Organized at Acts of Art by Nigel Jackson and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, the roots of the Rebuttal exhibition go back to early 1969, with the founding of the BECC in response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Harlem on My Mind—an exhibition devoted to the “cultural capital of Black America,” but that included no work by Black painters or sculptors—and the Whitney Museum’s The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America, a survey of some eighty artists that again included no Black painters and sculptors.

In response to the BECC’s pickets and to press they generated, the Whitney entered into negotiations with the group and, after some months, agreed to the coalition’s demands for greater representation of Black artists in the museum’s long-established annual exhibitions, in its permanent collection, and in focused one-person exhibitions. The BECC lobbied, too, for a survey of Black artists and for Black representation on the curatorial staff to support that initiative. In January 1971, after still more heated negotiations, the BECC pulled its support for the Whitney’s survey, Contemporary Black Artists in America, and began to plan for a boycott and a counter exhibition. Black Artists in Rebuttal opened at Acts of Art the same night as the Whitney’s show, April 6, 1971, with fifty artists representing a broad umbrella of cultural positions and formations, and of styles and approaches.  ❉