Supporting Programming, Building Capacity

Reflecting nearly 100 years of art history in America, Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem reflects the breadth of The Studio Museum’s 50 years of supporting and incubating artists of African descent. The exhibition creates opportunities for dialogue that expand and challenge audiences’ understanding of American, modern and contemporary art, while addressing universal themes like class, identity, socio-economic power, and social justice. In conversation with KIA’s complimentary exhibitions, Resilience: African American Artists as Agents of Change and Where We Stand: Black Artists in Southwest Michigan, Black Refractions encouraged new ways of seeing, understanding, and talking about art, society, and the world.

By stressing the importance of this exhibition for youth audiences through programming, KIA built a holistic engagement approach that offered multiple opportunities for children and students to see themselves in the galleries and gain exposure to differing points of view. During the installation, young visitors were encouraged to participate in programs like a Teen Talk Back with artist Aida Millet, and invitations to respond to the art on view through interdisciplinary artmaking, writing, and video opportunities.

To prepare staff and docents to host and interpret this new curatorial approach, KIA invited educators from the Studio Museum to help them build capacity by enhancing internal knowledge of the art on view, and building the cultural competency necessary to welcome the BIPOC visitors they hoped to attract. These skills and sensitivity will impact the museum and its community well beyond Black Refractions.

Critical Impact

While KIA’s art collection, exhibitions, and programs have expanded to include more diverse voices and perspectives,  hosting Black Refractions presented the museum with an unprecedented opportunity to speak to the experiences of Black artists and community members — Learning & Engagement funding from Art Bridges allowed KAI to activate these works in ways that created lasting relationships and strong precedent for inclusive practice. 

As the only midwestern venue for the exhibition, the KIA shouldered responsibility for sharing Black Refractions and the two complimentary exhibitions widely throughout the region. To ensure the widest possible audience with the deepest possible engagement, the KIA partnered with over twenty-five local organizations to ensure that all programming was appropriate, inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible. 

With the goal of elevating and amplifying the work of community artists, collectors, and scholars, KIA hosted Vision & Visibility: Diversity, Inclusion, Contemporary Art+Culture, a symposium examining the evolving visual language and national discourse around artists of color as advanced by collectors, artists, and arts institutions. Funded by Art Bridges, this day of critical conversation explored the exhibition, dissemination, and impact of Black visual culture upon the global arts community.

The result of these combined efforts was the most well-attended exhibition in the museum’s history, welcoming thousands of visitors over the course of 12 weeks. Art Bridges is proud to partner with organizations like the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, who activate bold curatorial approaches with deep and multi-centered programming to build bridges and spark conversations with and for audiences about our common humanity.

“Everyday we live our vision that Art is for everyone. It inspires, transforms, and fulfills.”