Against Symbolic Inclusion: Investing in Black Art

Sanford Biggers, Psyche (detail) (2009–11). Lithograph with hand sewn thread, 43.5 × 25.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

When the late Dr. Samella Lewis, an award-winning artist, author, and art historian, joined the staff at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1968 as education coordinator, the spirit of the institution was in a different place than it is today.¹ Frustrated by the exclusion of Black artists from the museum’s exhibitions and the absence of adequate Black art representation in the permanent collection, the arts educator (who would later establish L.A.’s Museum of African American Art and the scholarly International Review of African American Art in 1976) resigned the following year, saying, “We were not included in the art museum here.”² Dr. Lewis’ statement was supported—emboldened, even—by months of ensuing protests agitating for LACMA to expand its worldview by deepening the institution’s awareness of Black artists and outreach to Black audiences.³

The museum course-corrected shortly thereafter with a string of subsequent exhibitions that brought Black artists into the fold, such as Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington (1971); Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists (1972); and the museum’s first comprehensive survey of African-American art, Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976).⁴ The last show retroactively acknowledged the contributions of Black artists between 1750 and 1950 and featured more than 63 artists and 200 works across painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic design, craft, and decorative arts. The Black Arts Council (BAC), founded in 1968 by LACMA art preparators Claude Booker and Cecil Ferguson, was the organizing force behind collective public pressure calling for the development of African-American programming at the museum, which would eventually lead to these three seminal exhibitions in the institution’s history.⁵ BAC was comprised of both museum employees and, beyond LACMA’s white walls, members of L.A.’s art community. The organization proposed events for the public (including a three-part lecture series and the one-time, day-long Black Culture Festival), planned field trips for students, and staged small protests to call attention to the lack of exhibition opportunities for Black artists.

In the decades since this era of pivotal advocacy and organizing on behalf of Black artists, their work, and its essential place in the art historical canon, LACMA—as with many institutions, in the art world and beyond—has evolved to a place of greater and more consistent inclusion, though the work of making up for centuries of exclusion (and worse, erasure) is long. Generally, there are trends toward museum exhibitions and collections expanding to prioritize a more nuanced view of the robust work coming directly from, or aesthetically inspired by, the continent. In an effort to guard against these efforts as merely symbolic gestures (performed for a “woke” and watching public that is rightly critical of the integrity behind institutional promotions of “diversity” and “inclusion”), some art spaces are taking predictable virtue signaling a step further by considering what tangible, meaningful investment in these narratives looks like in practice. But the reality of underrepresentation in museum holdings is still damning: A 2022 Burns-Halperin Report found that only 2.2 percent of acquisitions and 6.3 percent of exhibitions at 31 U.S. art museums between 2008 and 2020 were of work by Black American artists; unsurprisingly, the biggest spike (by approximately 200 percent) in acquisitions took place following the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013.⁶ And though statistics regarding international interest in acquiring contemporary African art—via auctions, art fairs, and gallery sales into private collections—demonstrate solid financial investment, they are still on the decline. In 2022, the global total sales value of art by African-born artists at auction peaked at $197 million, and by 2024 these sales dipped to $77.2 million.⁷

LACMA’s current Pan-African exhibition of contemporary art, Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, helps redefine what it means to invest not only in showcasing Black art from an ethical standpoint, but also in supporting Black artists from an economic one (over half of the works in the show were acquired by LACMA). The exhibition, on view through August 3, translates the intangible power of the universal albeit varied Black experience into an aesthetic exploration of time, place, and approaches to record-keeping. The root of this show, which gathers different explorations of remembering (and how we preserve those cultural memories through artmaking as storytelling), reflected in the institutional choice to invest in collecting many of these works for preservation in the larger archive, rather than to temporarily borrow the bulk of the offering from private collectors or other art institutions. Curated by Dhyandra Lawson, the Andy Song Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, the show brings together 60 contemporary artists working across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Of the 70 works spanning the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and time-based media, 42 are new acquisitions into LACMA’s permanent collection, exemplifying how institutions can expand their Pan-African holdings in a way that also sustains the livelihoods and creative practices of Black artists.

