*The Barnett-Aden Gallery opened on this date in 1943. This was the first Black-owned nonprofit art gallery in America.
Located in Washington, D.C., it was founded by James V. Herring and Alonzo J. Aden, who was associated with Howard University's art department and gallery. The gallery, operated until 1969, was the first successful Black-owned private art gallery in the United States, showcased numerous important artists, and became an important, racially integrated part of the artistic and social worlds of the 1940s and 1950s Washington, D.C. The gallery was on the first floor of 127 Randolph Place, NW row home, shared by the two founders, who were life partners.
Herring joined the Howard faculty in 1921, started the University's Art department in 1922, was its head until he retired in 1953, and founded the University's Gallery of Art in 1928 (it opened in 1930). Aden, a former student of Herring at Howard who was the first curator of the University's Gallery of Art until he left that position in 1943, was the director of the Barnett-Aden gallery, named after his mother, Naomi Barnett Aden. Black artists featured at the gallery included Alma Thomas, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Charles White, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Jacob Lawrence, Laura Wheeler Waring, Romare Bearden, Henry O. Tanner, and Bernice Cross.
The collection featured artists of every race, particularly African American artists whose work was shown in several other venues. "...there were few such opportunities in the years following World War II...in those bleak years, the Barnett-Aden Gallery was one of the few private galleries where Black painters, sculptors, and graphic artists had a continuing opportunity to expose their works.” The gallery opened with the exhibition "American Paintings for the Home." It was officially incorporated on August 19, 1947. The early gallery, which existed in 1947, can be seen in the painting First Gallery by John Robinson. Exhibition shows, receptions, and other events provided a racially integrated gathering place for the art community in a segregated city from the 1940s to 1960s.
Eleanor Roosevelt was photographed visiting the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1944 as First Lady. Romare Bearden said he first saw a Matisse in Washington at the Barnett-Aden. Therese Schwartz wrote that the Barnett-Aden was the most important art gallery in America south of New York. The gallery began to decline in the late 1950s. After the death of the founders in 1961 (Aden) and 1969 (Herring), the gallery closed, and the bulk of the gallery's collection was transferred via Adolphus Ealey to the Museum of African American Art in Tampa, FL (now defunct) as well as to private collections.
The collection was shown in the 1970s at the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Robert L. Johnson owned much of the collection. 2015, he donated portions to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
