3 New Acquisitions to Schomburg Center’s Art & Artifacts Division

There are three new reasons to schedule a research appointment to visit the Art and Artifacts Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The division added works by Kimberly M. Becoat, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Helina Metaferia to its collections.

The acquisitions are part of the division’s initiative to identify, collect, and preserve artwork by emerging and established Black female artists advancing Black culture, said Tammi Lawson, the division’s curator.

“Historically, women artists are underrepresented in any museum worldwide, but Black women artists even less. I just wanted to be able to include women to fill the gap in our collection, so they are fairly represented because they are really [creating] a lot of work. A lot of our artists are seasoned and are now being recognized.”

Kimberly M. Becoat

A daughter of Harlem and currently residing in Brooklyn, Kimberly M. Becoat is a contemporary mixed media artist. She incorporates materials such as acrylic paint, Sumi ink, watercolors, tar paper, and candy foil wrappers into her work. Becoat’s years in Harlem have served as the inspiration for many of her pieces.

Planting Seeds in the Break a Dawn-Sunflower Hours Explore, an acrylic collage on Strathmore paper, explores the urban displacement of people of color in public housing. It’s a recurring theme in her recent pieces.

Becoats’s works have been featured in the solo exhibitions Urbania at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art (MoCADA), Welcome to Urbania at Rush Arts Gallery, and New Abstractions at the Essie Green Galleries. Her work has also been seen on HBO’s Insecure, Netflix’s Luke Cage, and FX’s The Americans.

Barbara Jones-Hogu

Perhaps best known for her work with the Organization of Black American Culture and cofounder of the artist collective AfriCOBRA, Barbara Jones-Hogu (1938–2017) was a Chicago-born painter and printer. She is widely considered one of the most prolific artists during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Jones-Hogu provided the visual aesthetics to ideas central to the Black Power Movement such as Black Pride, self-determination, and unity. Her works use vibrant colors such as orange, strawberry, and lime, which become known as “Kool-Ade Colored,” and are part of AfriCOBRA’s signature look.

The Library purchased One People Unite (1969), a color screen print on Crescent artist board covered in gold metallic paper. The mix of colors, shadows, and type, Lawson said, gives the piece a 3-D effect and a feeling of visual movement.

Jones-Hogu’s estate donated the second screen print, God’s Child (2009). “I think it is actually Barbara as a little girl,” Lawson said. “Look at how the words just jump off this. This looks like it’s radiating."

Helina Metaferia

Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist of Ethiopian descent who works in mediums such as collage making, performance, and video. She uses stories of Black activism throughout U.S. history as a central theme of her work.

Metaferia 2022’s Crown (After Empress Menen) was part of her sculptural performance, The Willing. She created it in brass with images burned into the metal, based on the photographs of the Blue Hill Civil Rights Protest in Boston, 1967. The three points on the top portion of the crown are Black Power fists. She modeled the design on the crown worn by Empress Menen Asfew of Ethiopia.

Metaferia recently had the solo exhibition, All Put Together, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center in New York City.

To view these pieces in person, schedule a research appointment with the Art and Artifacts Division.

Get Schomburg Center news delivered directly to your Inbox. Sign up for the free e-newsletter, Schomburg Connection.

Join the Schomburg Center on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.