About the Exhibition

“Though Micheaux aimed to...challenge white supremacist representations of ‘blackness,’ he was not concerned with the simple reduction of Black representation to a ‘positive’ image…He worked to produce images that would convey complexity of experience and feeling.” —bell hooks

Visionary African American writer, director, producer, and distributor Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) was the driving force behind more than forty films, both silent and sound. Born to parents who were formerly enslaved, he went on to become the most prominent African American filmmaker of the early 20th century. Micheaux independently produced what are known as race films, employing Black casts and crews to make films for Black audiences who routinely found themselves excluded, stereotyped, and vilified in mainstream movies. His films countered these harmful representations, though they were sometimes met with criticism in the Black press for their negative depictions of African American characters prone to corruption and vice.

Significant Movies and Moviemakers: Oscar Micheaux used rarely seen archival footage and materials such as film posters, production materials, and contemporaneous press accounts to examine the career of the first African American auteur. Micheaux worked in an industry whose high-water mark for many was D. W. Griffith’s virulently racist film The Birth of a Nation (USA, 1915), and where the depredations of Jim Crow segregation limited the professional and creative possibilities of countless Black Americans. Despite these constraints, Micheaux charted a unique and prolific career centered on complex and unflinching portrayals of Black life that resonate to this day.

The first iteration of the Significant Movies and Moviemakers gallery featured a six-gallery experience showcasing Citizen Kane (USA, 1941), Bruce Lee, Oscar Micheaux, Thelma Schoonmaker, Emmanuel Lubezki, and Real Women Have Curves (USA, 2002).