TAM’s Margaret Bullock, speaks to Medicine Man Gallery about The Kinsey Collection at TAM.

Margaret Bullock, Tacoma Art Museum’s head curator, recently spoke with Chadd Scott at Medicine Man Gallery about the current Kinsey Collection exhibition and what it means to TAM and the Pacific North West. Read a brief excerpt below and click here to read the full article.

Black History is rarely featured in America’s Western History. The Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Transcontinental Railroad, cattle drives, sodbusters. Black faces are mostly absent from these stories. Not because they weren’t there. Black cowboys, doctors, farmers, artists, and others from all walks of life played integral roles in shaping the West’s history. 

They’ve been written out.

The Tacoma Art Museum is working to correct that omission and using the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection to do so. The CollectionConsidered one of the most comprehensive surveys of African American history and culture outside the Smithsonian Institution, the exhibition has toured 30 cities in the U.S. and internationally from Hong Kong to EPCOT Center at Disneyworld in Orlando, but this marks its first presentation in the Pacific Northwest.

The objects were amassed by Shirley and Bernard Kinsey during their five decades of marriage. A businessman and entrepreneur from Florida who met Shirley during Civil Rights protesting at Florida A&M University in 1963, Bernard Kinsey rose to become a vice president at Xerox. The couple settled in Los Angeles. Bernard left his Xerox job to help found and lead Rebuild LA, a revitalization program focused on bringing economic development to areas destroyed by the 1992 L.A. race riots sparked in the wake of Rodney King’s savage assault and the hands of L.A. police officers and their subsequent acquittal of charges.

Both of their lives, in uncountable ways, have been given to advancing African American people, communities, and history.