Artist and scholar David C. Driskell began acquiring works while a student, purchasing a Renoir self-portrait for $10 in a Copenhagen antiques shop and, back in the U.S., a Matisse linocut for just $2.98. He has also collected German Expressionists, Persian miniatures and decorative tiles, 19th-century Asian art and African objects from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This is all in addition to his extensive African-American holdings, many of which he has gifted to the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, at the University of Maryland. “I have broadened my own experience by putting African-American art in the context of the larger picture,” he says.

Former professional football player Calvin Hill started collecting art in 1969, when he moved to Dallas as the Cowboys’ top draft pick. “During my spare time, I found myself drawn to art galleries and museums,” he says, “but primarily art galleries.” His first acquisitions were prints by Arthello Beck Jr. and other local African-Americans, but he soon branched out, developing a predilection for works by Native American artists R. C. Gorman, Allan Houser and Amado Pena Jr.

When the all-star running back’s son, Grant Hill, who plays professional basketball for the Phoenix Suns, began his own collection, he focused on African-American artists’ works, like urban scenes by Harlem Renaissance painter Romare Bearden and self-taught artist John Coleman and portraits by watercolorist Malcolm Brown and the little-known Edward Jackson. “The art that I have is a reflection of our history, a snapshot of our times through the eyes of the artists,” he explains. An exhibition of highlights from his collection, called “Something All Our Own,” toured seven cities between late 2003 and summer 2006.

Driskell and the Hill are slated to appear in Black Market, a book series about prominent African-American art patrons currently being written by Bridgette McCullough, CEO of BRMC Art Advisory and a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Well aware that the “provocative” title could have negative connotations, McCullough draws a compelling parallel: “A black market is an economic system that’s functioning under the radar of the rest of the market.” She says she hopes the series will “help to shatter the myths on both sides of the aisle: how the art market is perceived as well as how the art market perceives.” Her inspiration for the project mirrors Calvin Hill’s collecting impetus, which  he says is to illuminate the forgotten contributions of the “invisible man,” a reference to author Ralph Ellison’s indelible metaphor for the African-American.

“So many African-Americans have been left out of this kind of arena, and now they want to be in,” says veteran New York dealer June Kelly, who has introduced many Black collectors to artists like Bearden, Hughie Lee-Smith, sculptor Elizabeth Catlett and painter Philemona Williamson. In this respect, she observes, auction houses have lagged behind galleries and even museums.

Amid the American art boom of the 1980s, exhibitions, programs and patron groups at Boston’s Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, Philadelphia’s African American Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem “spurred the collecting of African-American art and the advent of a robust core of collectors,” says Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African-American History and Culture and former director of the Studio Museum.

In the 1970s, New York private dealer Peg Alston set out to create a market for such African-American artists as figurative painter Pheoris West and abstract painters Alma Thomas and Herbert Gentry by  nurturing a new cadre of African-American collectors. She has since watched their numbers grow, especially in the past 15 years. “African-American artists are an affordable, natural place to start,” she says. “You can introduce your children to a part of your culture. Some would branch out to other art that they like but maintain a core focus on African-American art—for a very important reason: preserving the culture, and art is a big part of that.”