Founded by Asmaa Walton in February 2020, the library consists of literary works about Black art and artists.
The Library’s collection centers on Black art and visual culture, filling the gaps that Walton observed in mainstream art history education and institutional holdings. The growing archive intends to tell a fuller story and facilitate public engagement with Black achievements in historical and contemporary art. The books are sourced from a variety of online sales and donors, with special effort placed on supporting Black-owned bookstores.
Common Ground hosted a conversation in 2021 with founder and curator of the Black Art Library Asmaa Walton, curator Alexis Assam, and art writer Jasmine Weber.
They discuss the evolution of the Black Art Library – a catalog of books on Black visual art and culture that began coming together earlier this year and which will become a public-facing archive, research library, and collection of art books, children’s books, exhibition catalogues, biographies, monographs, and ephemera on Black visual arts and artists. This conversation is moderated by Malvika Jolly, and closes with a poetry reading by Karisma Price.
Asmaa Walton is a Detroit native and founder of the Black Art Library, an ongoing collection of books on Black visual culture which will become a public-facing archive, research library, and collection of art books, children’s books, exhibition catalogues, biographies, and ephemera on Black visual arts and artists intended to be an educational resource for the Black community and beyond. The project is currently fundraising to expand its collection and acquire a brick-and-mortar space that will act as a non-lending library based in Detroit, MI.
Walton holds an MA in Arts Politics from the Department of Art & Public Policy at New York University, and a BFA in Arts Education from Michigan State University. She was previously the inaugural Keybank Fellow at The Toledo Museum of Art, and the 2019–2020 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Alexis Assam is an emerging curator with a dual focus on contemporary art and arts of the African diaspora. She was the 2018–2019 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum where she co-curated the 2019-2020 exhibition, The Shape of Abstractions: Selections from the Ollie Collection, which presented the work of five generations of Black artists who have revolutionized abstract art since the 1940s.
She currently works for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in her second year as the Constance E. Clayton Curatorial Fellow, working within the contemporary art department on a number of current and upcoming exhibitions. These include Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia and the Future Fields Commission in Time-based Media, a collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo featuring Martine Syms in 2021 and Lawrence Abu Hamdan in 2022.
Jasmine Weber is a writer, editor, and visual artist focused on Black art histories and visual culture. As Hyperallergic’s news editor, she reports on the challenging power dynamics of art workers in the arts sector and recent efforts to carve out a more equitable future for the creative industries and beyond.
Karisma Price is a Cave Canem fellow. Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, she is currently a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University.
Follow the Black Art Library at www.instagram.com/blackartlibrary.