Art in Conversation: Black, But Not the Art: Breaking the Frame

BLACK but not the ART: Breaking the Frame brings together Black artists across Nebraska (Omaha & Lincoln) whose work challenges narrow definitions of Black creativity and shapes how regional art histories are formed in the present. The artists engage lineage, memory, and lived experience as active frameworks, while also imagining futures beyond the constraints those histories have imposed.

The “frame” functions as a metaphor for the limits historically placed on Black art, from expectations of form, to subject, and legibility. Rather than working within these boundaries, the artists create from embodied knowledge and lived reality, producing work that resists singular narratives and fixed meaning.

Through painting, photography, sculpture, text-based practices, and digital work, the exhibition asserts that what is made and documented now shapes what will be remembered later, insisting on Black creativity as expansive, complex, and ongoing.