How Top U.S. Art Museums Excluded Black Artists During the 1980s: From the Archives

The following article first appeared in the March 1989 issue of ARTnews under the headline “Black Artists Today: A Case of Exclusion.” It is reprinted below in full with the author’s permission.
Addressing a 1985 symposium, black artist Beverly Buchanan, a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships winner, recalled an encounter with a New York gallery in the early ’70s. “I walked into one gallery in SoHo and asked, ‘Are you looking at work?&rsq