Cal State Dominguez Hills is currently home to the “Act on It! Artists, Community, and the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles” exhibit, which is put together by the L.A. County Museum of Art and travels across a handful of galleries.

The CSUDH art gallery — which is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday —  will display the exhibit through June 7. The exhibit honors the historic Brockman Gallery that spearheaded the Black arts movement from 1967 to 1990 in South Los Angeles.

“Launched by brothers Alonzo Davis and Dale Brockman Davis in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion,” says a LACMA informational booklet, “the Brockman Gallery was central to the development of the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles, serving as a critical nexus for emerging artists of color and contributing to a growing network of Black-run spaces and collections.

“The history of the Brockman Gallery shows that artists are not only shaped by culture or responsive to it: they are shaping it and shaping us,” the booklet adds. “Brockman serves as a reminder that there is urgency in providing artists the space, platforms and support they need to share their work with the public, and that a small, audacious effort can have far-reaching reverberations.”

The Davis brothers set out in a green Volkswagen Beetle in 1966 with the mission of connecting with Black artists across the country.

“Inspired by the cultural renaissances occurring in Black neighborhoods across the country and catalyzed by what Alonzo described as their ‘resolve and commitment to be a part of a national response to the racism issues of the time,’ the brothers began fantasizing about opening a space for artists of color in their own community,” the booklet says. “Indeed, during its 10 annual exhibitions, the Brockman Gallery featured young Black artists who were often showing their work in a commercial gallery space for the first time.”

The brothers named the gallery after their grandmother, Della Brockman, but the name was also significant as it was the first slave name the brothers could trace on their maternal side, signifying the complexity of the Black experience.

All of the art featured in the gallery, in fact, made a statement about the Black experience. One of the most notable pieces included “White’s Wanted Poster Series” by Charles White, emerging from the artist’s frustration with the “contemporary condition” of Black Americans.

“White began making the series after noticing a disturbing continuity between the FBI’s 1968 wanted poster of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and pre-Emancipation wanted posters seeking African Americans who had escaped enslavement,” the booklet says, “which sometimes included depictions of Black figures alongside crude descriptions of each ‘runaway’s’ appearance.”

Other notable work created by artists Elizabeth Catlett and John Biggers highlighted the practice of sharecropping, often described as “slavery rerouted.”

Following the Civil War, thousands of formerly enslaved individuals survived financially by participating in sharecropping – a system through which a tenant farmer exchanged labor for living accommodations and the promise of profits from the harvest. This practice often kept sharecroppers in debt to landowners, preventing them from gaining wealth.

While the Brockman Gallery mostly featured Black artists, the brothers wanted to “promote outstanding underrepresented artists, expanding opportunities to marginalized communities including Latin, Asian American, Chicano and women artists,” the booklet says.

“Act on It!” features the work of dozens of Brockman Gallery artists, amplifying the themes of roots, material experimentation, body and identity, common ground, civic engagement and uplift.

“Using the Brockman Gallery, Alonzo Davis and Dale Brockman Davis placed their contemporaries’ work within a historical lineage of Black artmaking in the U.S,” reads a news release from CSUDH. “The exhibition represents the aesthetic, political and social statements encountered by Brockman Gallery visitors and underscores the reach and lasting significance of the Davis brothers’ project.”