Wilhelmina Godfrey: I am what I am

Born in 1914 in Philadelphia and raised in Buffalo, Wilhelmina Godfrey was an artist of exceptional skill and vision. Working in painting, printmaking, and textiles, her practice continuously evolved throughout her career of over fifty years. Godfrey’s lifelong contributions as an artist, writer, scholar, and educator earned the admiration and respect of many, cementing her legacy within the local arts and African American communities.

Wilhelmina Godfrey: I am what I am is a retrospective look at the artist’s massive portfolio and the development of her work from representative figuration to abstraction. Like many of her contemporaries, Godfrey pushed the boundaries of form, color, harmony, theme, and abstraction, refusing to be confined to a single medium or subject. Her artistic experimentation incorporated the influence of African motifs, her travels, and her observations as a Black woman artist living on Buffalo’s East Side, adding important nuance to the canon of how Black artists have fused their lived realities with their artistic interests. The dynamic connection between art and life is apparent not only in Godfrey’s artwork but also in her scholarship on African American craft art and her community engagements as an educator and co-founder of the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. 

Her work incorporates representations of her cultural identity while dispelling the myth that Black artists—particularly during the concurrent Black Power and Black Arts Movements in the 1960s and 1970s—were solely concerned with expressing their blackness through figurative realism. Godfrey transcended the assumptions imposed on artists to speak to a universal experience through politically charged, “positive” representation. Instead, her work is part of a larger narrative of Black artists who embraced abstraction and engaged in aesthetic developments outside the parameters of identity politics while remaining deeply connected to their cultural heritage. Her portfolio, complex in form, subject, and style, echoes the multiplicity of Black identities, expressions, and experiences that exist. 

The exhibition brings new attention to Godfrey’s career, ensuring that her incredible cultural contributions are recognized and celebrated in her first major museum retrospective. The featured works and archival material are exhibited together after years of research to bring unknown examples of her work to light, continuing the necessary work of preserving stories like hers so that they are not lost to time. Her story is a powerful reminder of art’s function in discovering the nuances of our identities on our terms to set ourselves and our imaginations free.

Wilhelmina Godfrey: I am what I am is presented through the generosity of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. For their leadership gifts, we gratefully recognize Bank of America and an Anonymous Foundation. Special thanks also go out to James & Dorothy Pappas and Lynne Stenclik Finn & Broadleaf for their additional generous support.