Creating Space and Opportunities

Creating Space and Opportunities: D.C. Black-Owned and Managed Art Galleries and Spaces 

Exhibit Dates: August 28, 2024 – March 30, 2025
Exhibit Location: MLK Library, Floor 4, East 
 

In 2021, Claude L. Elliott, a curator and collector of works produced by Washington, D.C.’s Black artists, started an oral history project to better understand how the city’s Black arts community supported its members when racism and structural inequities prevented them from exhibiting in the city’s mainstream galleries. In the years since, Elliott’s project, titled Creating Space and Opportunities: D.C. Black Owned/Managed Art Galleries and Spaces, has collected interviews with over a dozen artists. Their life stories reveal a tight knit group of creators, bound together by a sense of obligation both to one another and to future generations of artists coming up through the DC Public School system.

On view on the Floor 4, East outside of The People's Archive are three portraits sketched, live, during a public program at the MLK Library in May 2024, and completed in summer 2024. Each portrait is a unique interpretation of the life history of an artist in D.C.’s vibrant Black arts scene. This project is part of the DC Oral History Collaborative, a partnership program of HumanitiesDC and the DC Public Library. The Collaborative is Washington, DC’s city-wide oral history program. The Collaborative offers grants, training, and other resources to DC residents interested in recording and archiving oral history interviews with their communities. 
 

Acknowledgments:
Special thanks to Claude L. Elliott, Project  Director; Jasper Collier, Senior Manager, DC Oral History Collaborative, The People’s Archive at DC Public Library, and the DC Public  Library Exhibits team for their assistance.
 

Portrait Artists:
Luis del Valle; Prelli Anthony Williams; Janathel Shaw

Oral History Narrators:
Julee Dickerson-Thompson; Percy Martin; Dwight E. Tyler

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