The gist of what I do
I joined the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in 2019 to lead the African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI), a new program to establish the GRI as a major center for the study of African American art history.
As the first African American curator for Getty and the first to have this position, my job entails helping to found Getty’s collections of African American artist archives, the creation of AAAHI public programming, working with AAAHI fellows, and creating departmental and institutional partnerships. I'm also the co-curator of a number of archives at Getty: the Johnson Publishing Company (with the National Museum of African American History and Culture), Paul R. Williams, EJ Montgomery, Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, and Maren Hassinger, among others. I'm also working on a Johnson Publishing Company show with the NMAAHC and a Paul R. Williams show with USC and LACMA.
Discovering art
I grew up in Queens, New York. My father worked as a supervisor for the post office, and my mother was a district manager for New York Telephone. She was in charge of commercial and residential repairs for all five boroughs. I learned a lot about management from her. There were many artisans on my father’s side of the family—quilt makers, carpenters, seamstresses, and an aunt who’s a fashion designer. In fact, my paternal grandmother was related to the singer Tracy Chapman, who is a distant cousin. While I didn’t grow up going to museums (except on school field trips), I was allowed to create and draw and make whatever I wanted to make. At first, I created with LEGOs. It was innocent, but they gave me space to follow my imagination. In elementary school I studied the anatomy of comic book characters and made my own comics. I was a big fan of everything 1980s, like Spider-Man and G.I. Joe. I liked characters who had a human side and an extraordinary side, something that could be used to help society. Believe it or not, all this study eventually helped with life drawing classes in college and at the Art Students League in Manhattan, where I was also studying. I really understood anatomy.
Thinking through these characters also gave me the opportunity to think about moral dilemmas. The Green Goblin is trying to destroy New York City—what does Spider-Man think about that? Who does he care about? How does he know right from wrong? How is he trying to prevent himself from becoming a villain? Sounds like a lot for a six- or seven-year-old, but this is what I thought about.
The power of representation
My parents came from segregated Alabama and migrated to New York during the 1960s, and that’s where they met. Coming from that experience, they recognized that they needed affirming images for their kids. When they were going to school, there weren’t many textbooks that had anything to do with African Americans beyond slavery. So there was always an array of magazines at my house. My father read several newspapers every day, so there were always different kinds of readings around the house. And besides periodicals like Newsweek (I loved the political caricatures), I was immersed in the positive representations of people who looked like me in Ebony Jr! and Essence and Black Enterprise. My parents didn’t force these magazines on my sister and me—they just kind of left them around the house, and I’d eventually read them. But from them, I got a sense of the kinds of people I wanted to look like. How did they dress? What kinds of things were they into? There’s a kind of self-fashioning and modeling that came with exposure to visual culture.
Entering the art world
I was destined to be an art historian, since my two best subjects were social studies and art. I went to Hunter College in New York because I knew the photographer Roy DeCarava, artist Nari Ward, and painter Juan Sánchez were teaching there, and I wanted to be in that program. There, I learned that this thing I had been doing since childhood had inherent value, and that there were legacies of artists who looked like me and who were doing the same thing. My freshman year in college, I was working in the education department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and started the first of two internships at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the first in the education department and the second in curatorial. While there, I had the privilege of meeting all different generations of African American artists and curators, including Kinshasha Conwill, Lowery Sims, Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones, Deborah Willis, and Christine Kim. My work at Getty involves different kinds and levels of conversations with people I’ve known since my late teens, beginning at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It opened a world for me in terms of my exposure to a deeper history of African American art and artists.
I graduated from Hunter with a BFA in painting and a minor in art history. I recognized that I could always paint, but that the window to get a PhD is very finite. I received a fellowship from the Graduate Center my junior year at Hunter and decided to apply for a PhD in art history. So I went from being in an undergraduate painting program to a doctoral program. While there, I studied with Robert Storr, Katherine Manthorne, and Michele Wallace. Eventually, I was the first Black man at the City University of New York Graduate Center to get this degree.
From New York to California
After graduating, I wanted to stay in New York so I began adjunct teaching at universities in the city. There was a recession, so there weren’t that many attractive jobs on the market. It was a trying time; the life of an adjunct professor in New York City can really wear you out if you let it. But a vital thread in my life was my connection to artists who recognized me as an artist. I was part of circles of creatives in New York, going to openings and building bonds with friends who chose the route to be creatives. I did too, but it’s taken time to realize that. For instance, I created a public television show featuring my conversations with artists. I received poetry fellowships from the Callaloo journal and the Cave Canem Foundation, and began curating with the Bronx Council on the Arts and with Claudia Rankine and the Racial Imaginary Institute. I also wrote essays for catalogues, mainly because the form itself was manageable. There are poets who prefer sonnets and others who prefer villanelles and haikus. I preferred essays. That’s how I thought of it. My life as an academic was made more productive and powerful and earnest and sincere by my relationships to artists and thinking about the possibilities of my own creativity.
I was tenure track in the Africana Studies department at Lehman College when I first saw the announcement for a new position at Getty with the AAAHI. The routine of being a professor is very regimented—you grade papers, prepare lectures, meet with students during your office hours. That routine can be rewarding, but at the same time, I felt like there were other parts of myself that I hadn’t really explored yet, and that I could contribute more to the field than being a professor. At first, I thought, it’s in California, it’s too much of a life change. And then people who I really respected in the field sent me the announcement as well and told me I should think seriously about it. I applied and could sense the generation-changing potential this position offered and the legacy of what could be done here. I felt that my professional and personal experiences were in line with the ultimate goal of AAAHI. Eventually, I decided it made sense for me to accept the position when it was offered.
Archiving with empathy
There are histories of exploitation of the older generation of African American artists. Many gave their materials to specific institutions and were not pleased with the way their material was treated and the way they themselves were treated. So for me, it was important to emphasize empathy and care around their life’s work. Imagine living decades knowing that you’re making work on par with your white colleagues, yet critics aren’t going to your studio, you’re being practically ignored—and now there is a renaissance of people looking back on your work from the 1960s and ’70s. To do this work, you have to understand the history. I have to be extra mindful that many of them lived through this particular history (not unlike my parents) and were not treated with respect by the art world.
Favorite artwork at Getty
I love looking at the notebooks by Betye Saar in the GRI’s holdings. I love the Toni Morrison poetry and prints by Kara Walker. I love the Jason Moran and Alison Saar prints we’ve recently acquired. But the things I love most aren’t processed—they’re things I’ve seen in archives. I’m proud to say that I was the lead curator on the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) acquisition. I worked with the bankruptcy attorneys (and the remaining JPC staff, Vickie Wilson and John Roach) to gain access to the archive for evaluation before the auction. It still feels like a “360 moment,” considering my lifelong affinity for JPC publications. But, it will take years to process. I’ll leave that to Steven Booth, the new JPC archivist. The great part about the GRI is that we collect things a researcher can physically hold. It can be transformative when you study something for so long, and then you get to see it in person, study it, write about it, and help save it for future generations.
What people should know about African American art
I think most people don’t understand that the history of art is also the history of segregation. If you think about New York after World War II and all the European artists coming over to America, African American artists studied with them too, or knew them informally at cafés. African American artists innovated new forms and approaches to art and artistic practice but have seldom been credited. The erasures have remained for much too long. Who’s telling those stories? If those stories aren’t told, you can honestly go through an art history program and think that African American artists were never there. These are the wrongs we have to address in order for art history to become more relevant than it is now. We need new storytellers and newer approaches to research. So that’s what I want to do. Be an enabler of, and protagonist within, the movement for this vital and necessary future.
