How representation of Black artists in galleries, museums is changing

When George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, the event brought a “scary” time for the Minneapolis neighborhood where it occurred.

“Everything was on fire,” said Lamar Peterson, a contemporary art painter who lives less than a mile from the scene.

“You couldn’t have your windows open because of the smoke,” Peterson said. “It just felt like it was Armageddon, the end of times.”

The streets were filled both with protesters and also looters, Peterson remembers.

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For Peterson, it was a personally difficult for another reason: Due to the lockdown at the time, he lost access to his studio based in the University of Minnesota building where he teaches.

Peterson, 49, an oil painter, was unable to do his work at home in a closed space.

“That was really hard for me,” Peterson said. “My outlet is my artwork.”

Today, Peterson has recently wrapped up his latest show at the Fredericks & Freiser art gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York.

The works are the opposite of the dark time he lived through in 2020, with bright garden landscapes and Black figures that draw inspiration from the 1970s and 80s cartoons that Peterson grew up on.

The paintings are about appreciating the fleeting beauty in life, he said, inspired by his own love of gardening and his father’s recent death.

“Flowers can be a metaphor for human life, too,” Peterson said. “There’s a beginning and an end.”

The show, titled “Proud Gardener,” sold “very well” and is one of Peterson’s most successful shows to date, according to Andrew Freiser, a co-owner of the gallery. Prices for the works ranged from $15,000 to $60,000, depending on size.

Peterson, who started showing his work in the early 2000s, has noticed a shift in the art market.

“There’s a lot more support for Black artists that kind of came out of George Floyd’s murder and institutions realizing that they need to do more,” Peterson said.

That “sea change” in recent years has prompted museum shows of artists including Kerry James Marshall, Michael Armitage, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, noted Lucius Elliott, head of The Now Evening Auction at Sotheby’s, which focuses on contemporary works.

“My impression is there are vastly increased number of solo shows and group shows dedicated to Black artists in London, in Paris, in New York, across the United States,” Elliott said.

“Something fundamental has shifted here, and that’s driven I think more than anything by a desire to correct or redress a historical oversight, both in the market, but also for institutional representation,” Elliott said.

Other Black artists have gained importance, including Kehinde Wiley, who painted a portrait of former President Barack Obama, and Hank Willis Thomas, who sculpted the statue “The Embrace,” of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King that was recently unveiled in Boston.

“There are a lot of artists that I think have risen to a level of prominence that have really placed them at the center of the contemporary art narrative,” said Drew Watson, head of art services at Bank of America.

Works from established artists like Kerry James Marshall that depict Black figures are influencing the work of new artists and creating a lineage, Elliott noted.

“These are not images of degradation, but they’re images of dignity,” Elliott said.

Painter Xavier Daniels’ most recent show titled “Cry Like a Man” features portraits of Black men with vivid colors like purple, blue and white, meant to convey royalty, freedom and purity.

Prices for the works at the Black-owned Richard Beavers gallery in New York’s SoHo neighborhood ranged from between $30,000 to $42,000.

The male portraits are inspired by other Black men with whom Daniels, 42, had either worked during his 13-year career as a firefighter or been a student at an all-male predominantly Black college, he said.

The works in the recent show also touch on the mental health struggle Black men go through, with portions of some of the faces missing to reflect how negative stereotypes may lead them to not feel whole.

At the same time, the figures are empowered and free to be themselves, Daniels said.

“I’m just taking our experiences and creating art and a language I feel would help other Black males feel great about who they are,” he said.