Off the Wall, into the Archive: Black Feminist Curatorial Practices of the 1970s

In the fall of 1978, Corcoran Gallery of Art registrar Theresa Simmons, Renwick Gallery museum technician Edith T. Martin, and others organized a national show of black women artists to coincide with the 1979 annual meeting of the College Art Association. The show never secured adequate funding, and was canceled. This essay explores Contemporary Afro-American Women Artists through its documentation in the Archives of American Art. It considers the historiographical ramifications of Martin’s decision to lend her research files for the exhibition to the Archives for microfilming in relation to feminist and black revisionist curatorial practices of the 1970s. This analysis of the failed exhibition and its paper trail offers a critique of the power and the limitations of the archive for the study of African American art.