Building a More Inclusive Archive With the African American Art History Initiative

In the early 1960s, Los Angeles rivaled New York as a major center for contemporary art.

Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Robert Irwin seized national attention with “Cool School” pieces inspired by L.A.’s abundant light and space, and African American artists Melvin Edwards, Charles White, and Betye Saar created assemblages and other groundbreaking work animated by the civil rights movement.

This latter group, largely marginalized by white-dominated galleries and museums, found a supportive audience in the many African Americans migrating to L.A. for its economic opportunities and ethos of social acceptance. Alternative exhibition spaces sprang up in homes, churches, and artist-owned galleries, and eventually traditional venues in the city, and around the country, took notice.

And yet, more than 60 years later, many consider African American art an under-researched and under-funded field. As Saar, now 95, told the Los Angeles Times in 2018, “It’s taken a long, long time for the art world to figure out that there are African American artists. And it still has a long way to go.”

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) wants to change that. In October 2018 it launched the African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI), an ambitious program to establish the GRI as a major center for the study of African American art history. The initiative’s first action was to acquire some of Saar’s notebooks.

The GRI has since rolled out many more plans, all developed in consultation with senior consultant Kellie Jones, MacArthur Fellow and professor in art history and archaeology at Columbia University; an advisory committee of leading scholars, artists, curators, and champions of African American art; Rebecca Peabody, head of research projects and academic outreach, where AAAHI is anchored; and LeRonn Brooks, associate curator of modern and contemporary collections. As the first African American curator for Getty and the first to hold this position, Brooks has been helping to acquire Getty’s collections of African American artist archives while creating AAAHI public programming, building departmental and institutional partnerships, and working with AAAHI’s first fellows.

Initial collections included the Johnson Publishing Company archive, one of the most massive records of Black culture in the 20th century, with more than four million prints, slides, and negatives from Ebony and Jet magazines; groundbreaking L.A. architect Paul Revere Williams’s archive; and the Whitney and Lee Kaplan African American Visual Culture Collection, an encyclopedic trove of thousands of catalogues and other materials on Black artists.

AAAHI’s first fellows are Cherise Smith, professor of African and African diaspora studies and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, and Tobias Wofford, assistant professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University. Smith is using her nine-month residency to work on a book that looks at how artists Carrie Mae Weems, Charles Gaines, Cauleen Smith, and Rodney McMillian explore traumatic episodes in American history, especially those associated with the Jim Crow-era South. Wofford is examining African American contributions to the visual landscape of California through the case studies of Grafton Tyler Brown, Sargent Claude Johnson, and Williams.

In other AAAHI news, Kristin Juarez recently came on board to work with AAAHI projects and programs; Simone Fujita has become Getty’s first bibliographer of African American Art; Steven D. Booth, an inaugural archivist of the Barack Obama Presidential Library, joined Getty to organize, inventory, and catalogue the Johnson Publishing Company archive; and GRI research assistant Alex Jones has delved into photographer Charles Brittin’s archive and digitized items for an exhibition on dancer Blondell Cummings.

AAAHI’s first major research project, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures led by Juarez, Peabody, and Glenn Phillips, has already yielded an award-winning book and an exhibition at Art + Practice in South Los Angeles. The team also organized a faculty open house, introducing Cummings’s work and related GRI holdings to professors from across the country, and Art + Practice held a robust series of related public programs.

“AAAHI’s areas of activity mirror those of the GRI,” says Peabody, who works closely with the initiative’s oral history program, scholar and intern programs, research projects, and academic outreach. “We’re actively acquiring primary and secondary research materials and generating new archives in the form of oral histories; supporting scholarship at multiple levels, from undergraduates to senior scholars, and in the form of our own institutional research projects and partnerships; and sharing the results of our work through exhibitions, publications, and public programs.”