Gifted curators nyc8/23/2023 ![]() Part of it was not just doing a book with my voice, or Bernard’s voice, but to bring the community into it. Our culture is deeply sort of indebted in the history and the struggles that became before. You have these patrons collecting, preserving, donating, financially assisting artists so they could do the work and produce Black visual culture. When you were talking about Black patrons and Black collectors, there’s a long history dating back to the early 20th century with Alain Locke. That arc of history and how it informs the present is so important when we’re talking about Black artistic production but also the larger sort of social context. The book is grounded in this generation of Black artists, from Eric Mack to Kevin Beasley to Jordan Casteel to Jennifer Packer, and then you see their predecessors. So this is a history which needs to be written.ĪS: What was so important about this collection and this book is that you can clearly see the links from one generation to the next. And they kind of sort of erase Trayvon Martin, they erase Mike Brown, they erase these recent names, not to mention Emmett Till. On the one hand, you’ll have people think of the killing of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or any of the long list of names that we can name here as something new. I think that very often when we are in these moments that we don’t consider how we got to them. I think about the moment that we’re in now where we have disproportionate Black death, disproportionate Black suffering, but then we have what has been considered a sort of renaissance in Black artistic production. Where does this book fit into our current moment?Īntwaun Sargent:It’s the passing of a baton. Here, Lumpkin and Sargent in a conversation with Vulture about the book and how these groundbreaking artists and their work gives us a richer, deeper, and more complex view of the Black experience. I think as they get older, they notice different things.” “We’ve had it up for years and the children see something different in it too. Outside the bedroom is a classic Leonardo Drew composition, filled with found knickknacks and objects like baseballs and baby rattles: “Whenever I walk by this artwork, I see something different, you know,” says Lumpkin. In the living room, there’s a work by Tomashi Jackson and another by Kevin Beasley, a semi-figurative specter structure sculpted with resin and a house dress that Lumpkin’s son, Felix, likens to Harry Potter dementors. Henry Taylor’s The Sweet William Rorex, Jr., a painting of the artist’s nephew, is prominently displayed in the dining room. A photograph by D’Angelo Lovell Williams, a portrait of the artist and his mother, hangs in the entryway. Many of the works at his Tribeca loft are about family. “I use the art collection - which grew out of conversations with my father, who was African-American - as a tool to educate people about black history and culture,” Lumpkin wrote via email. ![]() Lumpkin says his mission-driven approach to collecting was shaped by his parents. ![]() Then there’s text from artists themselves: Jonathan Lyndon Chase writing experimentally about their work, Jordan Casteel on her connection to Lumpkin (some of Casteel’s work from Lumpkin’s collection is on view at the New Museum) and her wider work, among others. Lax, a young curator from MoMA, and Jessica Bell Brown, a curator at Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as the Studio Museum’s Thelma Golden in conversation with Lumpkin about the lineage of Black collection and patronage. It started out as an essay, and grew into a traveling exhibition, and now this 200-plus-page tome about “how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics, and art history itself.” The book, out September 22, contextualizes the collections of Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, and features critical and personal essays from curators, collectors, writers, and, of course, artists, including Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, and more. Looking back on the past decade and the explosion of Black art in the mainstream, Young, Gifted and Black surveys the next generation of Black artists, but with an eye toward the generation just before. “It’s grounded in this generation of Black artists, from Eric Mack to Kevin Beasley to Jordan Casteel to Jennifer Packer, and then you see their predecessors.” “This book is just another way to examine and to produce Black space,” says writer-critic Antwaun Sargent, the book’s editor, in a joint interview with collector Bernard Lumpkin, whose extensive collection it is based upon, over Zoom. Not everyone in the new book Young, Gifted and Black is young. Chiffon Thomas, A mother who had no mother (detail), 2017.
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