The Myth of the “Emerging” Black Artist: Ageism and Access in the Art World
The Myth of the “Emerging” Black Artist: Ageism and Access in the Art World
By Chenoa Baker
The art world has created three categories to describe artists: emerging, mid-career, or established. These labels are often based on metrics like the number of solo exhibitions an artist has had, whether their work is included in major collections, and how long they’ve been active in the field.
For Black artists, though, these labels can be perilous.
Though they may seem like harmless descriptors, these words have a sizable impact. They influence museum acquisitions, justify (or limit) opportunities for exhibitions, press coverage, and shape who gets taken seriously by collectors. Artists who have been in the field for years are still labeled “emerging,” which infantilizes their work and keeps them from advancing to the upper echelons of status.
Another conundrum is ageism. Older artists who didn’t attend elite art schools, participate in prestigious residencies, don't have blue-chip gallery representation, and are based outside traditional art epicenters like New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta are frequently sidelined.
The system also penalizes the self-taught, undervalues artists working in traditional craft media, and marginalizes those who have always been artists but began their art careers later in life but didn’t have the financial security to professionalize earlier. These labels do more harm than good. They reflect a narrow, exclusionary pipeline and fail to account for the full range of artistic journeys.
It’s a trap!
I had the privilege of working with Cheryl Miller, a self-taught analog photographer who’s been documenting everyday Black life and Black musical icons, in Queens especially, since the 1970s. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Schomburg Center, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York, and her work has been featured in volumes edited by Deborah Willis. Yet despite these accolades and being established, she’s had to re-emerge in a new place.
Cheryl Miller, Nina and the Twins, 1992 Gelatin silver,
14 x 11 inches, Unframed,. Courtesy of the Artist.
A peer of Marilyn Nance and Ming Smith, Miller spent nearly two decades working as an urban planner and served as executive director of two neighborhood revitalization organizations focused on housing, economic, and community development. These roles weren’t a detour. They were paramount for providing for her family. All the while, even when digital photography started to be en vogue, she continued to make the work.
During the pandemic, she relocated to Massachusetts, where feeling isolated inspired her to re-debut her work to society in a new state. That impulse helped birth ShowUp, a social impact artist residency model in Boston’s South End. I helped design a progressive installation for the residency: the initial phase partially replicated her working studio; we then scheduled meetings with key community members; and the final presentation, Cheryl Miller: If We Stand Tall (2023), expanded the show with new, large-scale works that marked her powerful re-entry.
When working with the artist Ifé Franklin on a major solo exhibition for 2027, I began grappling with these terms. I describe her as an “elder” artist—not to emphasize her age (though she’s in her 60s), but to honor her as a walking library of knowledge, seasoned in the field. Though her work is collected at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Fitchburg Art Museum, she was unjustly shuffled into group shows for most of her career—all while, for many years, working full time to support survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. As a Black, queer woman, she faced systemic erasure early on. In the ‘80s, a group show by the local Black Boston community was canceled when her work acknowledged her queerness.
Dogon/Nommos/Sirius B, 2020. Mixed media drawing on paper.
Courtesy of Ifé Franklin.
But where does working for all these years put her in the eyes of larger institutions and the market? “Emerging” is insulting. “Mid-career” suggests she’s middle-aged and on the come-up. “Established” may seem the most accurate, but even that term feels too narrow to reflect the depth, longevity, and the life investment her practice represents.
Besides people who are in their 60s and beyond, the art world repeatedly labels Black artists as “emerging”—even into their 40s and 50s—regardless of experience, exhibition history, or cultural impact. Take Robert Peterson, a painter based in Lawton, Oklahoma, who has been categorized as both “emerging” and “mid-career.” He’s forged his own path, saying, “I have to paint from my own experience.” Rather than being bogged down by labels, Peterson sees the shift of the tide in the art world as having a more expansive approach to labeling artists.
He explains:
More institutions and collectors seem to be focusing on the work itself, how it resonates with them, and reflects the times, rather than where an artist falls on a career timeline. There’s a growing interest in collecting work people want to live with and build a connection to, rather than just treating it as an investment. That shift is a step toward a more meaningful and equitable approach.
Robert Peterson, Protect Those Tears, 2025
Signed, titled, dated verso, Oil on canvas,
14 x 11 inches, Courtesy of the artist.
Although Peterson only picked up a paintbrush in 2012, he was named the Artist of the Year for Southwestern Oklahoma just four years later in 2016. His first major museum show opened at the Wichita Art Museum in 2024, and his work is already in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa. Known for his luminous blue highlights on the skin and minimal backgrounds that allow his subjects to shine, Peterson’s figurative paintings highlight diversity within Black cultures and have launched him into the realm of stardom. Yet he remains less concerned with how he’s perceived by the art world and more focused on painting from a place of authenticity. As he puts it: “I have to paint from my truth, shaped by my experiences and the stories I feel need to be seen and felt.” That truth-telling is central to his practice.
Traci Mims, an Atlanta-based artist, printmaker, and painter, offers a compelling critique of the art world's labeling systems. Known for her bold figurative work that often centers Black identity, womanhood, and social justice, Mims draws from both personal experience and collective memory. Her prints—often stark in contrast, rich in texture, and emotionally resonant—reflect her commitment to telling unflinching truths. While she doesn’t recall being formally labeled as “emerging,” “mid-career,” or “established,” she emphasizes that her primary focus has always been on the strength of the work itself. “My focus [is] on making work that is strong enough that it supersedes labels and makes them irrelevant,” she says, pointing to the need to center artistic integrity over external validation.
Angels on My Shoulder, 2024 by Traci Mims, Woodcut, 24” x 36”
Courtesy of the artist.
