Musée de Mélanine
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Over the last decade the Black community has welcomed large cultural sites such as the National Museum of African American History & Culture and smaller house museums such as Philadelphia’s Colored Girls Museum into the family tree of Black art institutions. These museums were created for and by Black professionals to share narratives of the Black community via our own voice, one that has long been stifled in the canons of ‘history’ and ‘fine art’. Black cultural institutions have continuously been an overlooked part of Black history. Compared to their peer museums, Black institutions are far less frequent and much less endowed than their counterparts. The reason being the struggle for equality and civil rights by people of African descent in the colonial culture of Western society. This subjugation was common of many Blacks in the 60’s and 70’s working to bring Black cultural institutions to their own communities. This activism of the Black arts movement is the foundation for Black museums and cultural sites in modern-day society. Black artists led the struggle for representation and equality in the arts and faced injustices such as, “the omission of historical and contemporary African American artists from the pages of art survey texts, racially biased art criticism, the absence of art education in urban ghettos, the death of teaching positions, scholarships, and grants for younger artists, and most urgently, the absence of work by black artists on gallery walls through the country.”1
“The convention has perpetuated the long-term fragmentation of Black lives as an alternative humanity and led to our systemic exclusion, abuse, and erasure throughout history”
Today, while the museum field continues to define its civic role and progress on improving best practices for community engagement, accessibility, and interpretation, more Black creative spaces are being conceived and nurtured by descendants of the diaspora, broadening our view of what Black history and culture looks like in the present day. The recent emergence of more Black-led institutions combined with a community-wide push for museums to decolonize has allowed greater opportunity for all institutions to clean house of outdated practices, collections, and staff. However, decolonization is more than a “trendy” practice of social awareness that liberal museums have taken to as if it is as easy as reorganizing your closet. Decolonization is a recontextualization of intellectual property that divests from colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal institutions that manufacture the violent phenomenon of the "other" within a cultural space. The convention has perpetuated the long-term fragmentation of Black lives as an alternative humanity and led to our systemic exclusion, abuse, and erasure throughout history.
There is much to be said and done in these institutions to change this oppressive culture; however, art laborers everywhere are shining light on inequality and demanding change. Although the fight for representation is not over, Black cultural institutions and collectives have more reason than ever to be celebrated. African American museums are a key component to the social, economic, and cultural infrastructure of the Black community’s history and their connection to global culture. Constructing and fostering pro-Black museums and collectives allows for a homecoming experience for those of the African diaspora to connect, learn, and conserve our collective identity. These pioneer institutions are necessary spaces of refuge, rest, and enlightenment for Black bodies where we can sew the fruit of our physical, mental, and spiritual labor and preserve traditions for generations to come.
1 Lennon, Mary Ellen. "A Question of Relevancy: New York Museums and the Black Arts Movement, 1968–1971." In New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, edited by Collins Lisa Gail and Crawford Margo Natalie, 92-116. Rutgers University Press, 2006. Accessed April 25, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj474.8.