FOREWORD Whenever I am asked how I became involved in
conversations among black artists in Philadelphia
the arts, I describe my upbringing. I was lucky to
and others who live and work in Pittsburgh, New
be born into a family of artists: my mother is a
York, and elsewhere. We Speak pursues the further
painter, my father is a writer. When they divorced in
opportunity to investigate the internal dynamic of
my teen years, each of my parents pursued other
relationships between Philadelphia’s black artists
long-term relationships with partners who were
and this city’s culture and history.
also artists, and were black. It was thus, coming into adulthood as a member of two multiracial families, that I became aware of the daily gnaws of racism in ways that I hadn’t been aware of before. With my emerging interest in a career in the arts, I also learned about the ubiquity of negative stereotypes of race within the white art establishment.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ The Chemistry of Color: The Sorgenti Collection of Contemporary African-American Art (2011). These two exhibitions celebrated the extraordinary wealth
exhibitions like the Hammer Museum’s Now Dig
collections, and we are honored by generous loans
This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (2011–
from both museums.
explorations of race and art focused on specific historic contexts and timeframes. We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s covers a broader timeframe than these exhibitions. It seeks to be a platform for further exploration and an overview of the historical connections between art, community, and cultural institutions in Philadelphia. Woodmere also feels the urgency to contribute to the dialogue on race in our city and across our nation, and to prompt hard questions to be explored and felt.
WOODMERE ART MUSEUM
of African American Art (2014) and by the
of art by black artists in our sister institutions’
Civil Rights in the Sixties (2014). These historical
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of Art’s recent exhibition Represent: 200 Years
It has been inspiring, in recent years, to see
12) or the Brooklyn Museum’s Witness: Art and
Cataclysm, Rebirth New World, 1968, by Roland Ayers (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase, 2015)
We are also inspired by the Philadelphia Museum
To give an example of how this exhibition evolved, we were unaware of the work of Roland Ayers (1932–2014) until he was brought to our attention by his friend and colleague Allan Edmunds and his one-time neighbor Nancy Goldenberg. His work was a revelation, and we are thrilled not only to include his Cataclysm, Rebirth New World (1968) in the exhibition, but also to have acquired it for Woodmere’s collection. Ayers, who had a background in graphic design, was a great storyteller and an artist who possessed a special finesse with line. Cataclysm, Rebirth New World
Upon arriving as Woodmere’s director in 2010, I
is an epic work and while it seems embedded in
was pleased to learn that one of the best-attended
the historic moment of the late 1960s because
exhibitions in the history of the Museum was the
of a certain stylized look that recalls Yellow
recent In Search of Missing Masters: The Lewis
Submarine, it also represents a historical and visual
Tanner Moore Collection of African American Art
epic that connects past and present. The boatlike
(2008). The show brought to the surface Moore’s
form that carries Ayers’s assembly of figures is a
particular perspective as a collector, as well as
reference to the slave ships that brought Africans WE SPEAK: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s
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