Every picture tells a story

An exhibition at the DuSable Museum —“In the Hands of African American Collectors: The Personal Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey” — shares approximately 90 objects from the Kinseys’ trove of fine art, historical documents and artifacts spanning centuries of African-American history.

“Many of these stories have not been told,” Bernard Kinsey says in a video showing at the museum, explaining why the Los Angeles–based couple has spent more than 35 years building their collection. Their exhibition, which originated at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, presents fascinating examples of African-American cultural achievements, such as a 1773 collection of Phillis Wheatley’s poems and an extract from Benjamin Banneker’s 1795 Almanack. But even as the show fills crucial gaps in American history, it leaves visitors with more questions.

The Kinseys’ oldest work of fine art is Grafton Tyler Brown’s grisaille Mount Tacoma from Lake Washington (c. 1885), which isn’t too different from other 19th-century landscapes. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance created more distinctive paintings, drawings and sculpture in celebrating their own community: James Porter’s elegant Self-Portrait (1931); Allan Crite’s graphite drawing Ping Pong (1934), which depicts a match between a well-dressed woman and an unseen opponent; and Hale Woodruff’s linocut Georgia Youth (1934), which makes the boy resemble an African mask, reveal a new prosperity and awareness of African-American culture.

The pieces from the 1940s and 1950s are also engaging, particularly Lois Mailou Jones’s Fishermen, Fishing Boats and Women Sketching (1947), a cheerful watercolor of friends relaxing beneath a shady tree.

Since the Kinseys were directly involved in the civil-rights movement—Bernard, a former vice president of Xerox, met his wife in college after she was jailed for demonstrating—one wonders why there is no art from the late 1960s on display. But later decades yielded Romare Bearden’s lithograph Falling Star (1979), a colorful and exquisitely detailed image of a woman standing in her living room as a star falls past the window behind her; and Elizabeth Catlett’s linocut Survivor (1983), a powerful depiction of an older woman whose apron, kerchief and lined face testify to a lifetime of hard work.

Some of the “postmodern” pieces in the couple’s collection are a little heavy-handed, like a painting of three people sowing books. But this period also yielded gems like John Biggers’s bizarre Nairobi-Kenyatta Center (Hoarrambe Street) from 1987–91, a drawing juxtaposing schoolchildren, Kenyan architecture and stylized animals with intricate patterns and ornament.

Some of the Kinseys’ fine art could be interpreted as political, but nothing is as provocative as their letters, proclamations, records and objects recalling the horrors of slavery and the second-class status of blacks who fought in the Civil War. A handsome recruitment poster from 1863, for example, portrays a proud regiment of black Union troops at Camp William Penn—led, as all black soldiers were, by a white officer. A pair of shackles needs no caption.

The Kinseys also emphasize positive aspects of African-American history, presenting, for example, several early photographs of prosperous black families and politicians, Zora Neale Hurston’s hilarious letters and a memo from Malcolm X to Alex Haley. Yet these artifacts trail off in the mid-20th century, making the exhibition feel incomplete. The Kinseys offer us a rare opportunity to rediscover Americans who are too often overlooked, but this story is missing some chapters.

“In the Hands of African American Collectors” is at the DuSable Museum through March 2, 2008.