Howard Singerman

This project explores two gallery spaces established for African American artists in Greenwich Village in 1969: Cinque Gallery, founded by Spiral members Romare Bearden, Ernest Critchlow, and Norman Lewis, and housed in the Public Theater’s building on Lafayette Street; and Acts of Art, first on Bedford Street and then on Charles Street in the West Village. In 1971, Acts of Art was the site of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s response to the Whitney Museum’s Contemporary Black Artists in America, an exhibition entitled Black Artists in Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum, and mounted the first exhibition of “Where We At,” a collective of Black women artists. In various published documents, the founders of both galleries make clear that the decision to open downtown was an intentional and pragmatic response to the geography of a still segregated mainstream art world. Through exhibition records and membership lists, interviews with surviving artists and community members, and the materials held in a number of collections both public and private, this project will map the networks of Black artists showing at Cinque and Acts of Art and working in the Village and the Lower East Side in the 1960s and 1970s. Further, it will situate those networks and institutions not only in relation to the white art world, but also to communities of artists in Harlem that consciously rejected that art world and its audiences.