The Louisville Art Workshop was never just about art. It wasn't even primarily about art.
It stood for community.
The workshop intentionally centered both the work of Louisville's local African American artists and the city's historically Black West End neighborhoods.
"Black people have always wanted to be together and in conversation with one another and in community with one another, regardless of geography, regardless of language," fari nzinga, Curator of African and Native American Collections at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, said. "We are always trying to, in a sense, rebuild our families and communities after the holocaust that we suffered, the maafa. The great tragedy is what the maafa translates to in Swahili, and it is a word that we use to talk about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the global African slave trade. I see [the Louisville Art Workshop] as very much a part of African and African diasporic culture, to be in that position of call and response and to create that call and response together."
Ed Hamilton remembered hearing the workshop's "call" in 1969, when he graduated from the Louisville School of Art.
"I had amassed all of these pieces that I was doing, and I found out that my graduate show was only going to be up for a week," Hamilton said. "I said, 'Wait a minute, Wait a minute. Somebody's got to tell me, am I on the right track here?' People got to see it."
Hamilton's sculpting instructor suggested he touch base with a group of artists in the West End. The Sunday his graduate show was coming down, he hopped in his car and headed to 35th and Del Park Terrace in the West End—Fred Bond's house.
The Louisville Art Workshop's West End Origins
Ed Hamilton recalled that first meeting with Fred Bond and Bob Douglas at Bond's home for the first time, and inviting them to see his art show. "When they saw what I was doing, they said, 'Man, you got to be with us.' I didn't know who 'us' was, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me."
The "us" Bond mentioned was the Louisville Art Workshop, which at that time was the only space for artists of color to routinely exhibit their work in the city. Robert L. Douglas and Fred and Anna Bond were the founding members. The Bonds converted a West End storefront into both a home for their family and an exhibition space for participating artists.
The first show was held in January 1967, a time when the shadow of Jim Crow segregation still darkened Louisville. The Civil Rights Act had been passed only two-and-a-half years earlier, and the Voting Rights Act that followed came less than two years before the show.
Douglas brought his activist perspective to the space, helping establish a social mission for the organization whose ultimate goal was to support and uplift the community instead of measuring success based on commercial interests.
Though the collective put community first, Workshop artists did indeed still achieve great commercial success. Hamilton, in particular, has enjoyed a long and prestigious career through which he has been able to put back into the world his response to the Workshop's call. Two among many Hamilton's celebrated projects include Louisville's Abraham Lincoln Memorial at Waterfront Plaza statue and the "Spirit of Freedom" national memorial in Washington, D.C., which pays tribute to the African American soldiers and sailors of the Civil War. Prominent Workshop members also included G.C. Coxe, William Duffy, and Kenneth Victor Young.
At its height, artists from around the state and region would travel to exhibit and see the Workshop's robust exhibition program, which displayed sculpture, photography, poetry, creative writing, dance, music, and theater.
"Art is for everybody. It doesn't matter if you're not an artist, but you appreciate the art," Hamilton said. "You got music, you got jazz, you got blues. You may not be a musician, but you appreciate the music. You may not be a dancer, but you appreciate the dance. You may not be a performer in a theater, but you appreciate it, and that's what art is all about."
The Louisville Art Workshop artists truly embody what it means to create art in service of artists and community.
"This was really an effort to build a local institution," nzinga said. "The Louisville Art Workshop was so embedded and enmeshed in the West End neighborhood, and for good reason. They rooted themselves where they were, and then they engaged meaningfully and directly with the neighborhood and neighbors around them. People really felt a sense of art is this tool that I am using because I want to stay here and make the place where I live better. I want this place to reckon with my desires. I want it to be a place that I feel comfortable and that I have resources, and that there are opportunities for me and for people like me."
From Louisville to the World
Organized efforts to uplift African American artists in Louisville didn't begin with the Workshop. Before co-founding The Workshop, Robert L. Douglas collaborated with Sam Gilliam to establish Gallery Enterprises in 1957. This earlier organization, which existed until 1961, was a visual arts collective dedicated to creating opportunities for Black artists to share and discuss their work as they built a wider audience.
Gilliam's name may be familiar to many art fans, as his abstract draped canvases can be found in the permanent collections of America's most prestigious art museums. An icon of American modernism, the Mississippi-born, Louisville-raised painter, sculptor, and educator is heralded as a major contributor to 20th-century abstract art. Best known for pioneering the draped painting style and as a prominent member of the Washington D.C. art scene and member of the Washington Color School, Gilliam's Louisville roots are an equally important part of the artist's story. African American figurative painter Bob Thompson was also a member of the Gallery Enterprises collective during much of his remarkably short, yet productive eight-year professional career.
