Interview with Art Historian and Curator Danny Dunson
DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, Chicago
02 April 2025
Danny Dunson is an art historian, curator and the Director of Curatorial Services and Community Partnerships at Chicago’s DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center. He is also the founder of Legacy Bros., an incubator for emerging artists. Ahead of Gustavo Nazareno’s forthcoming presentation at the DuSable Museum, we speak with Danny about art history’s blind spots, how his work tackles them and the art historical importance of Nazareno’s work as documentation of a multifaceted understanding of culture, religion and spirituality.
How did you find your way into art?
As a kid, I’d climb the library shelves of my father’s book collection. He had books on everything from Shakespeare to Frederick Douglas to writings by Dr. Martin Luther King to Aesop’s fables. I’d take out books on artists – Manet, Monet, Leonardo – and rip out pages with beautiful paintings and stick them on my walls. Art just inspired me. I started studying the history of the paintings I loved. Even before I could articulate it, I was always interested in a simple question: what inspired someone to do this?
I studied fine art at a couple of universities and dropped out, driving my parents crazy. But whenever I wanted to get an A for a semester, I’d make sure to take an art history course. It just stuck with me; like someone with a natural grasp of concepts in math or science, I found that I could talk confidently about art. I was fascinated by art as this language that words can never reach, and I allowed that language to speak to me. That’s something I continue to do today.
But quite early in your education, you noticed gaps in the Art History curriculum that you were being taught. Is that right?
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I was an Art History major, we had this several-inches-thick textbook: Art History One. Everything in it was explained through a Western lens. There was literally one page that considered the continent of Africa, and my professor skipped over it because they weren’t familiar with the topic. I remember, in an auditorium with about 300 kids, there were a few other Black kids. We found each other’s eyes and looked at each other like ‘did you just see this?’
From then on, I started extracting Black images from Western art — any time I saw a classical piece with a Black person in it, I tried to elevate it. Looking back, I was so wrapped up in the Western Canon that it was all I could define myself with at that time.
That changed when a dear professor, and a mentor of mine to this day, encouraged me to study abroad for a semester in West Africa. Here, I started to understand the autonomous working of a culture that wasn’t included in the Western canon. It blew my mind and completely changed my trajectory. It defined what I wanted to study and, later, what I wanted to showcase and cultivate with young artists.
Legacy Bros. became a vehicle for you to do this – can you tell me how that project started and how it’s changed over time?
Honestly, I had no intention of starting it. My brother and I were going to start a retail business and we settled on the name Legacy Bros. as a nod to older heritage brands like Brooks Brothers. I made an Instagram account for it and then went back to school. I shared things I learned about Black art history there, and started to get tons of messages from artists, so many that I couldn’t go through them all.
Years later, when COVID hit, I was working as an independent curator. I went through those messages that had been sitting there for a while. I was surprised by the quality of what I saw, and started reaching out to some of the artists. That’s how my relationship with Gustavo Nazareno started, but we’ll get to that later. I started setting up virtual meetings with these artists, just to get to know each other. They all had great talent, but were very much on the surface of what they could become.
I realised that throughout all my years of dropping out of school, graduating school, switching majors, being a visual artist, being an academic, I had learned quite a bit that I could disseminate to others. The biggest component was talking about the history of art, and talking to these artists about how their work connected to it.
It’s amazing how these things start by chance and end up becoming full ecosystems. Today, your work at the DuSable Museum seems to be a continuation of that educational ethos. Could you tell us about that?
When I joined in October of 2021, it was called the DuSable Museum of African American History. In 2022, we officially changed that to the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Centre. Using the term Black in this very universal way isn’t to demean the specificity of African Americans, but to expand a larger reach of Black resilience, being open to Black people from around the world.
The museum’s founder, Margaret Burroughs, had founded it in her house in 1961. She was an educator, a curator and a community figure. I wanted to continue doing the work she had paved the way for – and in working with artists like Gustavo through Legacy Bros. I had paved the way for this. We want to consider contemporary art to be a lens through which to look at history — pulling from it these stories and thinking about how they relate to our past.
I wanted to present international artists and tell the stories that connect us at a museum level.
Nazareno’s work feels like a testament to the international, diverse nature of how Black artists’ work can connect to a global story — in one of his canvases you might see elements of the European Renaissance, Yoruba religion, Japanese fashion and more.
Gustavo’s work is quintessentially what we look for as a museum. His paintings are objects that tell stories – not written or oral stories, but visual ones that communicate things that would be far too difficult to understand using words.
In his work, there’s this particular feeling. All of these things collide in a way that creates an explosion of emotion when people experience it. In a way, that’s — and that’s why we study art: to gain a better understanding of humanity, of each other; to understand that through all these different modalities, the bottom line usually remains the same. And, of course, to celebrate life, to celebrate the journey of life.
I see through lines that unite European Renaissance Vanitas paintings, Mapplethorpe’s photography and Gustavo’s work. They’re all documents; forms of testimony to the beauty of life that will live on long after the artist’s death.
That’s the kind of work that I think a museum is tasked to acquire and to showcase. That’s all of our mandate.
That’s a beautiful way to understand Nazareno’s work, as an deeply specific but also universally meaningful document. How important do you think his process is within this understanding?
In the DuSable presentation, we highlight the making stages. One of the first things I said to Gustavo was to encourage him not to be afraid of beauty. He loves fashion, he has a great visual sense: that’s something to lean into. That has a lot to do with his technical skills as a draftsman, which play out in his preparatory sketches. It’s a kind of activity-based thinking.
Gustavo was also very interested in Baroque, Renaissance and even Rococo paintings, how they contained different textiles shining and reflecting light in different ways. Being a lover of fashion, he was obsessed with that. So he created these mannequins to paint and draw the same thing from life. That process is also inspired by the history of haute couture: when a client wanted to see a collection, the designer would make a miniature garment for a doll to wear.
His work is the product of so much embodied knowledge and understanding of a lineage that he himself is part of. I always look for artists who are interested in how their work is going to contribute to an art historical conversation. Gustavo’s process is one that leads to a legacy.
Legacy is a word that links what the two of you do. I wanted to finish by asking you what you hope his legacy is: what will future students of Art History learn from Gustavo Nazareno?
That’s a beautiful question. Firstly, as I’ve said, it serves as a document that centres spiritual systems and beliefs that are sometimes demonised or misunderstood. It demystifies the mystery and shows how perhaps we have had a mideducation on certain things.
Ultimately, artists, curators and art historians want a story. They want to excavate the ideas of human life. There’s nothing new under the sun, but artists like Gustavo give us a new point of view on something that already exists. Their new points of view is why there’s still teeth in Monet, Van Gogh, Lucien Freud and Kerry James Marshall. In all of their work, something familiar is turned on its ear. That’s exactly what Gustavo does, too.