“This was an intentional strategy in terms of my curatorial methodology from the get-go,” Lawson told me. “I was considering the history of LACMA and the history of how contemporary Black art from outside the U.S. has been exhibited in California and on the West Coast. LACMA is the largest encyclopedic museum in the western United States and we have done great work growing our collections of Black American art, [but] it seemed to me that we had a lot more work to do in looking at Black art internationally.” This decision to invest in art that reflects the creative multiplicity of the global Black diaspora for the museum’s permanent collection highlights an effort to address the gaps and erasures within most public collections. And by prioritizing the acquisition of the majority of the show’s works (as not only a symbolic effort toward greater representation but also a form of meaningful curatorial ethics), Lawson offers a progressive view of what it means to support Black artists across the diaspora. She is interested in exploring diaspora not only as an aesthetic concept, but also as a way to think about how broadly and dynamically curators and collectors should be seeking out and investing in contemporary Black art—across generations, locations, styles, and experiences. Lawson’s efforts also emphasize public collections as living monuments to record-keeping, a cultural responsibility that preserves history and also establishes the sanctity of its contents for audiences and scholars to come.

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Walking through Imagining Black Diasporas is a practice in presence; the show, organized into conceptual categories that each highlight an aspect of the Black experience—speech and silence, movement and transformation, imagination, and representation—requests an embodied, reflective approach to witnessing the myriad artworks, which are as varied and beautiful as the African diaspora itself Los Angeles native Sanford Biggers’ silhouetted images of afro-crowned Black Power figures stretch high up on a white gallery wall, towering over the intricate, small-scale work of Senegalese artist Abdoulaye Ndoye: a book of invented script drawn on henna-washed pages that he describes as poesie graphique,⁸ or visual poetry. Chelsea Odufu’s eight-channel video installation Moved by Spirit (2021), which was previously exhibited at the Dakar Biennale as part of the U.S. Embassy’s programming in 2024, ⁹ is a faith-based investigation of water as a material for cleansing and its movement, a vessel for migration. The film explores the syncretic roots of Senegalese Sufism and includes footage of spiritual rituals and worship, vignettes of figures in Afrofuturist costumes engaging in traditional dance sequences, and pictures “the Door of No Return,” a passage in the stone wall of Elmina Castle on Ghana’s coast, which was a prominent hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Elsewhere, Ibrahim Mahama’s repurposed jute coal sack, a mixed-media assemblage dyed and adorned with cloth embellishments, puts a spotlight on the troubled, interconnected legacies of labor, colonialism, and capitalism in his native Ghana. Mahama refers to his practice as a form of “time travel”¹⁰—a nod to the material journey his objects take from manufacture, utilitarian use, and eventual acquisition and reimagination by himself, the artist.

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st -Century Art and Poetics (installation views) (2024–25). Image courtesy of the artists and LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st -Century Art and Poetics (installation views) (2024–25). Image courtesy of the artists and LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

There are several prominent American museums focused specifically on the preservation and pedestalling of Black art and material culture as an act of memory-keeping and self-determination (L.A.’s California African American Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., among others). But the impact of an investment in more diverse holdings has different implications when carried out by a general-focus institution like LACMA. Instead of this gesture being at the center of the institution’s purpose and therefore part of a long history of collecting and archiving the work of Black artists (as is the case with the aforementioned museums), this move by LACMA shows a fairly new commitment to supporting and preserving contemporary Black art in ways that go beyond the superficial: It signals a reconsideration of the museum’s own collection practices writ large.

