Two Centuries of Black American Art at Birmingham Museum of Art

Roll Call Got Something for Everybody at the Birmingham Museum of Art

by Trelani Michelle

Shabooya, Sha-Sha-Shabooya Roll Call!

It’s a call-and-response game many of us grew up playing. Everyone sings those lyrics while stomping and clapping the beat. Then someone takes the stage, if you will, shares their name, then gives us a lil something about themselves. The lil something shared is different for everyone in the circle. 

Roll Call: Two Hundred Years of Black American Art, the latest exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art is just that. It’s a gathering of intergenerational Black brilliance where each artist present takes a turn being centered, named, and celebrated. 

But Roll Call isn’t only taking attendance of the artists. It’s also taking stock of the museum itself, which opened in 1951, and how its collection of Black American art grew from a single African-American acquisition in 1971 to more than 1,000 works by over 250 Black artists, and everyone who helped shape it along the way. So the exhibition is both a celebration and a reckoning with what it means for a museum to build and steward a collection like this. Across its 99 works, Roll Call spans two centuries of Black American art from across the country, including artists representing every Southern state. 

It’s a stunning display of Black Art in America.

There are the late greats like Henry Ossawa Tanner, who gained an international reputation in the 1890s for his biblical paintings and is the BMA’s first Black acquisition; and Edmonia Lewis, a baddie of mixed Ojibwa and Afro-Haitian descent whose 1868 Hiawatha and Minnehaha busts carry both mastery and militance. Edmonia altered Minnehaha’s nose in an attempt, according to the exhibition catalog, to create the first “ethnographically correct Native American woman.” 

Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), Minnehaha and Hiawatha, 1868, marble, 11 5/8 × 7 1/4 × 5 in. (29.5 × 18.4 × 12.7 cm) and 13 3/4 × 7 3/4 × 5 1/2 in. (34.9 × 19.7 × 14 cm); Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art

More recent late greats adorn the space as well: Elizabeth Catlett’s Mimi linocut, created at 92 years old and yet another expression of her lifelong commitment to big upping the Black woman; and Sam Gilliam’s perfectly titled, bold, blue-black, geometrically shaped Black painting. 

Living artists abound in the show too, including three of my favorites, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Chakaia Booker, alongside Nick Cave’s iconic Soundsuit and Vaughn Spann’s rendition of the American flag.

Nick Cave, Knitted Yarn, And Mannequin, 96 × 27 x 14 in. (243.8 × 68.6 × 35.6 cm); Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art

According to Roll Call’s lead curator, Jade Powers, the show takes up over 6,000 square feet. So though full, it ain’t overwhelming. And it’s neatly organized into four thematic sections, which I told Jade reminded me of the four chambers of the heart. “The Ground We Stand On” centers the museum’s early acquisitions and is the first space visitors encounter. “Ujima: Collective Work and Responsibility” shares works that require more community effort to acquire. “What Freedom Feels Like” embodies our resistance and everyday selves (and really could’ve been its own exhibition). And “In the Heart of It All” ain’t limited to, but highlights, the Alabama artists.

The space-making for those local artists, Alabama and especially Birmingham—and that inclusion being an emphasis, not an afterthought—really struck me. Learning about Roscoe Hall had me like “How I ain’t been know about you?” In the lineage of George Washington Carver, Roscoe also uses food pigments like peanut, sweet potato, and collard greens in his paintings. And if that ain’t enough personality, his Four of the Alabama 9/ Scottsboro Boys painting in the show, is written to be made with “acrylic, pastel, ink, Sade, Negronis x 2, an amazing spliff, salt & pepper shrimp, and love on canvas.” Come on now… You also have Celestia Morgan, Richard Dial, Tameca Cole, Chris Clark, and so, so many others. 

Joe Minter (born 1943), ’63 Foot Soldiers, 1999, found objects, including old Alabama license plates, shoes and boots, toys such as plastic dogs and guns, chains, clothing, an American flag, a metal grate and miscellaneous metal parts, paint, plastic hats, and tires, 49 1/2 × 82 × 32 in. (125.7 × 208.3 × 81.3 cm); Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art

Prior to the show opening, I asked Jade what song would represent the exhibit if it had a playlist. “The first thing that came to mind was Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song for You,’” she answered, “the sound of that, how emotional that song is… ‘I’ve been so many places in my life and time. I've sung a lot of songs and I've made some bad rhymes.’ And that’s really what this show is.” 

