We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s, features over 70 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and prints produced by black artists living and working in Philadelphia during the roughly 50 year period. The exhibition focuses on a range of this city’s organizations and institutions and considers the degree to which they offered black artists a platform from which to launch their careers and have a voice.
The curatorial framework is anchored between two significant historical events. In 1925 Philadelphian Alain Locke’s published “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” an important moment in the New Negro Arts Movement that issued a call to black American artists to find inspiration in their African heritage. The exhibition concludes in the 1970s with the nation’s bicentennial year, when American ideals of liberty and equality were being reconsidered in a contemporary context.
