These brothers founded a gallery after the Watts rebellion and arts in L.A. would never be the same
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Set us as preferred The year after the 1965 Watts rebellion, Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis, two brothers from Tuskegee, Ala., who had moved to South Central a decade prior, traveled cross-country to visit and discover Black artists, activists and students.Dale was studying art at USC and Alonzo had studied art at Pepperdine.The following year, on March 25, 1967, the brothers opened the Brockman Gallery on 4334 Degnan Blvd.
Alonzo and Dale had looked for a location in Crenshaw and Silver Lake but settled on a storefront in Leimert Park.It was the first Black-owned art gallery in L.A.
They were 25 and 21, respectively.“As soon as we opened we were aware of the lack of opportunity for the entire minority community,” said Dale, 80, in a recent interview.“It was definitely the mission.”Alonzo and Dale named the gallery after their grandmother, Della Brockman, and designed a logo that combined the male and female gender symbols with the letter B and an arrow.
They spent the next 23 years exhibiting and cultivating more than 200 underrepresented artists of color, from emerging names to more established, now-widely recognized ones, including John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, David Hammons, Betye Saar, Judy Baca and Elizabeth Catlett.“It was a mix of young artists and artists who had been doing it for a long time,” Dale said.“They had not received any recognition for their efforts.
We were all new to the business.The artists that we met then are now the primary artists representing the African American community.”LACMA is celebrating the brothers’ history with its new exhibition, “The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967-1990,” which opened Sunday and runs through Jan.
24.It was curated by Lauren Hanson, with contribution by Dale (Alonzo died in 2025).
The show features more than 60 paintings, prints, sculptur...