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“Do you consider yourself a Black visual artist, an American visual artist, or an artist, period?” —Jeff Donaldson

Continuing our exploration of the incredible resources of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, we wanted to share another video from their Short Film Series, exploring the contemporary relevance of their archival materials. In this video, contemporary Black artists reflect on and answer eight questions posed by artist, art historian, activist, curator, and educator Jeff Donaldson in an open letter to his peers in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Featured artists include Maren Hassinger, Shaun Leonardo, Mickalene Thomas, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Elia Alba.

From Archives of American Art:

“Do you consider yourself a Black visual artist, an American visual artist, or an artist, period?” This question, posed by Jeff Donaldson (1932–2004) in an open letter to his peers in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago in 1967, motivated his work as an artist, art historian, activist, curator, and educator. In the late 1960s, Donaldson was a doctoral student in art history at Northwestern University who positioned himself at the forefront of creative activism on the South Side of Chicago. Drawing on the tenets of Black Power, he shaped the missions of OBAC and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), an artist collective of which he became a lifelong member. At the Archives of American Art, Donaldson’s papers live in conversation with many other important collections, including those of African American activist-artists Charles Henry Alston, Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, Maren Hassinger, Jacob Lawrence, Senga Nengudi, Hale Woodruff, and others. True to Donaldson’s global outlook and his desire to transform Black art, his papers reach far beyond the scope of American art as they attend to the influence of contemporaneous African and Caribbean artists and collectives. In this film, Donaldson’s questions are revisited by leading contemporary African American artists, who consider what it means to be a Black visual artist some 50 years after the question was first posed.