This exhibition explores through the museum’s rich holdings of the range of artistic expressions by self-taught African American artists from the rural South and the urban North, highlighting complex and vibrant quilts, paintings, works on paper, and sculpture. With approximately nine quilts and nearly thirty works of art in various media, “Ancestry and Innovation” includes paintings by an elder generation of creators, such as David Butler, Sam Doyle, Bessie Harvey, and Clementine Hunter; works by contemporary masters such as Thornton Dial Sr.; and provocative pieces by emerging artists such as Kevin Sampson and Willie LeRoy Elliot. Juxtaposed with richly patterned and graphically exciting quilts, the exhibition celebrates the ongoing contribution of black artists to the kaleidoscope of American cultural and visual experience. 

Stacy C. Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson, curators