New Arthur Ross Gallery show explores the legacy of artist, scholar, and curator David Driskell

A new exhibition at the Arthur Ross Galleryexplores the work and legacy of David Driskell, a leading American artist, scholar, and curator who was central to establishing African American art as a field of study.

The exhibition, "David C. Driskell and Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship," explores his friendships with other artists, drawing on his personal collection, with works by Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Keith Morrison, James Porter, Hale Woodruff, and others, signifying the scope of his relationships across generations.

The traveling exhibition is by the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and the Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora; all 35 artworks on view are from there, about a quarter of them by Driskell himself. The Arthur Ross Gallery is the last stop of the tour.

"This is a survey of African American art," says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the inaugural faculty director of the Gallery. "What ties it together is that all of these artists have a relationship to David Driskell, but the themes, the subjects, and the styles represent what so many artists had been doing."

Shaw, the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the Department of History of Artin the School of Arts & Sciences, curated the exhibition for the Arthur Ross Gallery space, editing it down by about a third. "I chose to emphasize visual relationship: color, form, abstraction. I wanted to tell a story as you go around the room, pulling together themes of family, of place, of history," she says.

Former Arthur Ross Gallery director Lynn Marsden-Atlass, who retired last year, arranged for the exhibition to come to Penn. She and Driskell were "great friends," Shaw says, and he visited the Gallery during her tenure. Marsden-Atlass purchased and donated a woodcut print, "Mask Series II 31/50," a 2019 work by Driskell, to the Penn Art Collection, says Lynn Smith Dolby, director. The work on paper usually hangs in the provost's office, Dolby says, but is in storage during current College Hall renovations. Another print from the same series is in the current exhibition.

Driskell, who died in 2020, worked primarily in collage, mixed media, and printmaking. He retired from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1998 as a Distinguished University Professor of Art. In 2001, the university established the Driskell Center, which now holds a majority of Driskell's original artworks and papers.

Curlee Holton, former director of the Driskell Center and for years Driskell's printer, organized the traveling exhibition aiming to emphasize Driskell's relationships with artists, Shaw says, those who impacted his life and whose careers he helped to support. Letters at the Driskell Center demonstrate how many in Driskell's circle were constantly in touch with one another and with him over the decades, sending each other Kodachrome slides of their artworks.

"They express their mutual support and collective appreciation for one another," Shaw says, "and the sense that together we rise, that we all have to be a part of the project for it to happen in a way that benefits everyone."

And they shared similar motifs in their works, Shaw says. "That's one of the things that I really tried to lean into with this installation, telling the story visually through color, through pattern, through form, through abstraction, to emphasize those relationships."

Driskell organized more than 35 exhibitions of work by fellow Black artists during his career, including the groundbreaking 1976 traveling exhibition for the U.S. Bicentennial,"Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950," considered a foundation for the field of African American art history. The exhibition "inserted African American creativity and cultural production, art making, material culture, visual culture into the narrative of the nation's history," Shaw says.

The catalog for that exhibition became a part of arts education. "I grew up with that catalog on my parents' coffee table; it was really the first book that helped me to understand the Black presence in art history and in art making in the United States but also in the world," Shaw says. "David Driskell's legacy is hugely important to me and I think to my generation."

Driskell also was an art consultant and helped to build several important collections of American art and African American art, Shaw says, including the purchase of the acrylic-and-graphite painting "Resurrection" by Alma Thomasfor the White House during the Obama administration, the first work of art for the permanent collection by a Black female artist.

"One of the things that really characterized Driskell as an artist was an appreciation for what other artists were doing but also an interest in supporting them, many of them women artists," Shaw says. "It was important to Driskell that these women's careers were considered critically and that their life stories were recorded and that their work was reproduced."

The Gallery has planned several exhibition events, including a panel discussion on Sept. 13, featuring former students and fellow art historians of Driskell's to discuss the way he supported women artists. Students, faculty, and staff in the Africana Summer Institute are invited for a tour and reception in July. In August, first-year students and their families are invited as part of Move-In and New Student Orientation, in collaboration with the Penn Libraries. And a new event is in the works for Second-Year Orientation, "a dress-up art party with mocktails," she says.

"David C. Driskell and Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship" at the Arthur Ross Gallery runs through Sept. 15. "It's a beautiful exhibition and covers so much ground," Shaw says. "There really is something for everyone."