ABSTRACT
The public art resonated with the museum’s mission of examining black culture and history in a global and local perspective. This chapter focuses on work by artists based in the United States who identified as having African ancestry, regardless of their nationality. It describes these artists as black, while recognizing that they may have called themselves—or have been perceived as—colored, Negro, Afro-American, or African American. The chapter considers antecedents for black public art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sculptures created for expositions and fairs are another antecedent of black public art. As instructors involved students in public art projects, students learned the traditions of black public art with their formal instruction. Until the New Deal programs of the 1930s, most black artists creating public art sponsored their own work or received commissions arising from the black public sphere.
