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LA's African-American Museum Launches Bold Fall Season

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This article is more than 7 years old.

Allow me to presume: Most Angelenos are aware that a new African-American Museum was dedicated recently on the Mall in Washington D.C. I’m also willing to bet, by contrast, that many of those same Angelenos have never visited our own California African American Museum (CAMM) -- if they even know it exists.

With ties to the Smithsonian, CAMM, chartered by the State of California in 1977 (they began operations in 1981) is located in Exposition Park across from USC and next to the California Science Center (and now conveniently located near the USC /Exposition Park Metro Stop). If you have never been there before, go now to see the five new exhibits recently unveiled by CAMM’s executive director George O. Davis and Deputy Director Naima J. Keith.

Keith, a native Angeleno, joined CAMM last February after holding curatorial positions at the Hammer Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. At CAMM’s press preview, Keith explained that CAMM had decided to launch five exhibits simultaneously as a Fall season rather than stagger the openings over several months as a way to create greater excitement and leverage visitors for one exhibit to see the others.

The five Fall exhibitions, each worthy of a visit in their own right, are: “The Ease of Fiction,” which features the work of four contemporary African artists living in the United States; “Genvieve Gangiard: Smell the Roses,” the first museum show of the photographer whose work is often a commentary on race and identity; “Politics, Race and Propaganda: The Nazi Olympics, Berlin 1936”; “Taking Place: Selections from the Permanent Collection”; and the debut of Hank Willis Thomas’s video, “Black Righteous Space”.

George O. Davis, Executive Director of the California African American Museum said, “Whether presenting emerging artist Genevieve Gaignard, offering a focused look into the history of the 1936 Olympics, delving into a range of contemporary concerns and formal issue with contemporary African artists, or showcasing the range of work available in our permanent collection, these exhibitions examine unique facets of American history and contemporary art.”

At the press preview, Keith said that it was her intention to always feature selections from CAMM’s own permanent collection which consists of more than four thousand works of art from the 1800s to the present as well as artifacts and historical documents. CAMM also houses a publicly accessible research library of more than 20,000 volumes.

CAMM’s collection includes the photographic collection of Miriam Matthews, California’s first African American librarian of images, who collected photos of African Americans in Los Angeles from the 1880s to the 1970s; the Vassie D. Wright Collection, of African American literary and historical works; the Walter Burrell Collection of audio recordings of Burrell’s interviews with African American celebrities, which were broadcast by a local radio station in the early 1970s; the oral histories of Celes King who was both a local civil rights activist as well a former Tuskegee airman; and the collection of visual artist John Outterbridge.

This Fall’s exhibition from the permanent collection, “Taking Place,” includes landscape paintings by Robert Duncanson (1821-1872) and Edward Bannister (1828-1901),  abstract work by Richard Mayhew (1924- ), and contemporary artists such as Dominique Moody whose Urban Nomad installation engages issues of place, history, and the references points that create community; and Sadie Barnette, a Los Angeles artist whose own website carries the statement that: “Whether working in drawing, photography or large-scale installations, I turn my attention to unexpected locations of identity construction.”

“Politics, Race and Propaganda” uses the 1936 Olympics in Nazi-led Berlin, as a forum for showing how State-promoted Racism became German law, the ways in which junk science, mythology and propaganda became Nazi ideology – and how the 1936 Olympics meant to showcase German Nazi Aryan superiority was bested by Jewish athletes in a variety of countries and by African-American Jesse Owens (and the impact he had at home). Originated by The United States Holocaust Museum, the exhibition features a well-organized display of photographs, documents, Olympic promotional materials and artifacts. For CAAM, the exhibition features a number of additions, including displaying one of Jesse Owens’ Gold Medals won in Berlin (for a sports fan – it was worth visiting CAMM just to see that!).-

Los Angeles artist Genevieve Gagniard’s whose “Genevieve Gagniard: Smell the Roses,” is her first museum exhibition, explores questions of identity and, in her own description, “of passing.” The daughter of a black father and white mother raised in a Massachusetts mill town, her works speaks to identities people adopt to feel part of a community that in assuming, assert that they exist. She is often the subject of her work, posing in ways that mock popular culture and its clichés of what constitutes black and white, rich and poor, redneck and white trash, Red State and Blue State. Gagniard’s work exists in a tradition pioneered by Cindy Sherman, but also by Catherine Opie, in giving stature to people that society in general and the Art World, in particular, often ignore. Much of the exhibition’s work is on loan from the Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in Venice which represents Gaignard.

The Ease of Fiction features works by four African artists living in the United States: ruby onyinyechi amanze, born in Nigeria in 1982; Duhirwe Rushemeza, born in Rwanda in 1977; Sherin Gurguis from Egypt; and Meleki Mokgosi born in Botswana in 1981. The exhibition was organized by the Contemporary Museum of Raleigh and curated by independent curator Dexter Wimberly; the CAAM exhibition was organized by CAAM’s Mar Hollingsworth.

Their work is very different, each accomplished, each captivating in different ways. There is something haunted about the light and empty spaces, the realistic and magical figures in omanze’s ‘Kindred’ from 2014, and Mokgosi’s works. Sherin Gurguin’s use of peacock feather-like decoration to localize her work is striking; while Rushemeza’s abstract constructions transcend place. Having this exhibition at CAMM not only highlights the cultural moment Africans are having in the United States (in film, theater and literature as well) and the important role CAMM plays in recognizing their work.

There’s an old biblical saying that Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. With CAMM’s Fall exhibits. Davis and Keith are doing justice to important unsung artists and significant contemporary ones, affirming the way African-Americans and Africans in America have faced past and present challenges as well as questions of identity. And they are doing so by exhibiting their work in ways that broadens, deepens and reshapes the narrative of art and art history.