LOS ANGELES — Cameron Shaw has had the talent from an early age to create her own opportunities. In the summer of 2002, she came home from college, visited the offices of the Peter Norton Family Foundation in Santa Monica, was impressed by the highly contemporary art on each wall, and asked if she could work there. The organization created an internship for her the following summer.
When she moved to New York after college to take an assistant position at the David Zwirner Gallery, she quickly translated that into a job, previously nonexistent, as a research manager.
After that, as a freelance art writer interested in how culture could play a role in rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina, she earned a writing scholarship and won $10,000 on the game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” to help her move there. Finally, in 2011, she founded Pelican Bomb, an online publication designed to support New Orleans artists and writers.
Now she has made her greatest professional leap ever, taking the position of Executive Director of the California African American Museum (CAAM). She was hired as Chief Curator and Deputy Director in September 2019 and had been on the job for a little over a year—a pandemic year, in fact—when Director George O. Davis quietly resigned after being charged with sexual harassment.
Shaw, 39 years old† said she acknowledged that a “search process could be destabilizing” and immediately wrote a letter to the board of trustees, claiming she had the vision and skills to run the museum. The board met Shaw last February and although she had never led an organization nearly the size or budget of CAAM, about $3.8 million, she got the job that month.
“I pleaded for myself,” she said. “My parents always instilled in me that as a black girl I would get nothing.”
Shaw declined to comment on the lawsuit against Davis, who is naming CAAM as a defendant and is still pending. But she said she’s committed to creating “a workplace that’s safe and supportive where I stand up with integrity, empathy, generosity and clarity. And I’m a person in progress working toward those things.”
She talks about the power of listening (also meditating, which she’s been doing since 15) and said her “purposefulness comes in making space or creating platforms for others.” Her supporters agree that her form of ambition is more generous than self-interest. One is Taylor Renee Aldridge, CAAM’s new curator, who describes Shaw’s leadership as “intuitive” and “not hierarchical at all — she’s very interested in working across the aisle.”
Another fan is the artist Mark Bradford, who calls her “an amazing” collaborator. “I love how she’s very global and local at the same time,” he said. “She can see the gender, the big idea and the details.” Bradford met Shaw last year and has enlisted all of her help creating exhibits for his non-profit space, Art+Practice, in Leimert Park.
Art+Practice has collaborated with other museums in the past, but a new five-year partnership with CAAM is the biggest commitment to date. “We’re going to create the scaffolding around CAAM’s ideas and visions,” Bradford said. (The collaboration kicks off with a Deborah Roberts show, adapted from the Contemporary Austin, which opens March 19 at Art+Practice).
Shaw’s job won’t be easy. With a broad scope in both black art and African American history, CAAM was founded in 1977 by the state of California and remains primarily state-funded and free to the public. It is located in Exposition Park, a 152-acre museum- and stadium-rich lot south of downtown Los Angeles (and a site of the 2028 Olympics). The museum is overseen by the state’s Natural Resources Agency, better known for managing parks and nature reserves, which can create “a complex set of conditions,” Shaw diplomatically said.
The museum has no endowment and only acquires works of art by donation – it has a policy of not spending state money on purchases – making for a spotty permanent collection. CAAM is also chronically understaffed, currently employing only 17 full-time employees.
Then there’s the potential competition, as so many museums are scrambling to display and acquire work by black artists. It begs the question of what the specific role of CAAM should be in the future. What’s CAAM on offer when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on the other side of town hosts the famous Obama portraits and, in the process, hosts an acclaimed show of black portraits?
“I want LACMA to have a Black American portrait show. It’s important for black people to see themselves in that space; it’s important for others to see black performers and black faces in that space,” Shaw said.
“But like all things, the experience or understanding of art and archival objects is transformed by context,” she added, citing factors such as neighborhood and audience. “When CAAM presents this work, we bring out a definitive black context and history. And we privilege the experience of our black creators, thinkers and audience.”
Shaw did not pursue the art market trend that has made black figuration, and portraiture in particular, so valuable, but instead followed a group of artists who thought of abstraction “as a pointed act of defiance of the demands of legibility and the demands of making the black body visible.” She points to the museum’s recent survey of work by Sanford Biggers, who engages in a dialogue with black cultural history by painting antique quilts, making glitter bombs, cutting up and otherwise manipulating.
She has identified the black abstraction, which she sees in music as well as in the visual arts, as one of the ‘four pillars’ for CAAM and an organizing theme for the museum’s programming. Another is “Black lives, green justice,” or as Shaw asks, “How do we move forward in this moment of genuine environmental crisis?”
Her third pillar focuses on black spirituality and “ancestral technologies,” which she interprets as “thinking about indigenous African knowledge and the way it is imparted by black people in this country both intentionally and unconsciously.” She is particularly interested in how spiritual traditions have anchored black protest movements, from abolitionism to Black Lives Matter. On February 5, CAAM opened an overview of what Aldridge, the curator, calls “sacred geometric abstraction” by Matthew Thomas, an artist who moved from LA to Thailand ten years ago to study Buddhism.
The fourth pillar is positioning CAAM as a resource for showcasing African-American historical material from its own collection and from other museums, libraries and the archives that live “in our basements, garages and under our beds,” Shaw said. .
Next on that front: A California buffalo soldier show hosted by CAAM history curator Susan D. Anderson, which, in Anderson’s words, examines “the role of black soldiers in the history of military violence against Native American people and the debate in the black community about her participation in wars.
“I find the way she has defined her pillars very interesting and inspiring,” said Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who sees these themes as building on CAAM’s existing strengths. “She is as invested in the history of the California African American Museum as she is in creating a future for the institution.”
History and art don’t have to be separated, Aldridge said. “So much of what I’ve learned from artists, especially artists practicing in California like John Outterbridge and Betye Saar, is that the creative and the historical aren’t separate at all, they’re intertwined in beautiful ways.”
Aldridge and Anderson were both hired by Shaw to rebuild the curatorial team after several staff retirements. She also appointed Isabelle Lutterodt as Deputy Director, Essence Harden as Visual Arts Curator, and Alexsandra M. Mitchell as Education and Programs Manager, ensuring an all-black, all-female leadership team.
Shaw notes that for the most part, the new team members don’t have a traditional art museum background, but have founded their own organizations or have worked independently, which “inspires a sense of ambition and experimentation.”
Her own trajectory was also marked by periods of working outside organizations, or inventing her own. She grew up in LA, where her father worked as an architect and helped her mother with his business, while her aunts worked in the entertainment world. Shaw studied art history at Yale. In New York she left David Zwirner after three years to start her own writing and editor.
In New Orleans, together with Amanda Brinkman, she started Pelican Bomb, an art criticism website that eventually became a breeding ground for exhibitions from 2011 to 2018. to see where they went naturally,” Brinkman said.
With her team at CAAM, Shaw is now aligning out-of-state financial donors, she said, to create flexibility with acquisitions, exhibitions and more. She also looks back on CAAM’s history, anticipating its 50th anniversary in 2027, to find ways to share her achievements to date.
“Historically white-centered museums wonder what it means to center black artists, BIPOC artists,” she said. “CAAM has been doing that work for over 40 years.”
