About
On October 1969, artists Nigel Jackson and Patricia Grey opened Acts of Art Galleries in a small storefront at 31 Bedford Street in New York City’s West Village. Advertisements in the Village Voice and the Villager announced the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, its “first ethnic showing, featuring Black Art in America.” The exhibition “included 150 works by 15 Black artists” and “attracted about two hundred people to the opening of the show.” The names of most of those fifteen artists have been lost, but Benny Andrews was among them. Andrews, by then a well-established artist, sent three paintings to the opening show, a “gesture toward helping Nigel get a foothold as a commercial Black art dealer.”
On January 1971, Acts of Art moved into a larger space a few blocks north, at 15 Charles Street. That year the gallery presented two exhibitions that are now seen as milestones in have become part of the history of Black artists in New York in the wake of the Black Arts Movement: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s Rebuttal to Whitney Museum Exhibition/Black Artists in Rebuttal and Black Women Artists: “Where We At.” Before Acts of Art finally closed, in October 1975, Jackson and Grey had mounted well over fifty solo, two-person, and group exhibitions of Black art and artists, and hosted meetings, concerts, poetry readings, and fundraisers for the Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem, the Prison Justice Committee in support of the Tombs Seven, and other causes in their Greenwich Village space. ❉
Left. interior, Acts of Art on Bedford Street. Right. Acts of Art on Charles Street
The Amsterdam News. March 28, 1970.
Nigel Jackson was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1940, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1953. Jackson, his parents, two brothers and a sister, settled in Harlem, on Morningside Avenue. The family would later move to Springfield Gardens in Queens. The neighborhood was Jamaican and Ghanaian, and Jackson would later say, “the melting pot didn’t work. You know, so, I can’t melt.” Jackson served in the Marines from 1958 to 1962, and, following his discharge worked in the production office of Look Magazine.
He enrolled at the New School for Social Research in 1970-71, where he worked with the artist Anthony Toney, a politically left figurative painter, and began taking classes regularly at the Art Students League in 1971, where his focus was primarily portraiture.
He and Patricia Grey married in 1970, just after Acts of Art opened, and separated before the gallery closed in 1975. Jackson lived and worked in Botswana for two years after the closure of Acts of Art; when he returned to the United States in 1977, he had no interest in returning to the art world. He died in New York on November 7, 2005.
Less is known is about Patricia Grey. Her work was included in a few of Acts of Art’s earliest exhibitions, and according to the bio included in the handmade catalogue that accompanied an untitled group exhibition in early 1970, she was born in New York, attended grade school in Greenwich Village, and later studied at Syracuse University and the Art Students League.