Call & Response: Asmaa Walton and the Black Art Library Exhibition Opens November 6 with “Library Hours”

CALL & RESPONSE: ASMAA WALTON AND THE BLACK ART LIBRARY, a public humanities project that asks how we create, share, and preserve cultural memory for a more complete and accessible cultural record, opens at the Lynden Sculpture Garden on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, and remains on view through February 28, 2025. During that time, Lynden’s gallery will be transformed into a working library, with plenty of room to browse, read, gather, and study. Walton will keep “library hours,” during which she will be available to engage with visitors and recommend books, on Wednesday, November 6 (1-4 pm); Monday, November 11 (1:30-4 pm) and Tuesday, November 12 (1:30-4 pm). She will return in February for additional programming.

There will be an artist reception and panel discussion on Saturday, November 23, 2024, from 2 to 5 pm. The Lynden Sculpture Garden is located at 2145 West Brown Deer Road, Milwaukee, WI 53217. Gallery hours are daily 10 am-5 pm; closed Thursdays. Admission is free.

More information at: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/exhibitions/asmaa-walton-and-black-art-library

A Detroit native and developer of the Black cultural archive, Asmaa Walton noticed a conspicuous gap in the mainstream narration of art history around Black art and artists when she was training as an art educator and then working in museums. In 2020 she launched the Library, a collection of publications, exhibition catalogues, theoretical texts, and research materials about Black art and visual culture. Its mission is straightforward:

Black Art Library is a collection of books and other art history ephemera on Black visual art intended to be an educational resource to share within the Black community and beyond. The Library’s mission is to introduce or expand the community’s knowledge of Black art from the past and the present through art books.

Walton aligns her project with other libraries that are vital community spaces and she places herself in the lineage of librarians as agents of change.

Black Art Library will be in residence in Lynden’s gallery for four months. The gallery, an emphatically domestic space that was once a living room, is an ideal setting for this temporary community gathering place that functions as an interactive, participatory archive. Visitors are welcome to examine books and materials at their leisure.

The Black Art Library, like Lynden’s CALL & RESPONSE, re-examines the past to imagine a better future. With this project, we center a Black cultural activist and create opportunities for the artists and community members who participate in CALL & RESPONSE to extend their engagement with the radical Black imagination through interactions both intimate and public.

In the spirit of critique, Black Art Library prompts a larger conversation around which resources are made available within traditional settings for (arts) education (schools, museums). The library fills in gaps left by existing institutions, opening visitors’ eyes to the wide range of artists and movements in the Black community that have been left out of the dominant narrative. In reimagining racial justice outside institutional confines, it makes space for “the joy of communal learning and enthusiastic intellectual exchange.”

In the spirit of change, Black Art Library not only expands the cultural record but shares it in ways that can lead to a re-envisioning of K-12 and museum education, creating a more inclusive educational landscape. By working together, Lynden and Walton expand the audience for the project, engage the community in dialogue about it, and—through our work with educators—facilitate the reintroduction of the cultural record that Walton has collected back into traditional K-12 educational institutions.

Education as a vital, dynamic process is at the center of the Black Art Library and of this project. The Library models sustainable stewardship of shared resources, introduces people from all backgrounds to Black art and visual culture, and creates a setting for joy and learning. This iteration of the project also serves as a model for civic learning, informed engagement, and the development of youth voice in a thriving, pluralistic democracy. It nurtures empathy, critical thinking, and active citizenship.

We have designed three artist residencies to maximize engagement with Walton and the Library, with a particular focus on K-12 educators and their students. Walton was in Milwaukee in June to introduce K-12 teachers in our Innovative Educators Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Writing Project to the Library, and to develop interdisciplinary, arts-integrated curricula around the Library, its contents, and its role as a cultural-repository-in-the-making. Teachers will implement these lessons in their own classrooms in the 2024-25 school year. Walton will return for two weeks in November, and again in February, to welcome the classrooms of the teachers she worked with in the summer into the Library. Students will engage in hands-on bookmaking projects, making their own contributions to the archive.

The public is invited to donate mission-appropriate items to this growing archive.

This project is funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisconsin Humanities strengthens our democracy through educational and cultural programs that build connections and understanding among people of all backgrounds and beliefs throughout the state. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding comes from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.

About the Artist
Asmaa Walton is a Detroit native, arts educator, and ardent developer of the Black cultural archive. Walton completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education at Michigan State University in 2017. Upon earning a Master of Arts in Art Politics from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2018, Walton joined the Toledo Museum of Art as an Education and Engagement Intern. In the same year she was appointed the Museum’s first KeyBank Fellow in Diversity Leadership, a position in which she identified opportunities for diversity and equity programming across museums and cultural institutions. In 2019, Walton was appointed Romare Bearden graduate Museum Fellow at Saint Louis Art Museum. In February 2020, Walton established Black Art Library–-a collection of publications, exhibition catalogues and theoretical texts about Black art and visual culture intended to become a public archive in a permanent space in Detroit. In the interim, Black Art Library acts as a traveling exhibition, allowing many different communities to experience it. The collection has traveled beyond Detroit to cities such as Cleveland, San Antonio, Houston and, most recently, London. The nearly 900 books that populate the library (a portion of them will be on view at Lynden) are sourced from a variety of online sales and donors, with special effort placed on supporting Black-owned bookstores.

About the Lynden

The Lynden operates as a laboratory at the intersection of art, nature, and culture. Since opening to the public in 2010, we have worked with artists, educators, students, and our community to create, support, and share experiences that integrate our collection of more than 50 monumental sculptures and temporary installations, Lynden’s community of artists, and the natural ecology of our 40-acre site. The sculpture garden is open to art and nature lovers of all ages daily, 10 am-4 pm; closed Thursdays. Admission is free. Annual memberships are available.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.