Fifty years ago, Nina Simone released “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a song written in memory of her dear friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry who died in 1965 at the tender age of 34. It became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement that soon found its way into a 1972 episode of Sesame Street. Simone sang, “We must begin to tell our young / There’s a world waiting for you / This is a quest that’s just begun” to Gen X babies, who took the message to heart and paid it forward to the children of Generation Z, who fearlessly stand at the forefront of a brave new world.
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With the Black Lives Matter movement centering issues of race in the discourse, the historically exclusionary art world has finally made space for Black Art. A wealth of established, mid-career, and emerging artists are breaking new ground, be it at auction houses, major museum exhibitions, on magazine covers, or with new books. Yet Black Art is far from a trend; it has informed the world for thousands of years in various incarnations in Africa and across the diaspora.
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This point is beautifully illustrated in the exhibition Young Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, which pairs collectorBernard Lumpkin with critic Antwaun Sargent to curate a masterful showcase of some of the most innovative and influential contemporary black artists. The exhibition is a symphony of voices and visions from across generations all around the globe, creating a mellifluous confluence of style, media, and subject matter. Culled from the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, Young, Gifted and Black features works by David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sadie Barnette, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, whose work appears on the cover of the catalog. Here, Lumpkin and Adeniyi-Jones discuss how when the collector and artist work together, they can transform the narrative of identity, politics, education, and art history.
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