Professor Jeffrey Stewart Curates
"A Homecoming Celebration,"
Bob Johnson's Selections from the Barnett-Aden Collection
Hemphill Galleries
Washington, DC
January 31 to March 7, 2009
Bob Johnson's Selections from the Barnett-Aden Collection
Hemphill Galleries
Washington, DC
January 31 to March 7, 2009
Read complete review of exhibit (pdf)
In 1998, Bob Johnson purchased the Barnett-Aden Collection, one of the nation's oldest and most extraordinary collections of African American art. A rich history embodies the Barnett Aden Collection. In 1943 by James Herring, a Howard University professor 
art and founder of its Department of Art, and Alonzo Aden, his student and curator of the University's Gallery of Art, founded a private gallery in Aden’s Northwest Washington, D.C. home. The gallery, named after Naomi Barnett Aden, who owned the home, maintained a "continuing schedule of bi-monthly shows of Negro and white painters and sculptors…[and] set a remarkable over-all standard of excellence in its choice of artists and exhibitions." At a time when most African American artists could not exhibit in 
mainstream museums and galleries, Herring and Aden held themed exhibitions and one-person shows of works by an international, multicultural, and multiracial cadre of artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, I. Rice Pereira, Candido Portinari, Lois Mailou Jones, Frederick Campbell, and George Grosz.
Herring and Aden used money from modest sales and a gift shop, combined with contributions from about 100 associates, to purchase art from some of the artists and form a modest collection of art. That collection now contains works by Henry O. Tanner, May Howard Jackson, Edward Bannister, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Alma Thomas, Laura Wheeler Waring, Frederick Flemister, Hale Woodruff, and John Robinson. While the collection is rich in works by those usually characterized as academic realists, 
the collection is also distinguished by a large body of portraiture and self-portraiture that document the rise of feelings of racial pride and self-assertiveness of the cultural awakening called the Harlem Renaissance. The best art of the collection emerged out of a dialogue between the artists and the communities in which they lived and worked. As Bob Johnson has stated, the "Barnett-Aden is work by artists who were influenced by the fact that they were African Americans living in America and dealing with what that means. This exhibition could not have come at a more perfect time, as February is Black History Month, and America has newly sworn into office its first African American president."
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Review of the Exhibit:
A Quietly Subversive Display of Black Power
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 6, 2009
There's a tiny new museum on
14th Street NW.
That's what it looks like anyway, at Hemphill Fine Arts, where "Selections From the Barnett-Aden Collection: A Homecoming Celebration" is on view. The art on the walls -- by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, John N. Robinson, Aaron Douglas, Alma Thomas, Henry O. Tanner, Elizabeth Catlett, John Biggers and others -- makes for a virtual who's who of 20th-century black art. None of it is for sale. Yet this contemporary commercial gallery setting really does feel like a homecoming.