The history of these illustrative local collectives is not widely known, even among Louisville art circles. nzinga, who has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and has dedicated her adult life to the study of African American art, admitted that she too knew nothing of Gallery Enterprises or the Louisville Art Workshop before arriving at the Speed Art Museum in 2022.
"Obviously, I knew the names Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson, and Kenneth Victor Young having taught survey courses of African American art history, but I didn't know anything about the role of the West End neighborhood in Louisville and the other players who were significant in helping those big three artists to develop their styles, hone their crafts, and launch and sustain their careers," nzinga said. "I always had taught that Spiral, [founded] in 1963 in New York City, was the first self-consciously organized visual artists collective of Black artists, and to learn that they had been preceded by six years in Louisville, Kentucky, of all places, was definitely an eye opener."
For all of Gilliam's acclaim, his Louisville years and connections to the city are rarely mentioned. His greatest success came in Washington, D.C., and that's where he's generally associated with.
The more nzinga researched Gilliam and Louisville art history, the more she talked to people who were there at the time, and the more connected she found them.
"I would hear so often how he would come back to Louisville and keep up with certain artists and want to know what they were doing, want to talk to them, want to spend time with them, want to look at their work, want to show them his work," nzinga said.
Gilliam's renown as a major figure in 20th-century American art alone is enough to connect Louisville and the Workshop to the broader American art world of the time. But this was hardly the only connection. Further research on the scene revealed a network that presented Louisville as a hotspot of mid-century African American art.
Fred Bond knew Earl Hooks from when both lived in Gary, IN. Hooks was a sculptor, ceramicist, and printmaker who became a professor in the legendary art department at Fisk University, where he worked from 1968-1999. Louisville and Nashville are only 175 highway miles apart, and Bond bridged the short distance between the cities by organizing an exhibition of work by Fisk art professors at the Louisville Art Workshop. Fisk University later hired Bond as a curator, where he would organize exhibitions for art giants including GC Cox, Elizabeth Catlett, and Alma Thomas.
Douglas was close with the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), a collective of Chicago-based artists that were contemporaries of the Workshop.
"He was very self-consciously part of a much larger cultural conversation and dialogue that was happening nationally, and in some cases, internationally," nzinga said. "Folks are coming and going. They're part of a wider network, and they're aware that they're part of this wider network, and they're celebrating it and enjoying it."
Louisville's central location as the hub in a circuit of interstates connecting it with Great Migration landing spots including Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland also made it easy for Louisville artists to visit and check out those scenes, while Black artists from those places visited Louisville to engage with programming at the Workshop.
"It wasn't just a space for folks to do art classes or to display their work," nzinga explained. "It was really about being part of a larger art world and exposing people to other artists, their practice, their aesthetic, their style, their technique."
All for One, One for All
Collectivity was as central to the Louisville Art Workshop as was community.
"I remember Professor Douglas telling me that he and Sam Gilliam would talk about that often and that Gilliam was like, 'Oh, man, you gotta do it with the group, all the greats, they had a collective behind them," nziga remembered.
The French Impressionists. The Surrealists. The Bauhaus. The Abstract Expressionists.
Workshop members were steeped in Western art history. They were the handful of Black students permitted to attend and graduate from the recently desegregated University of Louisville, and their earning degrees are a central part of the Workshop's narrative. "There's strength in numbers," Hamilton said. "When you associate with a viable group of people, like-minds, you can do a lot. If you're just an artist in your own little studio, doing your work and not getting out, nobody's going to know who you are."
Despite the extraordinary achievements of the Workshop and its artists, the broader established Louisville art scene didn't care to engage or elevate the group. The city's galleries, dealers, and most collectors didn't want anything to do with Black artists at the time. What Workshop members were going to achieve, they were going to achieve outside the mainstream. Together.
nzinga further credited the ethos of the time for their unity.
"Today, more people have embraced individualism. More people have integrated into the notion of just getting the bag as they speak, but in that time, you also had to reckon with a critical mass of Black people who were self-educating politically and who were articulating an analysis of power and who would hold other Black people accountable," she said. "They were like, 'Oh no, you're trying to sell out to the man?' The Black Panthers, the Republic of New Afrika, there are so many groups that were active politically and culturally that it was not socially acceptable to be individualists, to say, 'I'm just going to go out here and try to make it on my own.' No."
The Louisville Art Workshop made it together until 1978, petering out ultimately due to lack of funding.
Douglas would go on to start the Pan African Studies Department at the University of Louisville. Bond died young, at 55. Coxe mentored generations of Louisville artists, earning the moniker "dean of Louisville Black artists." Young, Hamilton, and Duffy went on to considerable art world success.
The Speed Art Museum has been celebrating Louisville Art Workshop artists through a series of small exhibitions under the title "Louisville's Black Avant-Garde" leading up to a major group show in the fall of 2027.