As a young artist still in college, I answered a call to artists for a show at the Cinque Gallery in New York. My work didn’t make it into the show. Romare Bearden wrote me back saying that the Gallery only showed works by African American artists. My small graphite and acrylic paintings were Sunday morning scenes of the Black business district in Santa Barbara, California, and some small towns in Louisiana. They were quiet and lonely spaces, but they were Black spaces. I focused on cast shadows and sunlight. The only suggestion of life was scraps of paper discarded to blow in the street. In thinking about the “Black Voices,” project, I am aware of the pitfalls of leaning into US Black artists’ expectations to create works that promote the Black figure’s primacy in defining Black art. Viewers, collectors, curators, and writers are complicit in this search for the visual and conceptual images of representational blackness where for many; the Black figure defines “Black art.”

We are currently in period of heightened focus on Black artists and the Black figure. As an art historian, I must take a pause. I can’t help but feeling a sense of déjà vu. I’m thinking of the figurative works by Black artists from other periods when white collectors and museums collected the works by Black figurative artists: 1920 through the 1930s and 1960 through 1970s. Although many of these artists came to their practice with displaying blackness in mind, many felt compelled to remain in that mindset related to Black people to stay relevant to displays of blackness. Almost all roads led to Black figure representation. I wondered how else one could explore blackness sans the image or explore other spaces for that Black figure. Many recent Black figures in paintings and drawings appear in the home’s intimate space or Black spaces frequented by Black people. It is a Black box mentality that limits artists and curators and leaves little room for contradictions in a multifaceted blackness.

Blacks are not culturally and ancestrally monolithic. Many of us know this but forget it when looking at art by Black artists. Because of the nature of Black enslavement, our experiences are multidimensional, embracing many nuanced stories, ethnic histories and notions, and varying perspectives on blackness as we explore and carve out our sense of place in the world. We are too complex to limit ourselves to a Black box.

In The Ambiguities of Blackness, my curatorial aim is to present works by artists beyond that art narrative and seek out the subtleties in addressing the complicated and various Black culture and life strands. In the end, I ask who decides if the artwork is Black enough to be included in a show. Do we have to explain our blackness in degrees or by the color of our skin tones? Can we move fluidly in other worlds and still maintain our blackness? Will we be challenged or brushed aside as not Black enough? I challenge the limited notion of “Black art” as I delight in the creative practices of Black people.

Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Ph.D., mixes scholarship with public engagement through cultural, social, and political storytelling. In 1984-1990 as Curator of Visual Arts at the California African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles, CA, she curated 1960s: A Cultural Reawakening, Novae: William H. Johnson and Bob Thompson, and The Portrayal of the Black Musician in American Art.

In 1990, she established her independent curatorial business, LeFalleCuratorial, in Oakland, CA. She curated museum exhibitions for USIA biennials and solo shows at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, El Centro, Tijuana, Mexico, and CAAM, presenting works by Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Mildred Howard, and Sargent Claude Johnson. In the next decade, she curated for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (MoAD), finalizing that relationship with the exhibition Portraits and Other Likenesses.

Dr. LeFalle-Collins is currently reviewing exhibition label texts as needed for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and continuing her creative writing.