Kelli Morgan's fight for Detroit's black artists

Detroit curator, historian, educator and former Hyperallergic Her colleague Kelli Morgan thought she was done with museum work, but then a conversation with a colleague inspired her to embark on a mission to document and share the rich legacy of the city's black artists.

Last July, Morgan founded the Black Artists Archive (BAA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting the long history of black art in Detroit and making it accessible to a wider audience.

Morgan's recent shift builds on her previous work in museums and academic institutions, where she has championed anti-racist curation practices throughout her curatorial and academic career. After publicly resigning from her curatorial post at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (at Newfields) in 2022, citing racial discrimination, she subsequently established the Certificate in Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice at Tufts University, where she served as the first Director of Curatorial Studies. From last fall to this past July, she worked as senior curator and interim director of exhibitions at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History (CWMAAH) at Wayne State University in Detroit.

“It is difficult to do [curatorial] Work that centers black voices and the black community. It was an exhausting struggle,” Morgan said in an interview with Hyperallergicadding that despite initiatives for diversity, equality and inclusion, she had faced “backlash” and “resistance” from institutions.

“I was at a point where I thought, 'I'm fed up with museums. I'm fed up with science, especially art history,'” she added.

While at CWMAAH, Morgan worked on an archival research project exploring the lineage and professional relationships of local artists. It was as part of this work that Morgan first met 90-year-old Marian Stephens last December.

“Mrs. Stephens is the matriarch of several of these lines,” Morgan said.

A founding member of Arts Extended, one of the country's oldest black arts organizations, Stephens is a long-time art teacher and has mentored several generations of the city's artists, including painter and muralist Sydney James.

Stephens “literally developed customized programs for us, even outside the school system,” James said in an interview.

Through meeting Stephens, Morgan realized that documenting the city's black art history went beyond a mere exhibition and required the efforts of an entire organization.

Morgan hopes BAA will shine a spotlight on Detroit's wealth of overlooked black art history and differentiate itself from the archiving efforts of larger museums like the Getty Museum's African American Art History Initiative, which she says could focus more on “canonical masters.”

“There are all these artists who have somehow fallen through the cracks,” Morgan said. “There's this critical mass of black artists in the city who are over 80 years old. They're 80, 85 and older … and they have these archives, right in their living room or in a garage.”

With Arts Extended's legacy in mind, she appointed Stephens to the advisory board of the newly formed nonprofit. Stephens, a former high school arts teacher in Detroit, said Hyperallergic She has spent decades documenting the city's art scene, building a “disorganized” collection of articles, photographs and other materials from her former students, many of whom “have gone on to be very successful in the art industry.”

But building an archive isn't BAA's only goal: Morgan also wants to develop programs that support the city's current arts and culture scene. She plans to create a curatorial incubator, host residencies, and acquire a building with a multi-story gallery to showcase community-curated exhibitions and work by resident artists.

“I really want to offer them a place where they can develop their interdisciplinary or experimental ideas,” Morgan said, adding that she wanted to create a “safe space” away from “the kind of discrimination that occurs in traditional institutions and can push younger curators to turn to freelance work.”

Morgan said that when a major arts institution, whose name she declined to disclose, that had a vacant curator position for members of the African diaspora, asked her why no one was applying for the position, she replied, “You bring us in, but you don't create the structure to support us.”

“We are no longer willing to put ourselves at risk or expose ourselves to institutional harm,” Morgan continued.

With the intention of nurturing arts communities beyond institutions, BAA's programming will focus on emerging and mid-level artists, which Morgan said can serve as a model for similar nonprofits in the future.

On October 1, Morgan said BAA would begin digitizing the Arts Extended archive and intends to release a virtual exhibition by July 2025.

“[BAA] is a way to expand our community and let people know that we all live in one place,” Stephens said.