CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/8/2020

Manetti Shrem Museum presents Bernard Lumpkin, Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff in conversation for the west coast virtual launch of 'Young, Gifted and Black'

Thursday, October 29 from 4:30–6PM PST, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California, presents the west coast virtual launch of Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists. Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent, the book accompanies the Young, Gifted and Black exhibition, which will travel to the Manetti Shrem Museum in 2022. Join museum Associate Curator Susie Kantor for a conversation with collector Bernard Lumpkin, writer Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff, curator of the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection. Register here for this Zoom virtual event.

As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now. Edited by Sargent, Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by these contemporary artists. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that “it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today, Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are affecting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself."

Bernard Lumpkin's committment to emerging artists is part of a broader mission of artist advocacy and institutional support. He currently sits on the Board of Trustees of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Board of Trustees of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Additionally, he serves on the Painting and Sculpture Committee at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Media and Performance Art Committee at the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Lumpkin is actively engaged in a dialogue with curators and educators around issues of diversity and inclusion in the contemporary art world. He has also lectured on contemporary art at The New School in New York City, advised public and private organizations on collecting and patronage, and participated in discussion panels at art fairs, auction houses, and universities. Mr. Lumpkin was educated at Yale (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A., Ph.D.). Above photo by Dawn Blackman.

Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic living in New York. He has contributed articles to the New York Times, Vogue, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and various essays to gallery and museum publications. He has curated exhibitions at Aperture Foundation and Jenkins Johnson Projects. He recently published his first book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, with Aperture. Above photo by Darius Garvin.

Matt Wycoff is an artist, woodworker and writer living in Brooklyn and Stephentown, New York. For the past ten years he has also worked as collection curator for the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection. Wycoff is a MacDowell Fellow, and has been the recipient of studio fellowships at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha) and The Urban Culture Project (Kansas City). Recent exhibitions of his work include Derek Eller Gallery (New York), Vanity Projects (New York and Miami), Joan (Los Angeles) and Kijidome (Boston). Above photo by Priest Fontaine Batten.