Art
Does it matter who owns Black art?
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In 2017, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled skull painting was purchased for $110.5 million US by Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. The historic purchase joined a growing number of works by Black American artists that have skyrocketed in value on the art market. These astronomical prices are frequently in the headlines, but I have also been curious about the collectors who choose to own these pieces. Who buys Black art? Why do they buy Black art? And does it matter who owns these works?
To grapple with these questions and more, I spoke virtually with Dr. Kenneth Montague, one of the most noted Black art collectors in Canada. Earlier this year, Montague published As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, a book by Aperture containing select photographic works from his extensive collection. It’s a moving assemblage of images that invites the viewer to witness an array of intimate moments in the wide expanse of Black life. According to Montague, Aperture was interested in putting together a book not only featuring the work of Black artists but specifically highlighting pieces that had found their home within a Black-owned collection. “That was really special and really kind of foundational for me. I didn’t really want to deal with a company that didn’t get that important fact.” Montague notes the soaring prices of work by many of the artists featured. “[Today] I couldn’t even afford many of the works in my collection,” he tells me. “In a way, we’re trying to hold on to something and keep something for ourselves, and I think Aperture understood that.”
I’ve been reflecting on Montague’s desire to “keep something for ourselves.” An early title for the book was “Black Owned” and I am curious about the implied assertion that who owns the art may hold just as much significance as the question of who made the art.
For Montague, who began purchasing works in the late ’90s, collecting is a form of storytelling, and he believes the works he acquires are engaged in a constant dialogue with each other. Each one contributes to Montague’s personal curatorial mission: to explore the multifaceted variations of Black experience. “I’m connected with the works and with my collection,” he told me. “It’s very much about figuration and portraiture. It’s about people. I see my own family. I’m very connected to the work spiritually because this is my community. I’m not saying that someone outside of the community can’t appreciate work by Mickalene Thomas or work by Dawit Petros or Sandra Brewster. I’m just saying that it’s extremely visceral and very intimate for me because these are my people.”
When I reached out to Julie Crooks, curator in the department of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and asked her if there was a need to interrogate who owns Black art, she was adamant that “everyone has the right to own art.” However, she added the caveat that the purpose and intention behind the purchase was also important. “If you’re just collecting it to then put it back on the market, like in an auction, to kind of flip it, to make a profit — and a profit for which the artist doesn’t benefit — I don’t know if that’s with good intention.” The transactional nature of art collecting is one that both Montague and Crooks flagged. It is an inherent part of an art market that frequently requires considerable capital to participate in. As Crooks noted, “Collecting is tethered to wealth. It is about a class bias.”
I’m connected with the works and with my collection… it’s extremely visceral and very intimate for me because these are my people.– Dr. Kenneth Montague, art collector
According to Montague, there are two different kinds of art collectors. The first is one he calls a “shopper.” This collector is driven by what is hot and trendy in the market. “[They often] have this very disparate collection that doesn’t really say anything other than ‘I’ve got money.’ It doesn’t tell any stories.” The second kind of collector, the kind Montague identifies himself as, is driven by a “burning” connection to the work that needs to be extended beyond a visit to a gallery. “You see work and you want to spend longer with it. You want to have a longer conversation with it.”
Works by Black American artists are being auctioned off for larger and larger numbers — numbers that sometimes don’t lead to any direct monetary gain for the artist themselves. In the absence of a royalties system, once an artist has sold their work, they are not directly entitled to any forthcoming value it may accrue. When we talked about the transactional nature of the art market, Crooks invoked the memory of the historic auction block where Black labour and creativity was bought and sold. This conversation is complicated by the fact that there is also an increasing number of Black art collectors who are paying the big bucks for works by Black artists.
In 2018, music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs made headlines when he paid over $21 million US for Kerry James Marshall’s monumental painting Past Times, the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living African American artist. The sale was reportedly orchestrated in part by music producer and art collector Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean, who convinced Diddy that the painting “has to stay in the culture.” However, I’m curious what that means. Is it still “in the culture” if it lives on the walls of Diddy’s mansion as opposed to being exhibited in a gallery available to the public? Is it still “in the culture” if the artist, Marshall, received none of the money from the historic sale?
