Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art
Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art was a landmark exhibition held at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art from November 10, 1994 until March 5, 1995. Organized by curator Thelma Golden, Black Male was a survey of the changing representations of black masculinity in contemporary art from the 1970s to the 1990s. The show included almost seventy works by twenty-nine artists of varying race, gender, and ethnicity. It also featured an extensive film and video program that explored representations of blackness in Hollywood, the independent cinema, video, and television. Black Male was widely labelled controversial and heavily criticized for its political subject matter, to which Golden responded, "There was no way to speak about the image of the black male in an art exhibition without speaking about what was going on politically and culturally. Many people saw this as either a beginning, in a hopeful way, or an end ... To embrace change and to embrace the new, for some, means giving something up, something being taken."