Sheldon Museum of Art Main Content
Exhibition
Black Fire: A Constant State of Revolution
September 11, 2015 through January 3, 2016
Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless #1. 
Barkley Hendricks, Bid ’Em In/Slave (Angie). 
Leonardo Drew, Number 175T. 
Radcliffe Bailey, Untitled. 
Willie Cole, Stowage. 
Renée Cox, Mother of Us All. 
Norman Lewis, Untitled (Blue Waves).
Jazz pianist Andrew Hill’s recording Black Fire and this exhibition share basic precepts: moments of transition. The year of the album’s release, 1964, was revolutionary—musically and otherwise. The 1960s were the decade of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Vietnam, and the first moon landing.
Drawn primarily from the Sheldon collection, Black Fire: A Constant State of Revolution presents a small group of large-scale works that evidence narrative threads of African American experience from passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present.
The Ethel S. Abbott Charitable Foundation Exhibitions and Programs Fund provided support for this exhibition.