“The art world was angry — they were angry that I was there, and that the realtor had leased me the space,” says Bryant. “Dealers would say nasty things to me in the elevator. But, hell yeah, we succeeded on a lot of levels.” JAM became an interdisciplinary community of artists and curators, including Lowery Stokes Sims, the first black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and multimedia artists Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O’Grady, fostering, Bryant says, “an appreciation for what was possible, not those little boxes we had contained ourselves in.” What these art dealers understood is that the gallery, as an entrée into the art market, is the sole platform for an artist to make a living. And in many ways, galleries are where the hierarchy of power in the art world begins and ends. They discover an artist’s work and promote it to both collectors and institutions; the work rises in value once it enters a museum, and this ultimately leads to more gallery shows. It is an unchanging cycle that for decades artists of color, lacking a commercial outlet, “couldn’t even attempt to break into,” according to Bryant. CONTRARY TO THE assumption that society moves toward equality on its own, the ascent of black artists into the status quo has been a result of diligent actors. It has been helped enormously through a dedicated group that includes Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, a director at Jack Shainman, New York gallery with a roster of largely black artists including Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems and the estate of Gordon Parks; Mariane Ibrahim, who founded her Seattle gallery in 2012; the San Francisco-based Karen Jenkins-Johnson, who recently expanded to Brooklyn; and a rising population of black staffers, who for so long were not present in most galleries at all.
‘Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers?’ by Janelle Zara for The New York Times Magazine (June 2018)