Communal Imagination: How Gallery 32 Made Space for Artists

Though Gallery 32 was not exclusively a gallery for Black Americans—Jackson stated its guiding principle was showing “good work that was not being exhibited elsewhere”—it nonetheless became one of a number of small but critical spaces, along with Brockman Gallery, Black Arts Council, and the Watts Towers Art Center, where emerging Black artists like Hammons, Betye Saar, Emory Douglas, Gloria Bohanon, and Timothy Washington could present their work.⁸ A pivotal example is The Sapphire Show: You’ve Come A Long Way, a collaborative, five-day exhibition organized in 1970. Widely thought of as the first survey exhibition of Black American women artists in the United States, the show brought together artists like Senga Nengudi (then working under the name Sue Irons), Jackson, Bohanon, Yvonne Cole Meo, Saar, and Eileen Abdulrashid. Its significance lies not only in that it was a historic “first,” but also in its refusal of the marginal position Black women occupied simultaneously within the mainstream feminist movement, Black liberation politics, and the contemporary art world.⁹ Though Jackson’s records of the show have since been lost, some of the work believed to have been a part of it includes Meo’s Forbidden Fruit in Garden of Eden (1965) and Nengudi’s Water Composition V (1969–70/2018); Saar’s Taurus (1967) is the only piece confirmed to have been in the original exhibition,¹⁰ which staged these artists as producers of critical visual languages that engaged memory, labor, gender, race, and structural injustice, concerns that were often sidelined in dominant artistic and political discourse.

Equally fundamental to Gallery 32 was its direct interaction with revolutionary organizing. Jackson and fellow artists like Bohanon, Nengudi, John Riddle, and Concholar would meet in the studio space, asking themselves and each other if there was such a thing as ‘Black art,’ and if so, how was it defined?¹¹ Rather than remaining purely intellectual exercises, these discussions shaped the ways the gallery positioned itself within broader movements for Black political and cultural liberation. The gallery opened its doors to the Black Panther Party, which staged a three-day exhibition of Emory Douglas’s pastel works, including portraits of party leaders, poster designs, and illustrations for the Black Panther newspaper. Organized by Yvonne Carter as a fundraiser for the Party’s children’s breakfast program, the exhibition stressed the gallery’s role not just as a site in which to exhibit work, but as foundational space for political education and movement-building.¹² Programming like this modeled a new structure in which a gallery could function simultaneously as an exhibition space and a public forum, in turn collapsing the boundaries between aesthetic practice and communal life.

Annie Bianucci, George Evans Jr., and Suzanne Jackson in the courtyard of the Granada Buildings, home of Gallery 32 (1969). Image courtesy of Gregory Wiley Edwards. Photo: Gregory Wiley Edwards.

You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby: The Sapphire Show (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon.

Suzanne Jackson, To-do list (1970). Image courtesy of the artist.

The radicalism of the gallery becomes increasingly clear when considering the resistance and intimidation from the police and FBI that surrounded certain exhibitions. During the opening of Douglas’s show, police officers were stationed outside the gallery attempting to dissuade visitors from entering and redirecting them elsewhere if they stopped to ask for directions.¹³ Similarly, on the eve of an exhibition of Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor’s charcoal portraits, the gallery received a bomb threat while the artist and Jackson were alone installing the work late one evening. According to Jackson, phone calls denounced the exhibition as unpatriotic because the drawings centered on oppressed people from around the world, like Angela (1970), a portrait of the activist Angela Davis, and the portrait Sharona (1967).¹⁴ The gallery was perceived as a threat to the Euro-centric, white supremacist status quo that governed the art world, as attempts to intimidate Jackson and her featured artists were ultimately attempts to silence forms of critique and solidarity between the marginalized communities that the exhibitions made visible.

These examples expose the fallacy that art can be separated from politics. The hostility directed toward the space demonstrates how risky it was to support Black artists who challenged the status quo; the gallery’s artists were shining a light on issues like urban decay and police brutality while also confronting U.S. imperialism and militarism abroad. To frame art as neutral or detached from civic life is itself a symbolic act that veils the power structures that determine whose work is seen or not seen—Black artists were often kept out of other spaces, leaving them unable to earn money by selling their art. Many of these artists participated in alternate ecosystems, often organizing exhibitions in Black businesses and spaces like community centers, churches, and even the homes of friends. Jackson’s gallery was part of a movement that worked to move these artists into the mainstream, though the resistance that met the gallery made sustainability difficult.

Less concerned with marketability and sales, the gallery prioritized intellectual exchange, political dialogue, and mutual support among artists. Yet it was exactly these commitments that set the space in a financially precarious position. In 1970, the financial strain of sustaining Gallery 32 had become increasingly difficult for Jackson to maintain, operating with limited institutional help and relying heavily on Jackson’s labor and teaching income.¹⁵ This scarcity of available resources reflected a cultural system that struggled to sustain spaces that challenged artistic hierarchies.

To understand the gallery’s importance within the wider trajectory of L.A.’s art history is to understand how the city’s global art identity was also formed through grassroots spaces like Gallery 32 that fostered investigation, community, and civil discourse. Today, Los Angeles is internationally recognized for its decentralized and community-driven art scene that is shaped by artist-run initiatives, activist organizations, and alternative spaces. For instance, Art + Practice, located in Leimert Park (a neighborhood long considered a cultural center for Black artistic life in Los Angeles), directly continues Gallery 32’s legacy by providing free exhibitions foregrounding artists of color while also partnering with local foster youth organizations to offer social services and educational resources to marginalized communities. Meanwhile, Del Vaz Projects reimagines the domestic sphere as a site for artistic exchange and community formation by centering its programming within the home of its founder, Jay Ezra Nayssan. It highlights multiracial, international, and LGBTQIA+ artists whose work exists outside dominant frameworks, while its activities as a research collective and independent press further expand the possibilities of what an art space can be. These inventive models are two of many—the precedent set by spaces like Gallery 32 continues to impact and inform the broader zeitgeist of experimentation and social engagement that permeates across Los Angeles’s art spaces.

Gallery 32 exposed the impossibility of impartiality, illustrating that whose work is exhibited, whose histories are centered, and which communities are welcomed into cultural spaces are always political acts. What spaces like Gallery 32 understood was that the realities of living in Los Angeles, from the racial tensions and economic inequalities to its sprawling geography and activist movements, were not conditions to separate from artistic production, but forces that actively shaped it. The gallery embraced the social and political realities as material for dialogue and communal imagination. The collaborative and politically conscious art ecosystem now associated with Los Angeles predated its major institutions; the foundation was built through artist-run spaces that understood art as inseparable from the lived experiences, struggles, and goals of the communities surrounding them.

Contact sheet portraying Suzanne Jackson and the Granada Buildings by Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor. © Suzanne Jackson. Image courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar, New York.