Mims acknowledges that terms like “mid-career” and “established” might be easier to pin down because they can be backed by certain achievements or visibility benchmarks. “On the other hand,” she reflects, “there are artists who have had long and successful careers and are not as well known publicly, or they may not be on social media or get a lot of press. Does this make them emerging?” Her question cuts to the heart of the matter:
Visibility doesn’t always align with value or longevity.
Rather than allowing the art world to dictate her identity, Mims has embraced consistency, clarity of vision, and creative rigor as guiding principles. “I do think there is an inherent bias towards youth in the art world,” she notes. “The key is to be consistent in doing the work and at a high level, no matter where you fit.” Her practice resists reduction—rooted in tradition, continually evolving, and driven by purpose rather than positioning.
Candace Hunter, represented by Stella Jones Gallery, identifies herself as a mid-career artist. But during a conversation with a curator, she was “corrected” and told she’s established. “I'm not in a major museum,” Hunter responded. The curator countered, “But you have been in museums.” Hunter continued, “I don’t have steady representation from well-known galleries.” Again, the curator replied, “But you are represented.” For Hunter, the label “established” carries connotations that don’t align with her reality: “I should have a bank account, and I don’t. I shouldn’t have to worry whether curators in Chicago know my name, but I do.”
Untitled by Candace Hunter, Collage on canvas. 20" x 20" x 1.5"
In our conversation, she and I unpacked the wide range of factors that shape these labels. We distilled it down to a kind of complex choreography:
Some come in knowing the dance and do it well; others learn it as they go; some improvise in spurts; and some dance entirely to their own tune.
It’s hard to imagine an art world beyond these titles, but, in effect, Hunter points to the space many Black artists occupy as something else entirely. She says, “There’s that nebulous place that Black people find themselves in. That my white counterparts, who may have actually done less work than I have, don't find themselves in the same situation. That being said, the gallery represented has to be those credible galleries in the city that you exist in, and there aren't as many African American galleries as there are other folk. And because of that, all of those galleries are trying to pitch for a whole lot of people, so it becomes very difficult for you to be represented by one.”
This structural tension was on full display for her at the 2025 edition of Expo Chicago. She shares:
Things are changing. As I walked through Expo Chicago this year, overwhelmingly, the work that one saw was large-scale representational Black bodies. Now, I'm not gonna say that all of those Black bodies were created by Black artists. But one was forced to reckon with Black large-scale Black bodies throughout Expo. So they might have been from New York, Baltimore, Martha's Vineyard, Tennessee, Brazil, or South Africa. The Black body was on full display and earning money. I would dare say that most of the artists are young. And when I say young, under 35 years of age. And so that's a new paradigm that has started to happen—where very young African American artists are being seen in a different way and being applauded differently than has ever happened before. Those same artists, without years of working, are already two steps above me, [after] decades of working. That's not to take anything away from them. I'm so glad the world has changed, and the whole world is getting to see that kind of Black excellence on big stages.”
Play Amongst The Ruins by Candace Hunter
Still, visibility alone does not guarantee care, nor does it mitigate the delayed timing of institutional recognition. Hunter reflects on the urgency of receiving acknowledgment in the present, rather than as a posthumous or end-of-life gesture. “I've been saying that probably for the last four years. I'm just like, there are things that I want to do to be in front of the right eyes, in front of the right places, so that I can have my flowers while I can still walk across a stage,” she says. She cites the example of Howardena Pindell, “who was wheeled across the stage at the MCA,” and Faith Ringgold, “who didn't even have the opportunity to be wheeled across the stage. Dementia and then death, which none of us anticipated.” While both artists are rightly celebrated, Hunter notes that “they're getting their flowers, but they're getting them very late. And how do you really appreciate that?” What she desires is simple yet profound: “to appreciate some things while I still have energy and the ability to keep making, without somebody writing a story about, ‘Oh, and she paints from her bed.’ I don't want to be that storyline. I want to be able-bodied enough to still make my work, able-minded enough for that work to have some kind of importance, and the ability to say thank you from a stage.”
Her commitment to reframing legacy and longevity extends even to how she navigates institutional conventions around biography and authorship. Hunter has long resisted the reductive shorthand of age as a measure of merit. “I refuse to put my birth year on my CV,” she explains. “It [typically] says your name, your country of origin, the year you were born, and then appropriate shows—solo shows, jury shows, blah, blah, blah.”
She steadfastly avoided including that detail for two decades. Still, age assumptions persist. When her work was recently included in the CCH Pounder Cone Collection exhibition at the African American Museum of Philadelphia, she flew in to see it in person, only to find that a label beside her piece had assigned her a fictional birth year. “ It said I was born in 1970 or something. I was just like, wow, I just got younger. Thank you.” The institutional need to categorize overruled accuracy: “It's now down in history books that there's this artist, Candace Hunter, who was born in 1975,” she laughs. Rather than express outrage, Hunter recalls the moment with wry humor: “I just thought that that was hilarious—that someone felt a need to put that there, and they made up an age.”
Ultimately, the art world’s obsession with categorization, particularly the rigid “emerging,” “mid-career,” and “established” framework, serves more as a gatekeeping mechanism than a meaningful metric of artistic merit or impact. For Black artists, and especially those who are older, self-taught, or working outside dominant art world centers, these labels often distort more than they clarify. They erase years of labor, marginalize lived experiences, and obscure vital contributions to cultural narratives.
Yet artists like Cheryl Miller, Ifé Franklin, Robert Peterson, Traci Mims, and Candace Hunter demonstrate that it’s possible to resist and redefine these terms. They model a shift toward honoring lifelong practice, embracing self-definition, and expanding how we understand what it means to be an artist. The goal is not merely to dismantle labels but to reclaim authorship over one's journey.
Because the real power doesn’t lie in what institutions call us. It lies in what we choose to call ourselves.
