Fifty years ago, Nina Simone released “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a song written in memory of her dear friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry who died in 1965 at the tender age of 34. It became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement that soon found its way into a 1972 episode of Sesame Street. Simone sang, “We must begin to tell our young / There’s a world waiting for you / This is a quest that’s just begun” to Gen X babies, who took the message to heart and paid it forward to the children of Generation Z, who fearlessly stand at the forefront of a brave new world.
With the Black Lives Matter movement centering issues of race in the discourse, the historically exclusionary art world has finally made space for Black Art. A wealth of established, mid-career, and emerging artists are breaking new ground, be it at auction houses, major museum exhibitions, on magazine covers, or with new books. Yet Black Art is far from a trend; it has informed the world for thousands of years in various incarnations in Africa and across the diaspora...