NEW YORK, NY.- The Hunter College Art Galleries are presenting Acts of Art in Greenwich Village, the first comprehensive account of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery dedicated to showcasing the work of Black artists in downtown Manhattan.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalog co-published with Hirmer Publishers and distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press. In addition to an introductory essay and complete exhibition history, the volume will include biographies of the gallery’s key artists and entries on important group exhibitions, events, and affiliated organizations. The publication is designed by Natalie Wedeking and edited by Howard Singerman with Re’al Christian and Katie Hood Morgan. Pre-order is available here.

Founded by artists Nigel Jackson and Patricia Grey in 1969, Acts of Art was first located at 31 Bedford Street and later moved to 15 Charles Street in the West Village. In 1971, the gallery mounted Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s strategic response to the Whitney’s concurrent Contemporary Black Artists in America. That same year, the gallery hosted the inaugural exhibition of the Black women artists collective Where We At. Before Acts of Art closed in 1975, it presented one- and two-person exhibitions by twenty-six different artists, and numerous group exhibitions. Acts of Art in Greenwich Village centers Acts of Art and its director’s curatorial vision, tracing the gallery’s exhibition history as it intersects with other histories of Black art and artists in New York—and with formations like the BECC, Where We At, and the Weusi Artists. Installed in Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery, the exhibition features artworks from the late 1960s and 1970s by fourteen artists with close ties to the gallery, a number of which were first shown at Acts of Art.

Curated by Howard Singerman, Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Professor of Art History, with Katie Hood Morgan, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, and with MA and MFA students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate Seminar.

Curatorial fellows: Eve Arballo, Kelis George, and Nicolas Poblete. MA and MFA Students: Ansley Browning, Karewith Casas, Erin Chase, Brianna Golub, Yayun Deng, June Kitahara, Laura Luo, Sondra McGill, Chloe Ming, Mary Lisette Morris, Grace Sanabria.

Artists: Benny Andrews, James Denmark, Reginald Gammon, Harlan Jackson, Nigel Jackson, Ben Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Dindga McCannon, Enid Richardson Moore, Ademola Olugebefola, Ann Tanksley, Lloyd Toone, Frank Wimberley, Hale Woodruff