Painting a Legacy
About
In 2022, Sarah Battle from the National Gallery of Art, the art museum in Washington, D.C, partnered with the art show through a series of lectures about the influence of local African American artists on the arts in Louisville in the 50s and 60s.
Sarah worked with Fari Nzinga and Toya Northington of the Speed Museum to create programming recentering the legacy of the Gallery Enterprises to ground the history of the Louisville art scene during the years bookending the very first several St. James Court Art Shows.
The programming offered a unique chance to relearn this context of Louisville modern art by hearing from artists who shaped, or were directly shaped by, the Gallery Enterprises & the midcentury Black art scene in Louisville, Kentucky.
According to Sarah Battle, “The same year Malcolm Bird and the St. James Court Association debuted the first St James. Court Art Show, the art collective, Gallery Enterprises, formed across town. The Gallery Enterprises included emerging luminaries Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson, Robert Douglas, G. Caliman Coxe, and Kenneth Victor Young. Between 1957 and 1961, the collective offered artists of color the opportunity to exhibit their art in Louisville. The collective’s influence has not been properly acknowledged, and consequently, over time, the narrative on this period in American art has overlooked their contributions.”
This programming was made possible thanks to the St. James Court Art Show as well as the oral history project, ‘Painting a Legacy’, supported by the Kentucky Oral History Commission, Oral History Center at the University of Louisville, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.
Photos above:
Robert Douglas, Untitled, late 1950s, image courtesy of the artist
William M Duffy and Ed Hamilton, courtesy of Sherri Duffy. Photograph by Eddie Davis