In essence, Imagining Black Diasporas is a show that is not solely concerned with the present context of diasporic works being mounted for audiences to view for a fixed amount of time, it is also simultaneously focused on correcting a long history of underinvestment in Black art. By acquiring more pieces for the permanent collection from a diasporic group of Black artists, the museum is actively making steps toward manifesting a future where generations of audiences may have access to works like these as a default rather than as an anomaly. And while this curatorial approach does model a new path toward more consistently diverse collecting practices, LACMA (whose encyclopedic collection boasts more than 150,000 objects) still has broad improvements to make; a 2019 study showed that at the time, almost none of the museum’s collection was dedicated to Black artists.¹¹ Part of Lawson’s motivation for prioritizing permanent investments came when reflecting on the curatorial strategies behind many Pan-African exhibitions throughout time, which “tend to compile loans,” she says. “I think the impulse has been to show as many works as possible and to gather a large grouping of works, but here it felt really important to think through what it would mean to actually make investments in artists by making purchases, and receiving gift offers from generous donors.”

While the show includes generational American greats like Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and others, it is also a celebration of emerging and mid-career artists working outside of the United States, representing both the Pacific Rim and the Black Atlantic. This offers an expanded, contemporary understanding of Pan-African art—a movement that encompasses various artistic expressions that reflect Africa’s rich cultural history and diverse creativity while promoting a unified sense of shared identity. This is a crucial reframing of “diaspora” as more than just a shorthand for shared ancestral homeland, as it is most commonly deployed—an application that oversimplifies the myriad shades and sensibilities of Blackness globally into a universal origin story that belies the abundance of languages, customs, and aesthetic choices that exist within it.

Awash in hues of blue and lavender so delicate they’re almost surreal, Widline Cadet’s photograph, Seremoni Disparisyon #1 (Ritual [Dis] Appearance #1) (2019), is at once a very personal self-portrait and also a broader reflection on memory-keeping and migration—particularly for immigrants like the Los Angeles-based Haitian artist herself, whose proximity to home has shifted at various points throughout her life. In the image, Cadet stands in the water, looking on at a collection of smaller images showing the artist during her childhood in Haiti superimposed on a larger print of palm trees, hanging on a backdrop stand in the ocean before her. Sheets of corrugated metal attached with spring clamps to the stand almost wink with iridescence, under a quality of natural light that looks like it belongs to the morning. The backdrop stand is more practical than beautiful—a contrast to the femininity of her sea-soaked silhouette—but sturdy enough to ensure that her memories won’t be washed away.

The photograph, Cadet told me, is her way of “imaging that absence, that lack of access” to her home island, and is additionally an exploration of her relationship to photography as a medium. “I barely had any exposure to [it].… My first interaction with photography was getting my passport [photo] taken as a kid.” The image is, in some ways, a fantasy of the artist’s subconscious: a dream-like photomontage where time and space are collapsed and she is at once both girl and woman, home and away. The resonant impact of Cadet’s work entering into LACMA’s permanent holdings is not lost on her: “The way I see my work functioning in the world is as an archive, so I really enjoy the prospect of it becoming a part of a public collection at LACMA.… The idea that my work will exist in its collection for years and years to come and be accessible to people in the future means a lot, and I think it adds another layer to my work,” Cadet said.

Over the course of curating the show, Lawson told me she was thinking through the ethics (and historically problematic nature) of collecting African art—particularly Indigenous objects—in museums. By focusing on contemporary artists and their work, she was able to facilitate transactions that prioritized the curator-artist relationship and the transparent communication that blooms as a result. “We are having open and frank conversations about how much things cost and it is super important that we can do that now,” she said. “It is a way to acknowledge the looting that has happened historically and to, in a contemporary moment, choose a different path.”

Imagining Black Diasporas—the exhibition itself and the curatorial and collecting practices surrounding it—reminds us that honoring the diversity of diaspora involves an active process of remembering and record-keeping, and that to advocate for a nuanced collecting practice is also to advocate for the necessity of permanent collections that reflect the breadth of contemporary Black art. Museum holdings act as living archives, with a responsibility to accurately represent the reality of art that exists but also has existed. And if there’s a gulf in that presence historically, it is important to seek out opportunities to close the gap. “We can bring this diasporic memory into our holdings for the first time with this show,” Lawson mused. “Once an artwork is in a collection, it is [available] for a lifetime of new interpretations.”

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 40.

Ibrahim Mahama, No. 20 (2014). Coal sacks with cloth, 83 × 80 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photo: © Ibrahim Mahama and © Museum Associates/LACMA.