We have yet to see these historic sales happen for Black Canadian artists and there is little infrastructure (and few Black millionaires) here to create the kind of Black art stars that we see south of the border. It’s partly why Montague pushed so hard to include Black Canadian artists, such as Michèle Pearson Clarke, Jalani Morgan and Anique Jordan, in his book alongside more internationally-recognized names, like Gordon Parks and Kehinde Wiley. His hope, he told me, was to introduce these Canadian image-makers to a wider art community. “This insertion is not to say we’re as good as, just to more sort of say we have our own thing going on here.”
Although Canada may lack the headline-grabbing auction sales happening in the U.S., there have been recent projects that inspire another way of considering Black art collecting. The Art Gallery of Ontario’s Montgomery Collection is a fascinating case study in Montague’s notion of “keeping something for ourselves.” It is an invitation to consider the possibilities of Black ownership and art collection in Canada in a way that is not limited to private acquisition, but rather a possibility for collective mobilization and public offering.
In 2018, Crooks and curator Sophie Hackett were invited to check out a private collection of Caribbean photography that had been assembled by filmmaker and photography collector Patrick Montgomery. The astonishing collection of more than 3,500 prints, postcards, daguerreotypes, lantern slides, albums and stereographs included works that were taken between 1848 and 1940 across 34 countries. “As he was pulling out these boxes, my heart started beating really wildly,” Crooks told me. “It blew our minds.” The images are an important documentation of the region, capturing faces and moments that we rarely get to see on gallery walls. But most of these images were not captured by the subjects themselves. They were frequently taken by outsiders to the region. It was clear to Crooks that this archive required critical and thoughtful interrogation as well as appreciation and care.
Over the next few months, Crooks, Montague (who serves as a trustee at the AGO) and others began working towards the purchase of the collection. They saw the moment as an opportunity to shake up the way things are typically done at the AGO and begin cultivating new relationships between the institution and Caribbean communities. “It had to have some kind of ownership by our community,” Crooks stated. “It had to be a kind of legacy building.” Sidestepping the usual processes for fundraising, they tapped into their networks, building relationships with individuals who had the interest and the capital. “I petitioned people of means in the Black and Caribbean community,” Montague told me. “Let’s do this one for us, by us. Let’s not wait for one of those big five names that you always see all over Toronto — these families that are very wealthy, that do great work. But what a difference it would be to have this work, featuring and reflecting people in our Caribbean community, bought and paid for by Caribbean and Black people of Toronto.” Crooks admits that once they showed sample photographs to potential donors, it took very little convincing to get people to come on board. “As soon as folks saw those images, the immediate response was, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s Jamaica! That’s my parish! Those are the hills that I played in as a child.” That recognition was all the spark that was needed.
In 2019, the AGO announced the acquisition of the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs thanks to a group of 27 donors, largely from Toronto’s Black and Caribbean communities, who quickly and collectively raised over $300,000.
In the fall of 2021, the groundbreaking exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory presented over 200 photographs from the collection. I went to see it with my family and was moved to tears, not only by individual pieces, but because I’d never seen such a monumental artistic exploration of the Caribbean in a Canadian institution. Curated by Crooks, the archive was crucially placed in dialogue with paintings, sculptures and video works by contemporary Caribbean artists. “I didn’t want to tell the story simply from the colonial archive, the colonial lens, the perspective of European photographers or American photographers who go to the region,” Crooks said. “I wanted to interrogate, problematize, contest, while also understanding the archive.”
The acquisition of the Montgomery Collection and its exhibition in Fragments of Epic Memory is a powerful example of Black investors choosing to work collectively to acquire important works in order to share them with the community. For many of these investors, this was their first time purchasing art and it has ignited a desire to become ongoing patrons and collectors, sparking a potentially long-lasting cultural shift in the Canadian art market. The experience has led Montague to reconsider his own direction. “As a collector, where I’m headed is more about institutional change. I’d like to sort of keep putting the foot on the gas for institutions to come over to broadening their collections and for the audiences to start experiencing the kind of joy I experience in my own personal life as a collector.”
There is a sour tendency in cultural politics today — a growing gap between speaking about the world and acting in it.
In the domain of rhetoric, everyone has grown gifted at pulling back the curtain. An elegant museum gallery is actually a record of imperial violence; a symphony orchestra is a site of elitism and exploitation: these critiques we can now deliver without trying. But when it comes to making anything new, we are gripped by near-total inertia. We are losing faith with so many institutions of culture and society — the museum, the market, and, especially this week, the university — but cannot imagine an exit from them. We throw bricks with abandon, we lay them with difficulty, if at all. We engage in perpetual protest, but seem unable to channel it into anything concrete.
