Roland Hodson

(New York)

American art gallery and exhibition space that operated from 1974 to 1986. Just Above Midtown (JAM) was an exhibition space dedicated to experimental Black and African American art. Founded in 1974 by Linda Goode Bryant (b 1949), who had served as Education Director at the Studio Museum in Harlem, JAM was initially a commercial art gallery for the promotion and sale of work by African American and Black artists, although it later exhibited work by other artists of color as well as some white artists. Unlike other exhibition spaces promoting Black art, which were primarily located in predominately Black neighborhoods, the gallery’s first location was at 50 West 57th Street in Manhattan, in New York’s prime commercial gallery district. Confronting a racially segregated art world that devalued the contributions of Black artists, JAM provided an outlet for Black artists producing conceptual and experimental work, including performance and video, as well as works made from inexpensive or discarded found materials. In ...

Article

Studio Museum in Harlem  

Josie Roland Hodson

(New York)

American art museum. The Studio Museum in Harlem is an art museum dedicated to the exhibition of artwork by artists of African descent. Located in Harlem, New York, the museum was founded in 1968 by an interracial group of artists, civic activists, and philanthropists, including Charles E. Inniss, the museum’s first director, Betty Blayton-Taylor, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Carter Burden, Frank Donnelly, and Campbell Wylly. The museum was initially conceived as an integrationist effort amid widespread political uprising against systemic racial discrimination and segregation in American cities, including in the art world. Since its founding, the institution has become a catalytic site for the careers of many notable Black artists and curators.

The museum’s first location was at 2033 Fifth Avenue, where Tom Lloyd’s Electronic Refractions II was the museum’s inaugural exhibition. Lloyd’s work incorporated electronically programmed light sculpture; his experimental and abstract approach to artmaking was initially controversial, as it strayed from the figurative mode dominant among members of the Black Arts Movement. Aesthetic tenets of the Black Arts Movement—which scholar Larry Neal described as “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept”—prescribed politically legible, representational forms that addressed themes of Black self-determinization, pride, and resistance....