Welcome back to “A Long Look!” For the rest of the season, I’ll be presenting paintings from the Evans-Tibbs Collection, one of the most important collections of works by Black artists in America.

It was the mission of Thurlow Evans Tibbs Jr. to raise the profile of Black artists by collecting and exhibiting their work in his Washington DC gallery from the 1970s through the early ’90s and by documenting their careers in an enormous archive. He inherited his love of art from his grandmother, known as Madam Evanti, the first professional African American opera singer to perform internationally.

Joining me in this introductory episode is Tibbs scholar Sandy Bellamy, an adjunct art history professor at Howard University and manager of the Percent for Art Commissions program run by the Washington DC Department of General Services. Sandy takes us through the fascinating history of the collection, and the rich legacy of Black art scholarship born at Howard University decades earlier.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT)

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo

Episode theme is “Opportunity Walks” by Kevin MacLeod. https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4173-opportunity-walks http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artwork information https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/special/american-art-evans-tibbs.html

https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/exhibitions/pdfs/2019/the-evans-tibbs-archive-of-african-american-art.pdf (PDF)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1997/01/17/art-dealer-thurlow-evans-tibbs-jr-dies/fb689a7d-8032-4c9f-a325-b66dce0490fa/

Digitized Evans-Tibbs archive items https://library.nga.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01NGA_INST:NGA&collectionId=8153325980004896

Slow Art Day http://www.slowartday.com

BOOKS MENTIONED The New Negro, Alain Locke

Modern Negro Art, James Porter

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