So we spin around. We circle. And, maybe, we start going backward.
I’ve just spent a week tramping across Venice, a city of more than 250 churches, and where did I encounter the most doctrinaire catechism? It was in the galleries of the 2024 Venice Biennale, still the world’s principal appointment to discover new art, whose current edition is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst something like a tragedy.
It’s often preachy, but that’s not its biggest problem. The real problem is how it tokenizes, essentializes, minimizes and pigeonholes talented artists — and there are many here, among more than 300 participants — who have had their work sanded down to slogans and lessons so clear they could fit in a curator’s screenshot. This is a Biennale that speaks the language of assurance, but is actually soaked in anxiety, and too often resorts, as the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka deplored in a poem, to “cast the sanctimonious stone / And leave frail beauty shredded in the square / Of public shame.”
This year’s Biennale opened last week under an ominous star. The Venetian megashow consists of a central exhibition, spanning two locations, as well as around 90 independent pavilions organized by individual nations. One of these nations is Israel, and in the weeks before the vernissage an activist group calling itself the “Art Not Genocide Alliance” had petitioned the show’s organizers to exclude Israel from participating. The Biennale refused; a smaller appeal against the pavilion of Iran also went nowhere. (As for Russia, it remains nation non grata for the second Biennale in a row.) With disagreements over the war in Gaza spilling into cultural institutions across the continent — they’d already sunk Documenta, the German exhibition that is Venice’s only rival for attendance and prestige — the promise of a major controversy seemed to hang over the Giardini della Biennale.
As it happened, the artist and curator of Israel’s pavilion surprised the preview audience by closing their own show, and posted a sign at the entrance declaring it would stay shut until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.” A small protest took place anyway (“No Death in Venice” was one slogan), but the controversy had only a tiny impact on the Prosecco-soaked Venetian carnival that is opening week. Right next door, at the U.S. Pavilion, twice as many visitors were waiting to get inside as were protesting.
One could strain to read the Israeli withdrawal productively, as part of a century-long tradition of empty, vacated or closed exhibitions by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Graciela Carnevale, and all the way back to Marcel Duchamp. Probably it was the only possible response to an untenable situation. Either way, the Israel pavilion encapsulated in miniature a larger dilemma and deficiency, in Venice and in culture more broadly: a thoroughgoing inability — even Foucault did not go this far! — to think about art, or indeed life, as anything other than a reflection of political, social or economic power.
That is certainly the agenda of the central exhibition, organized by the Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa. I’d cheered when he was appointed curator of this year’s edition. At the São Paulo Museum of Art, one of Latin America’s boldest cultural institutions, Pedrosa had masterminded a cycle of centuries-spanning exhibitions that reframed Brazilian art as a crucible of African, Indigenous, European and pan-American history. His nomination came a few weeks after Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first far-right prime minister since World War II. And Pedrosa — who had successfully steered his museum through Brazil’s own far-right presidency of 2018-22 — promised a show of cosmopolitanism and variety, as expressed in a title, “Foreigners Everywhere,” that seemed like a moderate anti-Meloni dig.
But what Pedrosa has actually brought to Venice is a closed, controlled, and at times belittling showcase, which smooths out all the distinctions and contradictions of a global commons. The show is remarkably placid, especially in the Giardini. There are large doses of figurative painting and (as customary these days) weaving and tapestry arranged in polite, symmetrical arrays. There is art of great beauty and power, such as three cosmological panoramas by the self-taught Amazonian painter Santiago Yahuarcani, and also far less sophisticated work celebrated by the curator in the exact same way.
In the brutal rounding-down arithmetic of the 2024 Venice Biennale, to be a straniero — a “foreigner” or “stranger,” applied equally to graduates of the world’s most prestigious M.F.A. programs and the mentally ill — implies moral credibility, and moral credibility equals artistic importance. Hence Pedrosa’s inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. people as “foreigners,” as if gender or sexuality were proof of progressive bona fides. (Gay men have led far-right parties in the Netherlands and Austria; over at Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a wonderfully pervy show of the polymathic Frenchman Jean Cocteau, who praised Nazis while drawing sailors without their bell-bottoms.)
Even more bizarre is the designation of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil and Mexico, of Australia and New Zealand, as “foreigners”; surely they should be the one class of people exempt from such estrangement. In some galleries, categories and classifications take precedence over formal sophistication to a derogatory degree. The Pakistan-born artist Salman Toor, who paints ambiguous scenes of queer New York with real acuity and invention, is shown alongside simplistic queer-and-trans-friendly street art from an Indian NGO “spreading positivity and hope to their communities.”
