Black Representation

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 brought outraged Black Americans to the streets. The uprisings engulfed urban centers across the country for weeks. Black activists and artists transformed this frustration and anger into new efforts to rebuild their communities. They created new community art spaces and formed new pressure and advocacy groups. The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), among other groups, was formed in New York City in early 1969 to pressure the city’s art institutions to establish greater representation for Black artists and curators. These groups wrote open letters, picketed outside museums, and used creative protest actions to draw attention to the lack of Black representation at all levels of arts and culture institutions. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, was the target of significant scrutiny because of its deficits in the representation of Black artists and lack of inclusion of Black curators. AWC’s campaign led, in part, to Hunt’s retrospective at MoMA in 1971. At thirty-five, Hunt was the first Black sculptor to receive a solo exhibition in the museum’s forty-two-year history. Hunt’s 1971 retrospective at MoMA catapulted the already well-regarded Hunt into the debate about the role of Black artists in the fight for equity. For some Black activists, Hunt’s sculptures— concerned with hybrid organic and metal forms with few explicit references to Black identity—were an insufficient incursion in the white-dominated museum space. Hunt’s commitment to equality included a commitment to his own artistic vision, which drew on a wide variety of references. Hunt’s MoMA exhibition and the pressure campaign that made the exhibition possible were part of a long-standing effort to correct Black representation in the country’s cultural institutions.

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