Art Collections in the United States

By: Aaron Myers

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Art Collections in the United States

Archives of African American art that are kept in the United States by institutions, corporations, and private individuals.

Universities and libraries constitute a major repository of African American art in the United States. Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, boasts the largest (more than fifteen hundred works) and oldest (established 1894) institutional collection. In 1967 the Harmon Foundation, an organization committed to recognizing and encouraging African American achievement, donated nearly half of its holdings to Hampton. The art collections at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., and Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, began in the early 1930s. In 1955 Howard's museum was expanded by the acquisition of a collection of paintings and African sculptures by the American philosopher and critic Alain Locke. Fisk houses a large number of murals, paintings, and graphic works by Aaron Douglas, who taught there from 1937 to 1966. Works by African American artists also make up a significant part of the Art and Artifact Collection at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (established in 1926). The Schomburg Center accepted a large body of works from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1940s.

There are several museums devoted exclusively to African American art, but with works by over one hundred African American artists, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., is the most expansive collection of African American art in the United States. The Du Sable Museum in Chicago, Illinois, was established in 1961 and is the home of the Palmer C. Hayden Collection and Archives. Since its birth in 1975, the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, California, has built up a collection of more than eight hundred works from the WPA period (1935–1943) and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. After serving African American artists for years by providing them with working and exhibition space, places such as the National Center for African American Artists and the Studio Museum in Harlem began their permanent collections in 1978 and 1982, respectively. In 1991 the Museum of African American Art was opened in Tampa, Florida. Some of its 171 works by eighty-one African American artists date from the mid-nineteenth century.

Large black-owned companies have also become important patrons and collectors of African American art. In 1949, to celebrate the dedication of a new building, the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company of Los Angeles commissioned American artists Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff to paint two murals documenting the history of blacks in California. The publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, possesses a large number of works by African American artists.

Private collections of African American art are numerous. Many of these collections, such as those of Richard V. Clarke and Walter and June Christmas, also include African and Caribbean art. John and Vivian Hewitt have amassed a comprehensive body of twentieth-century artwork since they began collecting in 1949. Begun in the 1970s, the Walter Evans collection of African American art is particularly strong in nineteenth-century landscape paintings as well as works executed during the WPA period.

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