UPPER EAST SIDE
Acts of Art in Greenwich Village
Through March 29. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, 132 East 68th Street, Manhattan; 212-772-4991, huntercollegeartgalleries.org.
D.E.I. didn’t exist in the mainstream New York art world a half-dozen decades ago. Black artists eager for shows had to find them mostly in Black neighborhoods, and live with the fact that a fiction called race would determine their audience.
A rare exception was a storefront gallery called Acts of Art, which opened in the West Village of Manhattan in 1969. It not only exhibited new art by Black artists but also became, de facto, a place where diversity, equity and inclusion were demonstrated and promoted.
Although the gallery is long gone — it lasted for just six years — its spirit is revivified in a small, tightly researched and impeccably mounted exhibition at Hunter College.
Acts of Art was founded by two artists — Nigel Jackson (1940-2005) and Patricia Grey — at a hot cultural moment. The year it debuted, a big show called “Harlem on My Mind” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Planned as an integrationist gesture but composed of documentary photos rather than art, “Harlem on My Mind” was an infuriating flop and inspired the formation of a protest group called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition.
When, two years later in 1971, the Whitney Museum opened a show called “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” organized by a white curator, the coalition staged a rebutting group show, and Acts of Art was where it appeared. In a stroke, the gallery caught the public eye and a spot in the history books.
It hosted other activist happenings too, including the first exhibition of the all-women Black collective Where We At. What the gallery did mostly, though, was what it was designed to do: provide a showcase for a wide variety of contemporary Black artists who would otherwise not have been seen in downtown Manhattan. Fourteen of those artists make up the current show at Hunter, organized by Howard Singerman, a professor of art history at the college, and Katie Hood Morgan, the gallery’s chief curator, working with 15 students in the school’s Advanced Curatorial Certificate Seminar.
