Philadelphia and the Countryside - Press Room

For more than a century, the city of Philadelphia has been home to a number of prominent African-American artists who received academic training and created visual works of all media, contributing to the artistic and intellectual life of the city. Establishments like the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, art schools like Moore College of Art and Design and Tyler School of Art at Temple University and venues like Sande Webster Gallery and ArtJaz Gallery have provided important channels for the career development of African-American artists in Philadelphia. While the African-American art scene has blossomed and waned to varying degrees throughout the 20th century through the present, its presence has been vital to the cultural life of the Philadelphia region.

African-American artists have indeed struggled to find arenas that were consistently receptive to and active in exhibiting their work. While some institutions like the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial and The Barnes Foundation trained African-American artists and/or collected their works, many galleries in Philadelphia were reluctant to represent them. The Sande Webster Gallery, established in 1967, was the exception, as Sande Webster invited artists to show based on the quality of their work, regardless of race, resulting in a representation of an unprecedented number of African-American artists.

Artists’ Initiatives:
Because of Webster’s commitment to African-American artists, she made her gallery available to the Philadelphia artist group Recherché as a site for their meetings. Recherché, meaning “carefully sought out; rare or exotic,” began in 1983 with the Cheltenham Art Center exhibition, Black Artists’ Point of View. The seven founders, Syd Carpenter, James Dupreé, Carolynn Hayward-Jackson, Richard Jordan, Charles Searles, Hubert Taylor and Andrew Turner, agreed at its inception that the organization would celebrate the differences among African-American artists, thus breaking down some of the typecasting that had begun to circulate within the art world. While some members have cycled in and out of the group, additional artists have included Moe Brooker, Charles Burwell, Martina Allen, Nannette Acker Clark, James Brantley, Don Camp, Walter Edmonds, Jimmy Mance, Quentin Morris, LeRoy Johnson, Calvin Jones and Richard Watson. The group acted as cultural ambassadors, traveling in 1986 to Copenhagen, Denmark and in 1988 to Bahia, Brazil as part of a cultural exchange sponsored through the City of Philadelphia. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Recherché put together several local and international group exhibitions.

Other artists also took charge to provide alternative art exhibition spaces. For example, in 1972, Allan Edmunds founded the Brandywine Workshop in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. In addition, Ellen Powell Tiberino converted a drugstore in the Poweltown Village area to house an artist-led workshop called The Building, where group shows popped up twice a year. Two art galleries have become mainstays for Philadelphians collecting African-American art. Located in Old City, ArtJaz Gallery, established in 1999, exhibits the works of artists of color, and October Gallery on West Oak Lane hosts an annual art expo of African-American art and wares.

Changing The City Wall By Wall:
Walls throughout the city have offered additional spaces for the display of African-American art. On the interior walls of the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, a set of 14 murals called Biblical History in a Black Contemporary Setting, U.S.A., were completed in 1974 by Walter Edmonds and Richard Watson. Since 1998, the Church of the Advocate has housed the cultural arts center The Art Sanctuary, where the murals surround attendees of all ages for music, dance and literary performances and for arts and culture workshops. The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, which began in 1984 as a component of the city’s Anti-Graffiti Network, has produced more than 2,800 murals of all subject matter to adorn the sides of buildings, homes and bridges throughout the city, as a way to curb destructive graffiti and to address neighborhood blight. African-American artists have completed a number of these murals, and several of the works honor Philadelphia leaders, artists, athletes, neighborhood citizens, children and African-American history in general.

Philadelphia Art Museums And Schools:
Philadelphia-area institutions continue to make efforts to meet the demand of interest in and availability of African-American art. From October 17, 2009-January 3, 2010, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts presents the work of trendsetting Barkley L. Hendricks, an alumnus of the school. Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool includes 57 stunning works by the Civil Rights-era artist who set the standard for hip, in-your-face images that celebrate the beauty and complexity of black identity. Like the Brandywine Workshop, The Fabric Workshop and Museum occasionally hosts artists-in-residence and offers exhibitions of African-American artists. Through her current residency, Senga Nengudi, who gained fame in the 1970s among African-American avant-garde artists for her minimalist work, is switching gears to focus on sound and video installations the workshop. The Philadelphia Museum of Art mounts special exhibitions of borrowed works, and throughout the year, exhibits a portion of the more than 500 works by 130 African-American artists in its permanent collections. Professional art schools, such as Tyler School of Art, Moore College of Art, the University of the Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, support the African-American art scene by employing artists as professors and instructing young, emerging artists who, in turn, continue the long tradition of high-quality, vibrant and important work by African-American artists in Philadelphia.

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Contact(s):

• Rachel Ferguson, (215) 599-2291
• Donna Schorr, (215) 599-0782