Whither Black Art?

Now an obscure historical figure, Henri Ghent was a gay Black curator and critic who served as founding director of the Brooklyn Museum’s Community Gallery and was the first Black American to assume a leadership position at this level in an elite U.S. art museum. During his tenure at the Brooklyn Museum (1968–72), he organized more than fifty exhibitions featuring work by artists of all races and levels of achievement. A cultural activist in the late 1960s and 1970s, Ghent helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) and played an instrumental role in the initial Black public protests against racism in major New York art museums. He also published art criticism in mainstream publications. This first survey of Ghent’s career examines his contributions to contentious debates about a “Black aesthetic,” reviews his theory of Black creativity, and considers probable dynamics that contributed to his erasure from American art history.