Broadening the Idea of What American Art Is

Museums can feel permanent. Paintings hang on walls, archives fill shelves, and exhibitions become part of history. But behind every collection are countless decisions about what is saved, what is studied, and whose stories are told.

To understand a curator’s work, imagine not a show’s opening night, but the places and things most visitors never see: storage rooms, family collections, U-Haul facilities, boxes of letters, and the fragile materials that remain after a life in art. For LeRonn P. Brooks, curator of African American collections and acquisitions at the Getty Research Institute, those spaces are where history is protected before it becomes public.

That idea is central to Black Curators Matter: Conversations on Art and Change, a new Getty Publications volume edited by Kellie Jones and Tumelo Mosaka. Drawn from oral histories recorded between 2021 and 2023, the book brings together conversations between six influential curators—Lowery Stokes Sims, Deborah Willis, Richard J. Powell, Jones, Thelma Golden, and Franklin Sirmans—and a new generation of art professionals, including Brooks.

Brooks interviewed Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, about Harlem, mentorship, Basquiat, hip-hop culture, and the Black cultural networks that shaped his career. The conversation also prompted Brooks to reflect on his own path, from discovering African American art as a student to building archives that preserve creative legacies for future generations.

We spoke with Brooks about Black Curators Matter and how curators do far more than organize exhibitions.

What did participating in Black Curators Matter mean to you?

LeRonn P. Brooks: It was an honor because Franklin Sirmans is someone I’ve known for years and learned from throughout my career. More importantly, the project reminded me that we’re all part of a continuum.

Earlier that same day, I had been interviewing Alison Saar about the pioneering curator Samella Lewis for another Getty project. Moving between those conversations made me realize that my generation is now helping carry these histories forward.

As an art historian, documenting that continuity matters. It is about recording the warmth, generosity, and knowledge that pass from one generation to the next so future curators understand they are part of something larger than themselves.

The book traces the history of Black curators over the last fifty years. Where do you see yourself within that history?

Brooks: The curatorial world itself is actually quite small, and Black curators represent an even smaller community within it. Many of us share mentors, institutions, and experiences.

Earlier generations opened doors when museums were far less welcoming, and because of their work, my generation inherited opportunities that simply did not exist before. At the same time, every generation has its own responsibility. My role is to help extend those histories, create new opportunities, and ensure the next generation has a stronger foundation.

You often describe curators as shaping cultural memory. What do you mean by that?

LPB: Black curators shape cultural memory. We enter institutions and determine what histories are preserved, what narratives are centered, and which artists become visible within the public imagination.

Curatorial practice is never neutral. It structures how societies understand themselves through exhibitions, archives, collections, scholarship, and interpretation. At the Getty Research Institute, that can mean exhibitions drawn from archives, collections that scholars use to write dissertations and books, and materials that a student might one day use for a paper.

When institutions invest in curators who bring these voices forward, they broaden the idea of the canon. They broaden the idea of what American art is.

You are Getty’s first Black curator and the founding curator for African American archival collections. What does that mean to you?

LPB: I work in a research library, not a museum, which is similar but not the same. The question becomes: can one of the world’s premier research libraries help define the canon of American art if it does not have the archives of African American artists?

For me, the work is about bringing a cultural inheritance into the archive. When I worked with Richard Hunt on his archive, I understood that he studied Picasso, Julio González, and European masters of sculpture, but there is also a deep rootedness in African American history in his work. My parents migrated from segregated Alabama to New York. Hunt’s parents migrated from segregated Georgia. That background can shape interpretation.

What does a research curator actually do day to day?

LPB: We acquire and develop the kinds of collections that spur interest in research. When researchers request original documents from an artist or scholar, those materials do not just appear. Someone has gone into the world and dealt with families, estates, storage spaces, attorneys, and many other people to build trust and begin a process of stewardship.

I go to U-Haul facilities. I go to art storage. I go to where the remains of the material reside. Archives are never whole, but they are remnants of memory. There is emotion attached because they are often the last of how families may remember a person. Those materials become the foundation for future scholarship. They allow researchers to reconstruct an artist’s life, understand their process, and place their work within a larger history.

You talk about parity in collections. What does that look like?

LPB: If we have Frank Gehry’s archive, and now we have Paul R. Williams’s archive, alongside the Johnson Publishing Company Archive, then parity matters. Put the evidence in front of researchers. Exhibitions and publications help frame that evidence, but the archive itself allows people to discover new histories, ask new questions, and find themselves in the work.

That is deeply personal for me. In my first year of college, I discovered A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson. It changed the way I saw myself. As I encountered artists like Jacob Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance, I realized I was part of a much longer creative lineage. Later, I understood that I was also an extension of what Bearden and Henderson had made possible by preserving that history. I am the subject of the argument I’m making: when people have access to the evidence, they can find themselves in it.

Franklin Sirmans talks about Harlem spaces that shaped him. What spaces opened art up for you?

LPB: I’m a native New Yorker, but I was living in Queens and taking two buses and a train to Manhattan in the late 1990s. I had two internships at the Studio Museum in Harlem, one in education and one in curatorial. That space was important to me.

When I went, it was electric. In the early 2000s, you had the Artist-in-Residence program, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and all these groundbreaking shows. If you wanted to be involved in art, New York was vibrant. People were available, reachable, and collaborating. A lot of what I am saying now is based on understanding that people are resources.

Franklin also talks about popular culture and fine art. How do you see that relationship?

LPB: Popular culture is deeply rooted cultural expression, but it also has immediacy. Music has often been the most immediate form of art for Black communities. Hip-hop culture, the independent labels, the boroughs, the dress, the music, the graffiti, all of that was emerging with intimacy because there were no cell phones.

Fine art can feel contained in rare spaces, but it is often a concentrated distillation of what is happening in the outside world. Artists are not absent from the world. There is a cultural urgency and a political urgency to express discontent and a desire to be understood.

What do you hope people understand about the relationship between big institutions and community spaces?

LPB: I do not see them as being in tension. Every institution knows its mission, and they are all pieces of a puzzle. The Schomburg Center has archival collections for research. The Studio Museum is a contemporary art museum, but it is also a gathering place. These are community spaces.

In Los Angeles, I see something similar to Harlem: the importance of maintaining a cultural foothold as cities change. I serve on the advisory board of Destination Crenshaw, an outdoor public art and culture experience in the Crenshaw District. As gentrification continues to roll through Black communities, that cultural foothold matters.

The audience matters too. Once you are there, you are counted in the number. You do not always have to instigate the thing. Your presence means you want to be counted among the people supporting it. For every artist, the audience that shows up matters.

Kellie Jones, editor of Black Curators Matter, and Deborah Willis, chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University, will discuss the book at Black Portraiture[s]: Los Angeles: The Black Built Environment conference, hosted by NYU, Getty, and UCLA. Their conversation, moderated by scholar and curator Bridget R. Cooks, will be held on September 28 at the Getty Center. Get more information and register to attend in person or online.