At a press conference on Tuesday morning, the Taft Museum of Art announced an upcoming retrospective of the work of Robert S. Duncanson, often regarded as the world’s first internationally famous African American artist.
Duncanson spent the majority of his career working and living in Cincinnati, and is one of the most famous artists of the the Civil War era. His work can be seen all over the Taft Museum itself, especially in the museum’s famous Duncanson Hall, which sports several murals by the artist. The new exhibit, simply titled “Robert S. Duncanson,” will showcase over 80 works from the famous painter and was co-created in tandem with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
In addition to the upcoming retrospective, the Taft unveiled two newly-restored murals of Duncanson’s originally painted on the museum’s walls today, both of which are from his famous “Fruit Still-Life” series of works. Public interest in Duncanson’s work has always been significant, but has reached a fever pitch in recent years thanks to former United States President Joe Biden placing Duncanson’s painting “Landscape with Rainbow” inside the Oval Office during his presidency.
“That selection served to shine a light on the value of Duncanson’s work and his story. And since then, with increased scholarship, the time was right for an institution to tackle the project of a major Duncanson show, and there is obviously no better institution in America better positioned for that than the Taft Museum,” the museum’s Louise Taft Semple President & CEO Rebekah Beaulieu told CityBeat.
The exhibition, which begins in fall 2027, will showcase all sorts of Duncanson’s work across his entire career — portraiture, oil paintings, landscapes, still lifes, literary-based works and more. It will also examine his relationship with the South, which he often painted despite the danger of being a Black artist operating in the South when the Fugitive Slave Act was still legal. In addition, a catalog co-published with Yale University Press will feature 12 scholarly essays by curators, academics and conservators on Duncanson’s life.
When Beaulieu joined the team at the Taft four years ago, the “first thing” she wanted to do was a major retrospective of Duncanson’s work. After the museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs Ellen E. Roberts joined the team with a similar vision, she knew there was “no better time” to jumpstart the exhibition and to finally restore the lost murals in Duncanson Hall.
“We knew we should look at some of the things that we thought were mysteries that had to be solved, so that started right here in our own institutional home, where we knew that there had been these covered aspects, fragments of the murals, and we said, ‘This is the moment. Let’s see what we can do,'” she said. “It was a natural evolution that our research on the murals and the hidden fragments actually was concurrent with when we were doing the research for the catalog and gathering scholarly perspectives from around the country. So it has really been all Duncanson all the time here at the Taft, and it’s been wonderful what we’ve learned.”
Artists like Duncanson are often erased from the narrative of art history, even here in Cincinnati where he spent most of his time. Beaulieu hopes that this exhibition will change that.
“I hope our audience will recognize that Cincinnati was, is and will continue to be a hub of creativity and artistry, and we should be proud of that cultural legacy of the city. I would also say I think it’s incumbent upon institutions like ours to uplift the stories of artists that have traditionally fallen outside of the canon, and to find ways to showcase those stories. And one of the joys of being in a field like this is we continue to broaden our knowledge, and we get to solve mysteries and ask new questions. And this is a perfect emblem of that,” she said.
For more information, visit the Taft Museum of Art’s website.
