Guy C. McElroy audio and moving image collection

circa 1973-1990

Guy Clinton McElroy (1948-1990) was an art historian and curator who focused primarily on African Americans in art. He curated the Corcoran Gallery of Art's 1990 exhibition Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940, about Black Americans in art by both white and Black American artists. In a 1990 interview on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, McElroy described the exhibition as the first show of its kind to be curated by a Black art historian.

McElroy was born on July 26, 1948 in Fairmont, West Virginia. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in art education from Fairmont State College in 1970. In 1972, he graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a Master of Arts degree in art history. In 1975, McElroy earned a second MA degree in video production from Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts. His video thesis, "Roxbury Puddingstone," examined the bedrock stone found in Boston's African American community of Roxbury. From 1983 to 1990, he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, where he specialized in seventeenth century Dutch painting and African American art.

McElroy held curatorial positions at museums around the country. From 1973 to 1975, he was a Rockefeller Fellow in Museum Studies at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California. In 1974, he was assistant curator at the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1978 to 1982, McElroy served as curator of the National Council of Negro Women's Bethune Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C. From 1982 to 1988 he was the institution's assistant director.

After a car accident in 1987, McElroy lived with paraplegia. He addressed how his disability affected his life and work in two of the collection's television interviews. McElroy died at age forty-one of a pulmonary embolism on May 31, 1990.