The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The Founding of “Where We At”

Abstract

Although the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s signaled one of the most significant developments in recent American art history, black women artists, for the most part, were underrepresented in major gallery and museum exhibitions at the movement’s inception. “Where We At” Black Women Artists: 1971, the first show of professional black women artists, was launched at the Acts of Art Gallery. The fourteen participants went on to form an artists’ collective of the same name. The group eventually became a real sisterhood, working together on common aesthetic ideals and developing a professional closeness. This essay, by one of the founding members, discusses the group’s origin and evolution, including its many successes, in the late twentieth century and beyond.