Capturing the Artist’s Perspective
How Getty’s African American Art History Initiative is making history
Video Still from Dream City, 1983, Ulysses Jenkins. Photo courtesy the artist
Body Content
Since 2018, Getty’s African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) has been collecting the stories of a vanguard generation of Black artists whose stories might otherwise be lost.
The series, On Making History, is part of AAAHI’s ongoing oral history project and explores how Black artists remember, record, and rewrite history.
Getty's library contains hundreds of archives, each of them full of written historical material about artists. But oral histories contain fascinating stories that are not published anywhere else, and are significant primary sources that can be studied alongside the artists’ work.
They also contain fascinating stories about art in America:
David C. Driskell signing the “Echoes” silkscreen, 1996. Courtesy of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. © Carol Harrison
Photo: Greg Staley, 2019
“He did these things in the show that were outrageous for some viewers in an art museum,” said scholar Bridget Cooks, who interviewed scholar and painter David Driskell in 2019.
For example, in 1976, his exhibition of works by enslaved artisans at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) resulted in death threats. Read more about that chapter of Driskell’s 70-year career and his enormous contributions to American visual culture.
R.S.V.P X, Senga Nengudi, 1976. Senga Nengudi papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA
“I don’t think there’s a man, woman, or child—especially two Black women—that have had a sustaining working relationship for that long.”
In her oral history, sculptor Senga Nengudi discusses the decades-long friendship behind her installation R.S.V.P. .
Video Still from Dream City, 1983, Ulysses Jenkins. Photo courtesy the artist
“The dead cat was an apt metaphor for how we disregard nature.”
In his oral history, video artist and modern-day griot Ulysses Jenkins merged Black storytelling traditions with technology to create a surreal 24-hour performance. Read more about his re-telling of the hallucinatory performance here.
“Art and life cannot be separated in the oral histories," says senior researcher Kristin Juarez, who leads the program. Stories behind groundbreaking exhibitions, collaborations, and artworks are told within the context of artists’ lives, shedding light on their commitment to art-making in their personal, social, and political environments.
