Black portraiture is on a timer. Every few years, institutions rush to fill their collections with Black faces, signaling progress. But the moment the optics shift, that visibility fades like a marketing campaign. This cycle of exposure and abandonment, masquerading as progress, is nothing new — it’s just more visible now.
In the last few years, there has been a noticeable surge of institutional interest in Black portraiture. Auction houses saw record-breaking sales of Black artists, and exhibitions spotlighting Black portraiture swelled across the art world. But the surge was fleeting. In the latest New York Magazine article, “How the Black Portraiture Boom Went Bust,” Rachel Corbett outlines the rapid decline in demand for Black portraiture. The art market corrected itself, and Black artists — those whose work once filled the headlines — were relegated back to the margins. It was almost as if this surge in visibility was not about rectifying historical exclusion, but exploiting a fleeting moment of political urgency.
The term “Black Fatigue,” coined by Mary-Frances Winters, describes the chronic exhaustion Black communities endure from systemic racism. Yet, in a turn both cynical and calculated, conservative commentators have co-opted the term to express their supposed weariness of Blackness in public discourse. This framing is not accidental; it’s strategic. It serves as a mechanism for narrative control, a justification for retreating from dialogue and action. When society claims it is “tired” of Black narratives, it becomes easier to pull back from Black art, from Black stories, from Black lives — returning visibility to its factory settings.
The swell of Black portraiture following the summer of 2020 was heralded as a cultural reckoning. Artists like Serge Attukwei Clottey, Kwesi Botchway, and Isshaq Ismail saw their works sell for unprecedented prices. Collectors and institutions, eager to signal their alignment with the movement, bought heavily into the aesthetic of Black presence.
But this wasn’t about representation — it was about optics. As soon as the socio-political climate cooled, so did the demand. The boom turned bust. The artworks, once symbols of acknowledgment, became speculative assets, abandoned when their political and financial value deflated. It’s not hard to trace the shift: Headlines about record sales gave way to whispers about “market correction.” In 2021, Serge Attukwei Clottey’s “Fashion Icons” sold for £340,200 (over $450,000 by today’s rates) at auction, smashing estimates. By 2024, those same works struggled to meet reserve prices. Institutional gestures — acquisitions, solo exhibitions, magazine covers — vanished as quickly as they appeared. Black portraiture, once the centerpiece of auctions and exhibitions, was tucked back into storage, making way for the next fashionable movement. Increasingly, that movement has been toward Black abstraction — work made by Black artists that is often not legibly Black without the assistance of a press release, docent, or eager salesperson who frames it as such. Abstraction, in this sense, becomes a comfortable re-entry for institutions, a way to nod at Black presence without the weight of explicit representation. It’s inclusion, but without the burden of narrative.
Public art spaces are no different. Thomas J Price’s “Grounded in the Stars” (2023), currently towering over Times Square, stands as a rare monument of everyday Blackness — a 12-foot bronze sculpture of a fictional Black woman, serene yet assertive. Her stance, hands on hips, is neither symbolic nor exaggerated; it is a gesture of ordinary presence in one of the world’s most visible intersections. The backlash against Price’s work is telling. Dismissed as woke propaganda and performative, the sculpture is criticized simply for occupying space in a landscape long dominated by white male figures. Times Square, with its statues of Father Francis P. Duffy and George M. Cohan, has traditionally served as a monument to White legacy, cementing historical narratives that privilege whiteness as the default. Price’s sculpture unsettles that visual hierarchy by asserting a simple, undeniable truth: Blackness belongs in these spaces too, not as an act of defiance, but as a matter of fact.
But the attacks reveal more than discomfort; they expose a strategy. By framing Price’s work as “wokeness,” it is easier to justify its removal or marginalization. When the fatigue narrative is deployed, it doesn’t just suggest that society is tired of conversations about race — it implies that Black presence itself is the burden. This isn’t incidental; it’s strategic. Reframing “Black fatigue” as society’s exhaustion with Black visibility absolves institutions from responsibility and makes retreat feel reasonable. Price’s sculpture, by merely existing, is treated as an act of provocation.
The exact phrase “Black fatigue” itself has not been explicitly co-opted — its original definition, as outlined by Winters, still stands as a descriptor for the cumulative toll of systemic racism on Black bodies and minds. What has emerged, however, is a rhetorical maneuver that mirrors the symptoms of “Black fatigue” and reframes them as societal exhaustion with Black visibility. The concept, which was originally meant to articulate the physical, emotional, and psychological strain of enduring racial inequity, has been subtly inverted. Instead of recognizing the fatigue experienced by Black communities, public discourse, particularly among conservative commentators, has begun to imply a kind of public fatigue with Blackness itself. This manifests in the market’s retreat from Black portraiture, the criticism of monuments like Price’s sculpture, and the narrative that too much Black visibility is somehow overwhelming or unnecessary. In this way, while the terminology remains intact, the strategy of invoking fatigue serves as a release valve for institutional and societal discomfort, justifying retreat as a form of equilibrium rather than erasure.
The conservative distortion of “Black fatigue” is strategic. It pivots the conversation from the real, lived exhaustion of navigating systemic racism to a fabricated weariness of racial discourse itself. This reframing is not just linguistic — it’s market-driven. When institutions and collectors declare fatigue, it’s not just a call to retreat from dialogue; it’s a coded signal to deflate the value of Black art, to shift the lens away from Blackness until its visibility is demanded once again.
This isn’t a failure of Black art; it’s a design. Fatigue, in this co-opted sense, is a release valve for market pressure — a justification to discard Blackness when it no longer serves the public’s appetite for righteousness. In this way, the art world’s fatigue isn’t symptomatic of real exhaustion; it’s strategic engineering.
The path forward must disrupt this cycle of boom and bust. To challenge this, we have to challenge the notion of fatigue itself. The art world’s fatigue is not a symptom — it is a strategy. It is a preemptive justification for erasure. If Black art is only visible when politically convenient, then its erasure isn’t fatigue — it’s engineered. The market’s relationship to Blackness is extractive, calculated, and cyclical. We aren’t witnessing a market correction; we’re witnessing controlled disappearance. To resist it is to demand space for Black art that is not contingent on crisis or optics but on the permanence of Black visibility.
What if Black visibility itself is the commodity — valuable when politically convenient, but abandoned when it demands too much space? If optics and fleeting urgency dictate the market’s relationship to Black art, then it is time to expose that relationship for what it is: extractive, manipulative, and deeply calculated.