{"id":604041,"date":"2025-11-30T21:08:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T21:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/604041\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T21:08:20","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T21:08:20","slug":"as-the-us-slides-into-tyranny-europe-champions-black-american-artists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/604041\/","title":{"rendered":"As the US Slides Into Tyranny, Europe Champions Black American Artists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something shifted the moment I stood inside the Elbow Church art space in Amersfoort in the Netherlands this past September. As journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones delivered a\u00a0sharp lecture<\/a>\u00a0beneath Nina Chanel Abney’s monumental installations, it became clear that this Medieval city was presenting narratives of Black American life that the United States is increasingly unwilling to hold.\u00a0Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Nina Chanel Abney: Heaven’s Hotline<\/a>\u00a0opened in Amersfoort on the same evening. Together, Lawrence’s historical narratives and Abney’s bold indictments mapped the breadth of Black American artistic vision in a way that felt both clarifying and impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n

In fact, this year, four major European museums simultaneously staged ambitious exhibitions of Black American artists:\u00a0Kerry James Marshall<\/a>\u00a0at London’s Royal Academy, Lawrence at Kunsthal KAd\u00e9 in Amersfoort, Abney in Paris and Amersfoort, and\u00a0Mickalene Thomas<\/a>\u00a0at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse and forthcoming at the Grand Palais in Paris, all shows I visited with the exception of the first. This moment feels less like a coincidence and more like a long-overdue reckoning.<\/p>\n

\"\"Visitor looking at Augusta Savage’s bronze cast of “Gwendolyn Knight” (1935) in\u00a0Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist\u00a0at Kunsthal KAd\u00e9 (photo \u00a9 Mike Bink; image courtesy Kunsthal KAd\u00e9)<\/p>\n

These are not demure gallery shows. They are massive institutional commitments \u2014 entire floors and, in some cases, entire museums devoted to a single artist with hundreds of works spanning decades. These shows refuse simplification as they document Black American life, histories, love, resistance, queerness, labor, death, and joy without apology or translation.<\/p>\n

At Kunsthal KAd\u00e9, Dutch audiences are encountering Jacob Lawrence in his first European overview. The museum also commissioned four new portraits of Lawrence by contemporary artist Barbara Earl Thomas, his friend and former student at the University of Washington in Seattle.<\/p>\n

It’s a striking contradiction: These groundbreaking shows and unprecedented opportunities for iconic Black American artists in Europe come at the exact moment that American institutional capacity, social infrastructure, and constitutional protections are collapsing in tandem.<\/p>\n

\"\"Jacob Lawrence,\u00a0Genesis\u00a0series (1989), silkscreen prints, at the Kunsthal KAd\u00e9 in Amersfoort, Netherlands (photo \u00a9 Mike Bink; image courtesy Kunsthal KAd\u00e9)<\/p>\n

In July, Amy Sherald\u00a0withdrew<\/a>\u00a0her exhibition\u00a0American Sublime\u00a0from the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Portrait Gallery after it reportedly deemed her painting of a Black transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty too controversial. And according to the\u00a0American Alliance of Museums<\/a>, one-third of museums in the United States have lost federal funding since Trump took office, with around one in four slashing programs for underserved communities.<\/p>\n

It’s within this climate of censorship, disinvestment, and erasure at home that Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in London takes on even sharper resonance. Here, Marshall mounted the largest survey of his work ever presented in Europe, filling over a thousand square meters with more than 70 artworks and insisting that Black presence belongs at the center of Western art history. His monumental paintings, such as \u201cSchool of Beauty, School of Culture\u201d (2012), assert visibility and permanence even as people vanish from American communities, some violently removed by ICE raids, others quietly deported without notice or warning, all without constitutional protection.<\/p>\n

\"\"Kerry James Marshall, “School of Beauty, School of Culture” (2012), acrylic on canvas (image courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)<\/p>\n

Mickalene Thomas’s exhibitions in Europe are equally canon-shifting.\u00a0All About Love\u00a0at Les Abbatoirs in Toulouse was her first major show in France, and she will break yet another barrier in December by opening the first-ever major exhibition by an African-American artist at the Grand Palais in Paris. Her striking rhinestone portraits of Black women \u2014 like \u201cLe Dejeuner sur l\u2019herbe: Les trois femmes noires\u201d (2010) and \u201cAfro Goddess Looking Forward\u201d (2015) \u2014 radiate glamor, intellect, and authority on a scale historically rare in major French institutions. European audiences embraced Thomas’s\u00a0All About Love, while over\u00a0300,000<\/a>\u00a0Black women in the United States were pushed out of the workforce this year and their unemployment rate climbed to 6.7% in\u00a0August<\/a>\u00a0as federal and corporate layoffs systematically targeted positions many had long held, including in\u00a0dismantled<\/a>\u00a0Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.<\/p>\n

Abney’s\u00a0Heaven’s Hotline\u00a0in the Elbow Church confronts religious capitalism and American Christian ideals with her monumental sculptures, even as White Christian nationalism in the United States becomes more extreme and entrenched.<\/p>\n

Across Europe, these exhibitions offer Black American stories that subvert reductive narratives. These artists speak for themselves, asserting specificity, imagination, and a refusal to be flattened or erased. Yet, these contradictions expose something larger than a funding crisis or political cycle. They reveal a nation fractured into competing narratives and a fight over whose stories prevail.<\/p>\n

\"\"Barbara Earl Thomas with her linocut “Jacob as a Young Artist” (2025) in\u00a0Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernistat London’s Royal Academy (photo \u00a9 Mike Bink; image courtesy Kunsthal KAd\u00e9)<\/p>\n

Black Americans seeking and receiving better recognition in Europe is not new.\u00a0James Baldwin<\/a>,\u00a0Barbara Chase-Riboud<\/a>,\u00a0Richard Wright<\/a>, and many others sought reprieve there while white supremacy raged on at home. But this moment transcends individual refuge. Major European institutions are making visible, well-funded commitments to Black American narratives as the United States is seeking to neutralize, and tame what is evidenced in their power and skill.<\/p>\n

Walking through the exhibitions this fall, I felt the rupture between the full, complex realities of Black American experiences that these artists confront \u2014 erasure, exclusion, brutality, but also joy, resistance, and refusal \u2014 and the containment efforts happening at home. And I found myself wondering what European audiences make of seeing both sides of this growing chasm at once.<\/p>\n

A precedent is being set right now about which American stories are carried forward. Who steps up to witness matters. Who remembers matters. And who looks away will be remembered, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Something shifted the moment I stood inside the Elbow Church art space in Amersfoort in the Netherlands this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-604041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115640697726526104","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}