This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

David C. Driskell, an artist, art historian and curator who was pivotal in bringing recognition to African-American art and its importance in the broader story of art in the United States and beyond, died on April 1 in a hospital near his home in Hyattsville, Md. He was 88.

The University of Maryland, where he held the title of distinguished university professor of art, said in a posting on its website that the cause was the coronavirus.

Professor Driskell was teaching at Fisk University in Nashville in the mid-1970s when he began putting together “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950,” a landmark exhibition that was first mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and that later traveled to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Brooklyn Museum.

It was a sweeping show featuring more than 200 works by 63 named artists as well as anonymous crafts workers. Some critics found it too scattershot — “as an anthology, it needs serious editing,” Grace Glueck wrote in The New York Times — but Professor Driskell maintained that that was by design.