Reframing art history to include previously overlooked and underrepresented artists is as major an undertaking as it sounds. For San Francisco–based philanthropist and collector Pamela Joyner, it’s become her mission to incorporate the work of African-American artists not only into history books but also in the collections of major museums and learning institutions. Over the past 20 years, Joyner and her husband, Fred Giuffrida, have amassed one of the most important collections—if not the most important collection—of African American art in private hands. In 2016, the collection was chronicled in Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co.), complete with hundreds of illustrations, alongside essays by leading curators, artists, and writers. The hefty hardcover volume became the introduction to Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, a traveling exhibition that debuted in 2017 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. The show, which includes works by African-American artists from the 1940s through today, opens at the end of this month at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago (January 29–May 19).
Joyner, who serves as the chair of the Tate Americas Foundation and sits on the boards of both the Art Institute of Chicago and The J. Paul Getty Trust—among other institutions—was recently honored in San Francisco at the annual FOG Design + Art Innovators Luncheon, for her dedication to presenting and preserving the works of African-American artists. AD PRO sat down with Joyner in advance of FOG to talk about the importance of her mission, some of her newest acquisitions, and how to go about building a museum-worthy collection.
AD PRO: The collection you’ve built is really incredible, to say the least. When did you become aware of the challenges African-American artists faced in finding their place in art history?
Pamela Joyner: I had been aware of the challenges and the issues dating back to when I was in graduate school. Lowery Stokes Sims, who was the first African-American curator hired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was someone I met when I was at Harvard Business School. She brought to my attention the challenges that African-American artists, in particular, faced in museums and the commercial art world since the existence of African-American artists. So that is why I began focusing on collecting in that area. Then about 12 years ago, it became clearer to me that the issues were multifaceted, complex, and deeply embedded in the system, and that perhaps I had the time, resources, and, hopefully, the talent to try to begin to address the issue.
AD PRO: Solidary & Solitary, the exhibition built from your collection, opens at its fourth venue, the Smart Museum in Chicago, at the end of the month. What’s the response been like so far?
Joyner: The response has been terrific—and we’re really, really excited about it! The University of Chicago is really home turf to me; I was born at the University of Chicago Hospital and grew up within walking distance of the Smart Museum. I’m very anxious to see what my hometown does with this! The show is just one of the tools in the toolbox of prosecuting our mission to be corrective in the realm of art history. The idea of Solidary & Solitary is, for one, that we’re in a teachable moment. So the first venues have all been university museums, and each of these universities has written interesting curriculum around the show. For instance, Rick Powell at Duke University, who’s really one of the leading experts in the field of African-American art history, taught an interesting course, and the same was true at Notre Dame. Interestingly, at Notre Dame, it wasn’t just the art historians who taught Solidary & Solitary, but there was an interdisciplinary effort. Parts of the exhibition even showed up in science and social science curricula.
AD PRO: Science curriculum? What exactly did that look like?
Joyner: The core piece of that dialog is a work by Charles Gaines, who himself worked with numbers and systems in the 1960s. Charles is especially interesting because he taught at the California Institute of the Arts for many years, and if you look at who he’s mentored, there isn’t anybody in the last 25 years who has come through Cal Arts, focused on West Coast Conceptualism, who hasn’t been touched by Charles Gaines. Mark Bradford, for instance, was one of his teaching associates. So it made complete sense that the scientists and mathematicians were interested in the construct of Charles’s work. People who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily pause to think about art history at all—and certainly this particular piece of art history—were brought into the dialogue.
AD PRO: There’s a rumor that when the show lands at The Baltimore Museum of Art later this year, it’ll see some significant changes.
Joyner: When the show goes to Baltimore, it’s going to be three times the size and will likely take on a different tenor and may even have a different name. At the same time, we’re planning to republish Four Generations, which is now virtually sold out! We’ll be expanding and revising it—adding four to six essays and probably 80 new images.
AD PRO: That’s certainly a lot of new work. What is your strategy for collecting?
Joyner: I have a list taped in my office closet and I redo it every November. For the last couple of years, we’ve been buying a bit to fill holes in the collection that curators have pointed out—works they’d like to show at different points in the exhibition tour. This year I get to do what I normally do, which is sit down and think about who it is I’m interested in, and where they fit into the collection, which starts in 1945 and goes to yesterday.
AD PRO: What’s one example of an artist you were missing?
Joyner: If you collect midcentury Black Abstraction, you must own Martin Puryear, and we didn’t until recently. So, to me, that was definitely a gaping hole.
AD PRO: What are some of your other recent and most exciting acquisitions?
Joyner: I’m very excited by a number of young artists we’ve been working with in recent years. Last year, I bought several pieces by Firelei Baez, who was born in the Dominican Republic. We’ve also added Christina Quarles, who paints abstract figures. We’ve continued to add Kevin Beasley’s work—we own 8 to 10 pieces. He has an exciting show up at the Whitney now – we have work from every series he’s done so far. We’ve also deepened our holding with the work of a recently deceased friend – Jack Whitten. We own his work very deeply as well.
AD PRO: Although a large portion of your collection is touring, I still have to wonder: Where do you keep it all? You must be close to running out of space.
Joyner: If you come to my home in San Francisco, at any given point in time I probably have between 130 and 145 works on the walls. No curator would hang in that way, but what I try to do—because there are 100-plus artist in the collection—is have one representation of every artist in the collection. Unfortunately, it’s not possible right now because the core of the collection is traveling.
AD PRO: You also have a property in Sonoma where you host an artist’s residency program. Who’s eligible and how does it work?
Joyner: You have to be in the collection, or eligible to be in the collection as an artist. We also invite scholars in the field to participate. The way it works is informally—you have to ask me, or I have to ask you, and we work to find a date. Typically, people come for a month. But, for instance, South African artists stay for a much longer time. We recently had Nolan Oswald Dennis in residence from September to December. Fifteen percent of the current collection is by South African artists.
AD PRO: How do you discover new artists?
Joyner: Sometimes artists reach out to me directly. I go to all the major exhibitions and shows, and sometimes MFA shows. I follow several of the residencies that focus on young artists, and often these young artists tell me about their mentors and peers, and I find artists that way. And, curators will call people to my attention—that’s the most usual way I find new artists.
AD PRO: What advice would you give someone trying to build a collection?
Joyner: I’m a reader. Along with The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, I read the art blogs. I often tell people who ask how to start a collection, "the first thing you have to do is start your book collection." It was certainly true for us since there wasn’t a concentrated expertise in this field. There were, of course, always great scholars like Rick Powell, Kellie Jones, Lowery Stokes Sims, Thelma Golden, and Mary Schmidt Campbell. Although the scholarly work has been out there, in some ways it’s been as overlooked as the subject matter—but it’s changing!
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