ABSTRACT
As black and white art spaces began defining the field of African-American art history, black artists increasingly made work about the museum. For historian of African-American art Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Mabel O. Walker’s black paper silhouettes visualize the trauma of slavery and, so, make it available for viewers of all races to confront, negotiate, and overcome. Wilson’s work deployed the collecting and curatorial strategies that minimized and obfuscated the presence of African-Americans in Baltimore, and Kara Walker foregrounded the literal and thus ideological apparatus of the museum. For Walker, whiteness was part and parcel of the institution’s architecture and its attempt to erase context so as to highlight form. In their work, these artists reimagined the archive and the wall in order to expose the racial politics of curating and the “white cube,” respectively. Most metropolitan art museums on the East Coast of the United States were founded in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
