Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art

Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art was an exhibition held at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 25 April, 2002 until 23 June, 2002. The show was curated by Thelma Golden, the museum's Chief Curator. Black Romantic was a survey of Contemporary African-American genre painting whose stated purpose, as described by the Director of The Studio Museum, Lowery Stokes Sims was to show "elements of desire, dreams, determination, and romance particular to the black experience present a viewpoint that is oppositional to modernist conceptualization of blackness flavoured by exogenous exoticism, stereotype, caricature, and even abstractionist manipulation".

Curation and artists

Black Romantic was immediately seen as a risky exhibition because it did not cater to the predominant and powerful desires of the art world to see postmodernism and irony in the work of Black American artists. Rather, it was curated from submissions to an open call. Many of the selected artists were lesser known at the time, and existed "almost exclusively outside the mainstream, within a parallel art world with distinct circuits of distribution, value, and reception supported by an enthusiastic black middle class". Many of these artists were quite commercially successful, though rarely, if at all, exhibited in well known galleries. The show's proclaimed purpose was to show a revisionist trend in Black American genre painting that was undoing the stereotypes of black suffering. The show featured what some might, and did, consider the conservative art of figurative painting. It was through these various representations of the figure that the works themselves, and the show as a whole endeavored to work against racist and modernist stereotypes, caricatures, and characterizations of the black experience.