The History of the Group Exhibition from the Harmon Foundation to Black Male

Notably, the history of the all–African American group show is not without its complications. Exhibitions organized around an essentialist interpretation of identity—whether race, gender, sex, or religion—always arouse critical suspicion as they risk reinscribing identity-based characteristics as the seemingly “real” essence of a group in its totality. Moreover, such exhibitions threaten to create or maintain segregated spaces of display that separate majority and minority artists. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, many African American artists expressed skepticism or frustration over such curatorial practices. In 1946, artist Romare Bearden objected to the idea that black art of the time possessed some essentialized or unifying characteristic stating “the work of Negro artists reflects all the artistic trends of the time.” ¹ Recognizing this heterogeneity, he concludes, “there seems little reason for the continuation of all-Negro shows.” ² Later, in 1968, painter Charles Alston justified his refusal to participate in “segregated show[s]” by expressing his frustration that critics “didn’t apply the same standards” when reviewing an all-black show and stating that it was imperative that artists received “the best of the competition from his contemporaries.” ³ Most recently, conceptualist Adrian Piper requested her work to be removed from the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2013) for similar reasons. On the surface of a TV monitor that once played an excerpt from the artist’s film Other than Art’s Sake (1973), a label stated that while Piper appreciated being included in the exhibition, a more “effective” method of celebrating her contributions “might be to curate multi-ethnic exhibitions that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American artists against those of their peers in ‘the art world at large.’” ⁴ While these critical entanglements and acts of dissent are illustrative of the contested terrain of black aesthetics, it is important to note that despite Bearden’s, Alston’s, and Piper’s desire to do away with the black group exhibition, such exhibitions were necessary. It was through the group exhibition that African Americans first gained visibility within the broader American art world and, later, these exhibitions became crucial sites through which key aesthetic and political debates unfolded.302