Curator’s Talk on “African American Art in the 20th Century” (Virtual)

Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, explores the work of Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Lois Mailou Jones, Melvin Edwards, and other artists featured in African American Art in the 20th Century, which she curated. These artists participated in ongoing dialogues about art, Black identity, and individual rights that engaged American society in the twentieth century. Using documentary realism, painterly expressionism, and the postmodern assemblage of found objects, they rewrote American history and its art.