Epilogue

The epilogue outlines the strategies ultimately devised by the major museums to manage and accommodate the call for cultural equity and social justice: the creation of specific physical spaces within the museums in which to show works by artists of color—often restaurant galleries or small exhibition project spaces; reframing issues of cultural equity and accessibility as questions of “audience development”; and helping to create the wave of new, culturally grounded museums and train a contingent of art historians and administrators to staff them. This last development, the emergence of culturally grounded art museums, marks the 1970s as the beginning of the current era, a period of new opportunities for artists of color, but one that retains from the past culturally coded pathways through the art world; systems that sift artists by “race” and ethnicity; and culturally separate institutions with managed crossovers.