Gateways: African American Art from the Key Collection

A dynamic, personal, and poignant collection of over 90 works from Eric Key’s extensive collection of art by American artists of African descent, spanning the Harlem Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Since he started collecting in the 1990s, Eric Key’s intent has always been to help preserve America’s Black experience in the arts, and to benefit the many communities of which he has been a part—opening gateways for artists, African Americans, and conversations about race, identity, and America. Featured in the volume are selected works by some of the most recognizable contemporary African American artists, including Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, William Artis, Samella Lewis, and Renee Stout. Together, these artists work to dispel the many stereotypes and misunderstandings about African American art and people, but also remain a form of personal narrative. As Eric Key states, the works in his collection are an extension of himself, a Black man in a still mostly white art world; they are an extension of the country in which he lives and an extension of the artists who created them.

Dr. Adrienne L. Childs is an independent art historian, curator, and senior consulting curator at The Phillips Collection. She also served as curator at the David C. Driskell Center, where she curated numerous exhibitions on African American art. Childs co-curated the exhibition The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture for the Henry Moore Institute, as well as Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, (2020,) for the Phillips Collection. Childs’s current book project is Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts (2024). She has been awarded fellowships by many institutions, including the Hutchins Center at Harvard University and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery. In 2022, Childs was awarded the Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art for her contributions to the field of African American Art.

Halima Taha is best known for her ground-breaking bestseller, Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas, the first book to validate the collection of fine art, printmaking, and photography by Americans of African descent as viable assets and commodities within the art market. Her book served as a choice PBS membership incentive, raising its fundraising goal three times. In addition, her work created the foundation, in conjunction with the National Black Fine Art Show (1997-2009), to cultivate and educate global markets, enabling Swann Galleries to establish the first African American auction category in 2008. Her work catalyzed prominent museums to pursue collections of African American Art for exhibition and acquisition within the first two decades of this century. Taha is an art professional and tireless advocate for Black visual culture; her curatorial, art advisory, and strategic planning develop corporate and not-for-profit programs and audiences.

Eric Key is currently the director of the Arts Program at University of Maryland Global Campus.