Now that I’ve seen it, I agree. 

That emotion isn’t always easy, either. For all the beauty, humor, and joy throughout Roll Call, there are works that make you sit with what Blackness has meant and still means in America. That feels especially potent in Birmingham, a city whose Black history holds both extraordinary cultural production and some of the country’s most recognizable evidence of racial violence.

And if there were a cover image for that playlist, it’d be Debra Riffe’s st. clair woodcut. It centers a pitch-black figure with a low haircut, steady wide-set eyes, and a white doily—like one you’d see on your granny’s dresser—covering his nose, mouth, throat, and chest. It’s both soft and intense. It’s the teenager walking toward you with his face covered on an empty street at night, and you try to shake off everything the media has told you to feel about this encounter. Then he speaks and continues on his way, probably never thinking about you again, though you can’t stop thinking about him.

Encountering that image in Birmingham adds another layer. This is, after all, a city that’s often reduced to images of fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and protests. Roll Call doesn’t erase that history or pretend it ended there. It happened. It’s still happening. But the trauma ain’t the whole story. Inside these galleries, Black Birmingham—and Black America, more broadly—gets to be more complicated than what has happened, and continues to happen, to us. There’s pain, yes, but there’s beaucoup joy too.

I attended the exhibit with a good friend who’s a Birmingham local. She ran into someone she knew who was also there with a friend. I asked that friend what she was enjoying most about the show so far. She said recognizing people she knew, then pointed to Imperishable Stars, made by Erin LeAnn Mitchell, the sister of one of her childhood friends.

I enjoyed the exchange too much to recall how we got there, but she mentioned wishing more Black folk visited museums, if for nothing else, because it’s something different to do. I agreed, then said, “And it’s how you find out what you like.” She repeated that, a bit slower and more pronounced, as we tend to do when we strongly agree with something said.

My friend had earlier in our walk-through complimented the fact that I know what kind of art I like. “You do too,” I told her. She disagreed. I only had to remind her how hard she’d swooned over David Driskell’s Ghetto Wall #1 before she changed her mind.  “There’s something here for everybody,” her friend added.

  David Driskell (1931–2020), Ghetto Wall #1, 1971, oil and collage on canvas, 40 1/4 × 36 in. (102.2 × 91.4 cm); Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art;

“Yes!” I said. “It’s like being at a…functional family reunion. You got the auntie talking about why Black folks ain’t further along,” I said, pointing to Celestia Morgan’s REDLINE photograph series. “The auntie who adds the missing lil girls to the prayer before we eat,” I said, pointing to Imperishable Stars. “The uncle who still swears Chuck Berry is the greatest of all time,” I went on, referring to Richard Dial’s metal statement piece. “The auntie coming through with the hoodoo reminder to ‘Never Let Your Man Cut Your Hair.’” I pointed in the direction of Deborah Willis’s engraved glass. My friend pointed to Kerry James Marshall’s inkjet-printed Black Xmas: “Or the uncle reminiscing about Christmas at Grandma’s.” 

What Roll Call does especially well is collapse the distance between Black art history and Black people themselves. The canon ain’t somewhere else. It ain’t just New York or Chicago, or limited to the artists whose names we already know (or supposed to know). Alabama is in it. The South is in it. The sister of somebody’s childhood friend is in it. By placing artists we’ve canonized alongside artists many of us are yet to encounter, Roll Call makes an argument that feels both simple and necessary: they all belong to the same history.

Yvonne Wells (born 1939), Proverbs Quilt, 1988, cotton, polyester, and mixed-blend plain and printed fabrics with buttons and rickrack trim, 75 × 64 in. (190.5 × 162.6 cm); Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art

Museums have a hand in determining how that history gets told. And like any roll call, the names called also make you aware of who’s missing from the roster, who should be there. A museum collection doesn’t simply preserve art history; it participates in deciding what becomes art history.

I think that’s what makes Roll Call important now. It celebrates what’s been built without pretending the roster is complete. There’s a womanist sensibility to the way Jade Powers has set the table, one concerned with the wholeness of the whole community. Not because a Black woman curated the show, but because of the intentionality with which generations, genders, sexualities, places, and ways of making are invited into the same conversation. Nobody has to represent all of us. Everybody gets to bring their own lil something to the circle. And that circle is constantly moving and expanding, leaving you curious about who steps into it next and what they’ll bring with them.

There is truly something here for everybody.