October 31, 2011 | 12:00 PM | By

Longtime Bloomingdale Art Gallery Owner On Gentrification

The Washington Informer profiles NOA Gallery in Bloomingdale, which Michael Little started in 1970s. For decades, the majority of the neighborhood and Little’s customers were black and he sold many works that could be seen on the sets of black television programs.


Gentrification has changed the neighborhood, and brought an influx of new residents. Little had an exhibition that he marketed through his neighborhood list-serve of which two-thirds are white. To his surprise 80 percent of the people who came were white.

However, Little noted, “Just because the neighborhood changed in color doesn’t mean that all of these people know about art. For example [at one exhibition] I had all these European artists’ works hanging on the wall. This white guy comes over to me and says, ‘Where is the white section?’ which surprised me. Evidently he had made up in his mind that since I was black, what he was looking at were black artists. I immediately took him to a Norman Rockwell and an Andy Warhol and said to him, ‘These artists are not black.’ I also pointed out black artists that were in the show, but two-thirds of the artists were white.”

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