On my way into the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently to see “Pen, Lens & Soul: The Story of the Beautiful Project,” an exhibition of poetry and photography by black girls and women based in Durham, N.C., I looked up to its facade. And there I saw Wangechi Mutu’s stately African and divinely inspired female quartet of bronze sculptures.

As I headed to show, at the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education, I began thinking that the spatial difference between these two collections was not a juxtaposition between high art for public viewing and art used for community outreach. Instead they were on a continuum, in which the black girls in the photographs and Mutu’s figures actively challenged the notion of who belongs in those cultural spaces.

Today, more than ever, mainstream institutions are recognizing black women’s work (and beauty) in new and unprecedented ways. In 2019, black women were crowned in the five major beauty pageants, including Miss World and Miss America. A recent four-week Film Forum series focused exclusively on performances by black actresses (many of whom weren’t even credited for their roles in early Hollywood films), while another at the Museum of Modern Art, “It’s All in Me: Black Heroines,” opens soon. And since its unveiling at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2018, Amy Sherald’s painting of the former first lady Michelle Obama has received a record number of visitors. (This summer it will go on a five-city tour, with Kehinde Wiley’s painting of President Barack Obama.)