{"id":248396,"date":"2026-01-23T20:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T20:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/248396\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T20:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T20:24:10","slug":"david-driskell-a-pioneer-black-artist-is-on-view-in-portland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/248396\/","title":{"rendered":"David Driskell, a pioneer Black artist, is on view in Portland"},"content":{"rendered":"

PORTLAND, Maine \u2014 Let\u2019s start by giving David Driskell \u2014 educator, curator, scholar activist, artist, and not necessarily in that order \u2014 his due. As a foundational force in the long, slow expansion of the American canon to include Black artists largely disregarded for centuries, he was tireless, thorough, and impassioned. Watch the excellent 2021 HBO documentary \u201cBlack Art: In the Absence of Light,\u201d and you\u2019ll get the idea. He plays a starring role.<\/a> <\/p>\n

And if you\u2019re wondering: Yes, centuries. In 1976, Driskell curated \u201cTwo Centuries of Black American Art: 1750 to 1950<\/a>,\u201d <\/a>at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an assertion, radical at the time, that Black art history had a continuum and lineage essential to understanding America itself \u2014 an idea the intellectual establishment had largely, blithely, ignored. The show, Driskell recalled in a 2009<\/a> interview with the Smithsonian<\/a>, was conceived to send a signal, loud and clear: \u201c\u2018No, you haven\u2019t seen everything. You don\u2019t know everything,\u2019\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Driskell conveyed his deep knowledge of the long arc of Black American cultural pedigree to generations of his students at Talladega College in Alabama, at Howard University, where he\u2019d been a student, at Fisk University in Nashville, and finally at the University of Maryland, where The Driskell Center<\/a> remains as his lasting legacy, nurturing scholarship around Black artists, past and present. (Driskell died of COVID-19 in 2020, at 88.)<\/p>\n

Every summer starting in 1961, Driskell would travel to his studio in Falmouth, Maine, just north of Portland, and he has a legacy here, too. At the Portland Museum of Art, \u201cDavid C. Driskell: Collector,\u201d is an important jog to the memory \u2014 that now, coming up on a third century of Black art, lineage would be that much harder to draw without his life\u2019s work. And in an era of fractious politics and a resurgence of racial animus, the echoes of his foundational gesture, 50 years ago, seems not that far away at all. <\/p>\n

\"LoïsLo\u00efs Mailou Jones, “Paris,” 1962. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Petegorsky\/Gipe Photo<\/p>\n

In 2021, the PMA paid homage to Driskell\u2019s work as a gifted painter himself with \u201cDavid Driskell: Icons of Nature and History,\u201d<\/a> spotlighting an element of his life\u2019s work largely overshadowed by his scholarship and advocacy. To be fair, it loomed large: Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in New York, the most significant Black art institution in the country, wrote in the exhibition catalog that \u201cTwo Centuries\u201d was a monument to \u201cactivist curating,\u201d and for her, a powerful proof point that would inform her own career. It made her realize, she wrote, that scholarship had the power \u201cto transform the history of art as it was written.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"DavidDavid Driskell, “Pine and Moon,” 1971. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.Pillar Digital Imaging<\/p>\n

But that 2021 show gave a view into his introspective artist\u2019s soul, and helped reveal his life\u2019s priorities around breaking down divisions in both art and the culture. The current exhibition, though pocket-size, is a road map of his extrovert advocacy, and the alliances he forged as he pushed things forward. <\/p>\n

The walls at the PMA are a who\u2019s who of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, with Driskell as a central figure. Here, \u201cUrban Street Scene,\u201d a fractured, brightly-colored 1974 collage by Romare Bearden, a towering figure of the movement and a close Driskell confederate, there, a lovely untitled watercolor abstraction from 1964 by Alma Thomas, another close friend who broke ground in 1972 as the first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lois Maillou Jones\u2019s \u201cParis,\u201d 1962, is a bright, post-Impressionist delight, conveying the liberation she felt as a Black artist overseas, free of the constraints of American racial politics. She had been one of Driskell\u2019s teachers when he was an undergraduate at Howard University. Elizabeth Catlett, also a student of Jones\u2019s, is here too, represented by \u201cSharecropper,\u201d 1968, one of her best-known works. She, like Jones, abandoned the tensions of American racial animus for Mexico, where her social-justice-driven works found common ground in that country\u2019s long history of the same. <\/p>\n

\"EdwardEdward Mitchell Bannister, “Untitled (Walking in the Woods),” 1880s. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Petegorsky\/Gipe Photo<\/p>\n

The show surely wasn\u2019t meant as a reminder, but in this regressive moment in American culture, when history itself seems at risk, it\u2019s a significant, unintentional warning: Hard-fought progress can never be taken for granted, and that even the most natural, normal seeming forward motion can be forgotten and lost. In this little showcase, Driskell\u2019s insistence \u2014 of an arc of Black culture tracking every moment of American evolution \u2014 can be found. I was moved by a pair of small landscape paintings by the artist Edward Mitchell Bannister, a Black artist of the 19th century only recently being recognized for his remarkable talent. \u201cMy Father\u2019s Farm, North Carolina,\u201d a small 1955 painting by Driskell, of a moody green fog of forest, hangs nearby, almost as if in communion. <\/p>\n

The lineage was always there, he seems to say. It just took someone willing to see it. Driskell was that someone. His legacy, until very recently a beacon, now feels more like a bulwark. Its existence will be \u2014 has to be \u2014 a protective armor for whatever assaults come next. <\/p>\n

DAVID C. DRISKELL: COLLECTOR<\/p>\n

Through March 1. Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland, Maine. 207-775-6148, www.portlandmuseum.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte<\/a>.<\/p>\n