Actress CCH Pounder Teams Up With The DuSable In Chicago To Share Art Collection

“I had a huge conflict between being an artist and being an actor,” CCH Pounder told Forbes.com. “I had a mentor who said, ‘acting is for young people; as long as you have your eyes and your hands, you can always do art.’ I took her at her word and (thought), I’ll do acting for half a century and then the other half, I’ll do art–it doesn’t exactly work that way, does it.”

While Pounder is closing in on that half century in acting with major TV and movie credits to her name including “Sons of Anarchy,” “The Shield,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “NCIS: New Orleans,” “ER,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Bagdad Café,” she never abandoned art to pursue it. She dabbled in making herself–drawings, sketches, collage–even sold a few pieces, but it has been as a patron, collector, gallery owner and museum founder where her greatest mark on the art world has been made.

“For a good part of the time, I would go to act so that I could support the art,” she said.

In 1993, Pounder and her late husband Boubacar Koné founded and built the Musee Boribana, the first privately owned contemporary art museum in Dakar, Senegal. Their intention was “to show Mother Africa what her scattered children were doing out there” in her words. They gifted the museum and its artworks to the nation in 2014 shortly before his passing.

During the same period of time, Pounder operated a gallery in Los Angeles for 15 years–a remarkable achievement anyone in that industry will testify to–only closing its door when filming took her away from L.A. thus making it impossible for her to remain involved in the business’ day-to-day functions.

Increasingly, Pounder is now collaborating with museums, sharing pieces from her 500-plus item collection of mostly African and African Diasporic artists amassed over more than 45 years. The latest presentation comes at The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago during the exhibition, “Diaspora Stories: Selections from the CCH Pounder Collection,” on view through July 16, 2023.

Displayed are 24 works by world-renowned artists including Kehinde Wiley, Ebony G. Patterson, Mickalene Thomas, Betye Saar, Harmonia Rosales and others. Each item was curated and personally selected in collaboration with the DuSable and Pounder from her collection.

“One of my wishes is that my collection does not sit in the basement, that my alma maters do not inherit it and trot it out on Black History Month,” Pounder explained of her interest in publicly sharing her possessions. “I’m really interested in a section of society that sometimes feels uninvited to galleries. Sometimes young people miss out because their schools no longer have the money to bus them to museums. (I want) to find museums in areas where it’s possible that on your bus ride to school, you can pop off and dash into that museum.”

Black faces walking into a museum and seeing Black faces. Pounder understands the impact that can have.

“It’s immeasurable,” she said. “It was for me, therefore, I already know that it will be for them.”

Say it Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud

Pounder was born in Georgetown, Guyana, moving to England at 8-years-old and attending a boarding school in Sussex. There, her identity was both lost and found.

“Every place that I went to through my school, there was nothing that reminded me of me–nothing,” she remembers, thinking at the time, “I’m a little English girl from this little England town–no, you’re not.”

Thanks to James Brown’s “Say it Loud–I’m Black and I’m Proud” and a schoolmate who reminded her, “you’re black; you’re from Africa,” Pounder began connecting to her ancestry, using art as a means to do so, then and now.

“Just from my experience, I wanted to share the fact that we exist, we’re there, and we should be in all the places that one exists,” Ponder said. “In the library, there should be books. In the museums, there should be images, and I think deep down inside, maybe that’s how this whole thing happened. That I’ve chosen a life to represent the fact that I exist.”

Her existence as a Black woman shaped her early collecting habits.

“Very subtly, my husband said to me, ‘I’m only married to one woman, what are all these women doing on the wall,’” Ponder recalls.

She would gradually expand her collecting to include male figures, landscapes and abstract art from African, the Caribbean and African Diasporic artists, but portraiture remains the backbone.

“My eye is for portraiture, I know it now and I knew it then,” Ponder said. “Then was because of a need to see myself in some way, and now it’s because I am in love with the human form. It still fascinates me, even in its distortions, or its accuracy. I still gravitate to that.”

What does the four-time Emmy nominee look for when considering the purchase of a painting today?

“Something has to alarm me about it. I have to find it alarming in some way,” she explains. “I go past it and I’ll look at everything else and then I find myself–let me just go back and take a look at that. Or I leave, and then I call in a couple of weeks and say, ‘you know what, this thing is still stuck in my mind.’”

Her latest purchase was a Fahamu Pecou painting from Arthur Roger Gallery in her now hometown of New Orleans.

“I was determined just to look and keep walking and–dammit!–I got caught in this piece,” Ponder said.

The painting referenced “saggin’” fashion, reminding her of the nattily dressed sapeurs in Africa.

Anyone interested in “Diaspora Stories” at The DuSable will also surely be interested in “not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s” through June 4, 2023, at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.

Africa’s Long 1960s

“not all realisms” brings together photographic prints, books, magazines, posters and other printed ephemera from Ghana, Mali and South Africa, addressing the role of photography in Africa’s long 1960s—a period of resistance, revolution, new national and transnational movements and the daily lives of those living through it.

Seventeen new postcolonial nations were created in Africa in 1960. Eighteen more the next year. Thirteen more by the decade’s end.

“The exhibition examines photography’s capacity to construct and convey what happened across Africa during the 1960s,” guest curator Leslie M. Wilson said.

Eschewing panoramic images of political rallies or dramatic scenes of conflict, “not all realisms” communicates this stunning transformation in world history through mostly remarkably ordinary pictures and periodicals of regular people doing regular things against a most irregular historic backdrop proving how the very big is often best understood through an understanding of the very small.