Why Black Museums

Ethnically specific museums are founded by and for their communities. Through exhibitions, art, history, archives, public programming, and more, the foundation of ethnically specific museums is commitment to their people. Such institutions have modeled exceptional care for their audiences, grounding their activities in the needs and desires of the residents in their immediate neighborhoods as well as those of regional and national diasporic populations. In part, ethnic museums developed in response to the dearth of interest displayed by predominantly white mainstream museums toward audiences and artists of color. Yet the true promise and power of ethnically specific museums is their ability to transcend Western cultural heritage models. Ethnic museums create their own imaginative ways of being museum spaces. These community-based institutions take myriad forms. Tribal museums housed on reservations often work to preserve the history, artifacts, and languages of local tribes. Latinx- and Asian-focused spaces host cultural celebrations, historiographies, art exhibitions, and much more for large and diverse groups whose origins span continents. Black museums likewise offer their own unique and rich ways of caring for and celebrating Black people and Blackness in all its permutations.

Black librarians and archivists started collecting materials relating to African American life and artistic practice in the nineteenth century and established their own institutions by the 1940s. Among the first repositories were libraries, archives, and galleries housed at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) including Fisk University’s Franklin Library, Howard University’s Moorland–Spingarn Research Center, and Hampton University Museum.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Black activists turned to museums as “instruments of empowerment,” establishing across the country small history, art, and neighborhood museums focused on the Black experience. Some of the most prominent include the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit (founded as the Detroit Afro-American Museum); the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center (originally the DuSable Museum of African American History) in Chicago; Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C; the late Samella Lewis’s Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Artist-run galleries also emerged, including the Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32, both located in Los Angeles, and Just Above Midtown in New York. Founded on Black community, celebration, and care, the spaces that proliferated in this era created exhibitions and programming focused on topics relevant to local Black audiences, established collecting plans that prioritized everyday objects of the Black experience, and supported artists from throughout the Black Diaspora. Each of these spaces has demonstrated that museums can and do impact the daily lives of their Black audiences.

Art Galleries at Black Studies, housed at the University of Texas at Austin, sits among this expansive community of generative Black spaces where art, history, scholarship, and community come together to historicize and illuminate the immensity of Black cultural production. AGBS reflects and builds on the example of the many incredible ethnically specific institutions across the United States. In its two gallery spaces, the Christian-Green Gallery and the Idea Lab, it has already collected and exhibited art spanning time periods and media. History bears an enormous weight for Black museums, no matter their particular mission or organizational goals. AGBS’s situation is no exception: it is housed on a campus that was integrated only in 1956 and located in a city with a famously (or infamously) dwindling Black population. These circumstances imbue AGBS’s mission with a distinct urgency, tasked as it is with narrating histories and stories of Africa and the African Diaspora in a predominantly white city and university while providing a venue for comforting and challenging conversations, in equal measure. Yet all Black institutions face related challenges, and it is these issues we hope to address over the course of this series.

—by Delphine Sims and Dr. Gaila Sims

Delphine Sims and Dr. Gaila Sims are sisters from Riverside, California, who both work with and write about museums. Delphine is a curator dedicated to supporting artists of the Black Diaspora. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, researching the intersections between the history of photography and Black geographies. Gaila is the Curator of African American History and Special Projects at the Fredericksburg Area Museum in Virginia. She works on public history, museum display, and archival practice, Gaila is the Curator of African American History and Special Projects at the Fredericksburg Area Museum. Her scholarship critiques American museums and their interpretations of slavery.