Over and over, the human complexity of artists gets upstaged by their designation as group members, and art itself gets reduced to a symptom or a triviality. I felt that particularly in three large, shocking galleries in the central pavilion of the Giardini, packed tight with more than 100 paintings and sculptures made in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East between 1915 and 1990. These constitute the bulk of what Pedrosa calls the show’s nucleo storico, its historical core, and this was the part of the Biennale I’d looked forward to most. It had promised to demonstrate that the world outside the North Atlantic has a history of modern art far richer than our leading museums have shown us.
Indeed it does. But you won’t learn that here, where paintings of wildly different importance and quality have been shoved together with almost no historical documentation, cultural context, or even visual delight. It flushes away distinctions between free and unfree regimes or between capitalist and socialist societies, or between those who joined an international avant-garde and those who saw art as a nationalist calling. True pioneers, such as the immense Brazilian innovator Tarsila do Amaral, are equated with orthodox or traditionalist portraitists. More ambitious exhibitions — notably the giant “Postwar,” staged in Munich in 2016-17 — used critical juxtaposition and historical documentation to show how and why an Asian modernism, or an African modernism, looked the way it did. Here in Venice, Pedrosa treats paintings from all over as just so many postage stamps, pasted down with little visual acuity, celebrated merely for their rarity to an implied “Western” viewer.
You thought we were all equals? Here you have the logic of the old-style ethnological museum, transposed from the colonial exposition to the Google Images results page. S.H. Raza of India, Saloua Raouda Choucair of Lebanon, the Cuban American Carmen Herrera, and also painters who were new to me, got reduced to so much Global South wallpaper, and were photographed by visitors accordingly. All of which shows that it’s far too easy to speak art’s exculpatory language, to invoke “opacity” or “fugitivity” or whatever today’s decolonial shibboleth may be. But by othering some 95 percent of humanity — by designating just about everyone on earth as “foreigners,” and affixing categories onto them with sticky-backed labels — what you really do is exactly what those dreadful Europeans did before you: you exoticize.
And yet, for all that, there is so much I liked in this year’s Biennale! From the central exhibition I am still thinking about a monumental installation of unfired coils of clay by Anna Maria Maiolino, a winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, that recasts serial production as something intimate, irregular, even anatomical. Karimah Ashadu, who won the Silver Lion for her high-speed film of young men bombing across Lagos on banned motorbikes, gave the economic intensity of megacity life a vigorous visual language. There are the stark, speechless paintings from the 1970s of Romany Eveleigh, whose thousands of scratched little O’s turn writing into an unsemantic howl. There are Yuko Mohri’s mischievously articulated assemblages of found objects, plastic sheeting and fresh fruit, in the Japanese Pavilion, and Precious Okoyomon’s Gesamtkunstwerk of soil, speakers and motion sensors, in the Nigerian Pavilion.
Beyond the Biennale, Christoph Büchel’s frenzied exhibition at the Fondazione Prada assembles mountains of junk and jewels into an impertinent exposé of wealth and debt, colonialism and collecting. In the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, a hazily elegant video by the Odesa-born artist Nikolay Karabinovych reinscribes the Ukrainian landscape as a crossroads of languages, religions and histories. Above all there is Pierre Huyghe, at the Punta della Dogana, who fuses human intelligence and artificial intelligence into the rarest thing of all: an image we have never seen before.
What all these artists have in common is some creative surplus that cannot be exploited — not for a nation’s image, not for a curator’s thesis, not for a collector’s vanity. Rather than the sudsy “politics” of advocacy, they profess that art’s true political value lies in how it exceeds rhetorical function or financial value, and thereby points to human freedom. They are the ones who offered me at least a glimpse of what an equitable global cultural assembly could be: an “anti-museum,” in the phrase of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, where “the exhibiting of subjugated or humiliated humanities” at last becomes a venue where everyone gets to be more than a representative.
I still, unfashionably, keep faith with Mbembe’s dream institution, and the artists here who would have their place in it. But we won’t build it with buzzwords alone, and if anyone had actually been paying attention to the political discourse in this part of the world in a time of war, they would have realized that two can play this game. “An essentially emancipatory, anticolonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies” — did someone in the 2024 Venice Biennale say that? No, it was Vladimir Putin.
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A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Turner Prize shortlist includes art showcasing Scottish Sikh community
A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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