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The Atlanta-based group boasts work by roughly 160 artists of colour and a string of deals with major US museums hints at a vital shift in the art world.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Purvis Young, a self-taught artist from Miami, roamed the inner city streets of Overtown, scouring for cardboard, wooden crates and secondhand doors to use as canvas for his expressive paintings. He learned the chops of art history—from Rembrandt to Van Gogh—through library books. He was often called an outsider artist and would paint trains, trucks and railroads to suggest an escape from inner city life, while his pieces told visual tales of racism, poverty and hypocrisy.

In the 1920s, the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, made quilts from spare scraps of cloth to keep their families warm. In the 1960s, Civil Rights leaders declared the quilts to be unlike any they’d ever seen, and helped locals sell them by mail order for $25 each. Now, the quilts of Gee’s Bend live in the permanent collections of major museums from coast to coast, valued at tens of thousands of dollars each. They are widely acknowledged as masterpieces of American art.

NPQ has for some time been following trends that reflect a lack of diversity in US art museums, as well as the many initiatives being developed by individual institutions and funders to reconfigure the museum landscape. These efforts include diversifying the artists represented, diversifying the executives and curators who oversee collections and exhibitions, and even diversifying the trustees who serve on the boards of nonprofits arts groups.

The Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Morgan Library & Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art have acquired a total of 51 works by 30 African American artists of the South from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF). The acquisitions include a large number of quilts by the revered quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which are heading to the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the MFA Boston, and Spelman College. The Brooklyn Museum will also acquire works by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and James “Son Ford” Thomas; the Dallas Museum of Art is acquiring works by Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Nellie Mae Rowe; and the Morgan is acquiring drawings by Dial, Rowe, Henry Speller, Luster Willis, and Purvis Young.

In a strategic effort to reshape the narrative of American art, the Souls Grown Deep Foundation will help five museums acquire paintings, sculptures and works on paper by self-taught African-American artists of the South. These acquisitions bring to 12 the number of museums that have received more than 300 works from the Atlanta-based nonprofit, through gifts and purchase.

In 1998, an art collector named William Arnett arrived in Wilcox County, Alabama. Over the next two years, he went door to door in the African-American hamlet of Gee’s Bend, asking women if he could see their quilts: vivid, off-kilter assemblages of worn denim, outgrown school dresses and other salvaged bits of cloth, particular to Gee’s Bend and nowhere else.

“History Refused to Die” proved to be a striking title for a memorable exhibition. On view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through late September, it marked a gift to the museum of 57 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, an organization whose name derives from a poem by Langston Hughes. The foundation was started by William S. Arnett, a collector of African art who became fascinated in the 1980s by the work of self-taught black artists in the American South. Convinced that their art was part of a coherent tradition reflecting “the rich, symbolic world of the black rural South through highly charged works that address a wide range of revelatory social and political subjects,” Arnett has sponsored research, publications, and exhibitions on the subject. He has found himself dogged by controversy at times: In 1993, the arch-philistine Morley Safer aired a segment on 60 Minutes suggesting that Arnett was exploiting the artists whose work he promoted. (A full quarter-century later, Safer’s charges remain unsubstantiated.) And the gift to the Met testifies not only to the generosity of Arnett’s intentions but also to the abundant riches of the world he dedicated so much of his life to helping preserve.

Traded for a bottle of whiskey as a child, he grew up with burlesque dancers and liquor store owners, and was nearly killed in a horrific car accident. Yet through his sculpture and music, he has become a true American visionary.

National Public Radio’s Michel Martin will moderate the second Alabama Colloquium, set for Oct. 1 at the Birmingham Museum of Art, building on the strong foundation laid in the inaugural event in 2017. Alabama Humanities Foundation will honor eight fellows, who will be featured in a lively discussion of their roots in Alabama and the impact humanities has played in their lives.