Acts of Art: A Groundbreaking Gallery for Black Artists in Greenwich Village
On October 30, 1969, history was made in Greenwich Village when artists Patricia Grey and Nigel Jackson opened Acts of Art, the first black-owned gallery in downtown Manhattan at 31 Bedford Street.
Once a humble butcher shop in a tenement home, this small West Village storefront evolved into a powerful symbol of the Civil Rights Movement. During its six-year tenure, Acts of Art Gallery (which eventually moved to 54 Charles Street in January 1971) became a vital hub for the Black Arts Movement, hosting numerous exhibitions that highlighted the talents of Black artists. Last month we hosted a special tour of Hunter College Art Galleries’ new exhibition Acts of Art in Greenwich Village, honoring the gallery once found on Bedford and Charles Streets.
On opening night some 200 Villagers and travelers alike took in 150 works by 15 Black artists—advertisements in the Village Voice and The Villager called the gallery’s inaugural exhibition the “first ethnic showing, featuring Black Art in America.” Among the original fifteen was Benny Andrews, who by then was a well-established artist and civil rights activist. Andrews donated three paintings for the opening show, a “gesture toward helping Nigel get a foothold as a commercial Black art dealer.”
Originally, Grey and Jackson introduced the gallery as an opportunity to highlight their own work and that of their inner circle of fellow Black artists. But soon after its opening, the couple broadened the gallery’s horizons. Black artists were (and continue to be) often marginalized or excluded from mainstream art world conversations, and Acts of Art Gallery provided Black artists a platform and opportunity to showcase their artistic expressions beyond the very limited traditional places reserved for them.
In 1971, members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition organized and presented a Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition at Acts of Art. The show was in response to the Whitney Museum’s refusal to appoint a Black curator for their concurrent show, Contemporary Black Artists in America. While Jackson attested to the necessary separation between art and politics, the gallery was a hub for activist groups and black artists to discuss their place and rights within the art world. The gallery used politics to get an audience, as Jackson noted, and once at the gallery, the focus shifted back toward the art.
Later that same year, the gallery hosted the inaugural exhibition of the Black women artists collective, Where We At. The exhibit was the birthchild of a conversation between Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, Faith Ringgold, and other Black women artists who felt frustrated and excluded from the predominately white and male art world. Their collective, known by the same name, became a bustling network for Black women artists and allowed them to grant one another opportunities within the art and creative worlds that they were otherwise shut out from.
In October 2024, Hunter College revisited Grey and Jackson’s gallery through Acts of Art in Greenwich Village, which features artworks from the late 1960s and 1970s by fourteen artists with close ties to the gallery, several of which were first shown at Acts of Art.
Acts of Art Gallery was more than just a space to exhibit artwork; it became a catalyst for change in the art world, offering a platform for Black artists who had been historically excluded from mainstream spaces. In a 1972 interview with the New York Times, Jackson summed up the gallery’s purpose as “first and foremost to show art, works of quality that happen to be by blacks” but also “to function as an inspiration to blacks, to show some blacks what other blacks can achieve in art, to produce badly needed artist-heroes for the blacks.”