Black American Portraits

This publication is inspired by the exhibition Black American Portraits, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2021, and by the museum's explosive effort to collect works of art representing Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Neither a museum collection handbook nor an exhibition catalogue, the book borrows aspects of each to explore the role of exhibitions in collection building and to look at what it means to see oneself — as a subject, as an artist, as a community, as a people — on the walls and in the collection of a museum.
Focused on the theme of portraiture, Black American Portraits presents a selection of work from LACMA's collection to underscore the ways in which African Americans have envisioned themselves through art. This mission-driven publication features portraits and portrayals presenting Blackness as powerful, beautiful, joyful, abundant, complex, and nuanced. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and mixed media and augmented reality works are illustrated alongside essays by curators and cultural historians that meditate on the meanings of works of art, the past omissions of Black figures in art history, and the power of collecting art that centers Black histories.