Acts of Art in Greenwich Village with Howard Singerman
Book Talk
The Phillips Collection’s Living Room is a series of intimate conversations featuring artists, authors, curators, collectors, and museum professionals. These programs offer rare opportunities to engage in discussions that connect the museum’s collection with broader dialogues.
To mark on the exhibition Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest, join Howard Singerman for a book talk on Acts of Art in Greenwich Village, an overview of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery dedicated to the work of Black artists in downtown Manhattan. Singerman’s book resonates with Duncan Phillips’s own legacy of supporting artists outside the dominant art world. A Q&A and book signing will follow the talk.
About Acts of Art in Greenwich Village
A first-ever look at a network of Black visual artists in New York City’s Manhattan and downtown art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. This comprehensive account of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery founded by and for Black artists in Greenwich Village in 1969, includes a complete exhibition record, biographies of the gallery’s key artists, and entries on important group exhibitions and events. This first in-depth look at Acts of Art, and its role within communities of Black artists in New York City highlights the artists most closely tied to the gallery and its co-founder Nigel Jackson, from the early shows of Benny Andrews and James Denmark to the surveys of Lois Mailou Jones and Hale Woodruff. In addition to an introductory essay and complete exhibition history, the volume includes artists’ biographies and entries on important group exhibitions and events. This publication accompanies the exhibition Acts of Art in Greenwich Village, on view at Hunter College’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Galleries from fall 2024 to spring 2025.
Howard Singerman is author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (California, 1999); Art History, after Sherrie Levine (California, 2012); and, most recently, Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat (Afterall, 2019). He has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues over the past four decades, among them A Forest of Signs (1989) and Public Offerings (1999), both at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where he served as Museum Editor from 1985 to 1988. For Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery, he has curated and authored lead essays for the exhibitions Robert Motherwell and the New York School at Hunter (2015); Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 (2018); and Acts of Art in Greenwich Village (2024). His essays have appeared in a number of peer reviewed journals including Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures, October, Oxford Art Journal, La Part de l’Oeil, and RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and he has published essays and reviews in Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, Criticism: Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Parkett, and X-tra.
A professor of modern and contemporary American art, Singerman was appointed to the Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of Art and Art History at Hunter College in 2013. Prior to his move to Hunter, he was chair and professor of art history in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia, and also taught at Barnard College, the Art Center College of Design, the California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California Los Angeles and UC Irvine. Singerman holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio; an MFA in Sculpture from the Claremont Graduate School; and a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester.
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