Book | Among Others: Blackness at MoMA

Maintaining ignorance of black artists and art about blackness by design could be the tagline for Charlotte Barat and Darby English’s Among Others: Blackness at MoMA. 

The museum’s adjunct curator and art historian (respectively) provide a convincing argument that New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has, over its nine-decade history, adopted strategies and policies tipped towards excluding black artists and their work from its exhibitions and acquisitions. 

This tome opens with the co-writers’ foundational essay Blackness at MoMA: A Legacy of Deficit. Barat and English explore MoMA’s neglect, citing reasons ranging from the perceived superiority of western European masters over American artists, to the racist policies that saturate US life and push African-American artists down the pecking order. 

Added to this are Barat and English’s argument that “art museums are human systems: unstable, grounded in bias, habitual and difficult to modify”. Among Others highlights that when MoMA has encountered blackness – manifested in the artist, audience or artwork – it has often simply not known what to do with it, eschewed the perceived risk of exploring outside its norms, or sidelined any aspects of race within the conversation. 

The second essay, by Mabel Wilson, a professor at Columbia University, also scrutinises MoMA’s lack of works by black artists or designers. The two texts do, however, draw attention to the museum’s sporadic moments of inclusion and pioneering initiatives. The book then moves into more than 200 plates of artworks from the collection, each accompanied by a short text.  

Among Others richly pairs commissioned texts by contributing writers, prominent MoMA curators and artists with illustrations of the astounding but limited art in the collection. 

Lowery Stokes Sims, the art historian and former curator emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design, vividly describes the energy and poignancy of MoMA’s acquisition, Emergency Room (1989) by Robert Colescott, the first black artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. 

MoMA associate curator Yasmil Raymond traces artist Kara Walker’s work, from her meticulous caricatures to her divisive portraits, monumental sculpture and the sombre charcoals calling attention to the continued violence against black Americans. 

Gregg Borowitz, the writer and activist, celebrates the radicality, significance and poetry of film-maker Marlon Riggs’ portrayal of “black men loving black men”. Credit is due to MoMA for taking these groundbreaking artists to the audiences that they deserve. 

Within the history of art, these African-American artists are situated among others; the foreign-born black artists and artists from other ethnic minority groups who also navigate the construction of race. They are also situated within a system that others individuals not represented in the centres of power and one that projects a narrow view of blackness in order to assert its own culture as dominant and superior. 

Barat and English muse over MoMA’s preference for acquiring works by self-taught black artists over those with formal training and already widely known because the former were deemed to have a more “special appeal”. They fitted MoMA’s notion of “modern primitives” and were believed to be more authentic in their representation of blackness. MoMA’s acquisition strategy narrowed the variety of black realities.

Among Others exposes the natural urge within museums to classify and order, which in turn can homogenise. The irony in MoMA’s shortcomings lies in the foundational principles of modernist art: a belief in progress and plurality; an alignment with the varied experiences and values of modern life; and a rejection of history and conservative values. 

In Barat and English’s words, Among Others is “an endeavour of self-understanding”. MoMA has now prioritised assessing its collection and institutional behaviours where black artists and blackness are concerned. Publishing this book is a sign that blackness is no longer the elephant in the room.