| David Driskell: Changing the Face of Art History |
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| Over the course of the past five decades, Driskell has done just that. Museums have displayed no images of African-Americans except those in positions of servitude, according to Driskell. That state of affairs has slowly changed in the past two decades, however, thanks in large part to Driskell himself, an art historian and curator who earned his M.F.A. degree from CUA in 1962. As The Washington Post opined in 1998, “When David Driskell came to the world of African-American art, it had no place in the broader context of American art history. Through his passion and persistence — not to mention scholarship and taste — he has played a pivotal role in changing that. In so doing he has altered the nation’s artistic landscape.” Driskell’s career calls to mind an idea we don’t often entertain: the idea of the scholar as heroic. “He has, in essence, been the chief pioneer fighting for African-American art’s inclusion into the larger canon of American art history,” says Scott Habes, director of the art gallery of the University of Maryland. “He has challenged the powers that be and dealt with the fallout of that.” By so doing, Driskell has opened the door to a world of beauty and poignancy that most Americans — and maybe even most African-Americans — were not aware of. "YOU HAVE TO SHOW PEOPLE" In addition, he has curated dozens of exhibitions of African-American art, with a major breakthrough coming in 1976. That year he curated the groundbreaking exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750–1950” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As the first large retrospective of African-American art ever exhibited in a major American art museum, that show and the book Driskell wrote about it reverberate to the present day. “Arguably the most important exhibition of African-American art ever assembled … [it] forever transformed American art history from a largely white male bastion to a racially and ethnically diverse picture of art practitioners in the United States,” writes Richard J. Powell, professor of art and art history at Duke University, in the book Narratives of African American Art and Identity. The exhibition introduced American museum officials, educators and artists to a world of art they were unfamiliar with. “They saw the exhibition, measured it against what they were doing and saw there were no major differences between African-American art and the canon of European and Euro-American artists,” says Driskell. As a result many movers and shakers contacted him. CBS commissioned Driskell to write and narrate the script for an hour-long television special on African-American art. Bill Cosby surprised Driskell by calling to ask for guidance in collecting African-American art. Other signs of Driskell’s authority and influence have followed. The CUA alumnus was asked to choose the first work of art by a black artist to be purchased and hung in the White House. And in 2000 President Bill Clinton bestowed the National Humanities Medal on Driskell “for opening our eyes to the beauty, poignancy and power of African-American art.” FRUITS OF HIS LABOR As late as the 1980s, major U.S. art museums and the leading textbooks on American art history did not include the work of even one African-American artist. But building on Driskell’s foundational work, a few African-American artists have since begun experiencing unprecedented success:
In each case, these were the first major exhibitions of an African-American artist at these museums, according to Driskell. Beginning in 1977, the art historian has guided Bill Cosby in assembling the world’s leading private collection of African-American art. In 2001 Driskell published a book on Cosby’s collection: The Other Side of Color: African American Art in the Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr. That same year a woman in Portland, Maine, approached Driskell after seeing the Cosby collection reproduced in Driskell’s book. She told Driskell how happy she was to have come in contact with those black artists but — at the same time — how outraged she was that she had earned a doctorate in art history without having heard of any of them. “She said that she felt she had been cheated because these artists were part of her cultural heritage, too,” Driskell told a reporter for the Portland Phoenix. “I think that this kind of passion is what is needed, not conferences and symposia, but this kind of cultural consciousness that begins by seeing that we are all at a loss when we are not aware of such work.” WHAT HE FOUND AT CUA “Professor Nell Sonnemann was a wise counselor — a quiet person who had a very spiritual commitment to what she was doing,” remembers Driskell. “She taught an art theory course based primarily on Catholic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. She began the course with the writings of St. Augustine. I knew he had African blood, so I said to myself, ‘We’ve had a role in this thing a long time.’ ” Driskell’s reading of Thomistic philosophers helped him to sort out his artistic calling in the midst of those turbulent years of the civil rights movement, according to Julie McGee, the author of an upcoming biography of Driskell. “Through such philosophy,” she says, “he saw the goodness of doing art and saw that he didn’t need to justify his calling by painting politically motivated images.” Driskell agrees with those words. He adds that his time at CUA gave him “a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get away from teaching to experiment artistically.” CUA also taught him art skills that would prove important in his later teaching roles. “When Professor Alexander Giampietro was teaching us how to make ceramics on a pottery wheel, my clay kept wobbling,” Driskell recalls. “When I finally began getting the hang of it, and pulled up a beautiful bowl, I was so happy. But Professor Giampietro pulled it off the wheel, threw it into the clay bin and said, ‘Now, make 50 more.’ ” Driskell says he appreciated this seemingly harsh tutelage: “As Professor Sonnemann gave Driskell an opportunity to chart his future when she asked him to write a paper on what he considered to be the ideal art curriculum. “Nell was very excited about it,” Driskell remembers. “I came up with all kinds of ideas I wanted to institute, such as a seminar in which each student would have to present slides of their artwork to their professors — as this would give students practice for someday speaking to a gallery about exhibiting their work. In my later teaching positions, I put these curriculum ideas into practice.” THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES Still vigorous as he approaches his 75th birthday, Driskell looks over what’s been accomplished and what still needs to be done. He’s seen much progress. “When I started, I was the only scholar concentrating full time on African-American art and it was a very limited field,” he says. “Now there are sheep on every hill in the forest — young scholars, both black and white, devoted to expanding the study of African-American art.” The struggle continues, however. “African-American artists are still underrepresented in museums and in art curricula,” says Driskell. “Some mainstream museums sound satisfied to have the work of only one African-American in their collections. There is still the notion that African-Americans should be painting black subjects or should be subjugated to their own realm. And museums, galleries and art magazines still don’t seek out young African-American (or other minority) artists who are really doing wonderful things, as they do with white male artists.” Driskell illustrates the sometimes-unwitting bias of the art world through an anecdote: When he was putting together an exhibition of African-American art for the Baltimore Museum of Art in the 1980s, the museum’s chief curator told him, “We don’t normally host these kinds of segregated shows, but this is such a wonderful exhibition that we thought we needed to.” He replied, kindly but firmly, “I think you’re missing the boat. All you have had in the last 10 years were segregated shows of white males.” “The curator seemed almost hurt by my saying that,” Driskell reflects. “She thought I was attacking her, and I wasn’t. I was just stating a fact.” Driskell’s personal mission, he says, is “to do good to others and be a shining light so that somebody will be able to say the world was made better because I came this way. That’s my daily prayer.” The prayer seems to have been answered. His work has been instrumental in opening up museums and galleries to black Americans. On a more personal level, he has mentored virtually every major African-American artist of our time, says CUA grad Claudia DeMonte, M.F.A. 1971, a critically acclaimed artist and professor emerita at the University of Maryland. Driskell has helped African-American scholars and artists secure important positions in university art departments across the country. Moreover, he continues to help black artists receive heretofore unprecedented recognition, as in Pomegranate Press’ 12 illustrated coffee-table books — the David C. Driskell Series — each on an individual black artist of the 20th and 21st centuries. “Having attended many of David’s museum openings, I’ve watched as hundreds line up just to tell him what his work means to them,” says DeMonte. “He has changed the face of art history.” |
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In 1953, Washington, D.C., was a segregated city. Blacks could eat in only three of the downtown cafeterias or restaurants and couldn’t shop in most pharmacies or department stores, David C. Driskell remembers. That year, at D.C.’s historically black Howard University, art history Professor James A. Porter asked Driskell — a promising undergraduate from Polkville, N.C. — to take up the burden of “defining the field of African-American art.” He appealed to the student: “You have to show people what we’ve contributed.”