“Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston,” held at the MFA in 1970 and curated by Edmund Barry Gaither, presented recent work by 70 Black artists. Gaither was director and curator of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA), and special consultant at the MFA from 1969 to 2020.

Bowling was deeply skeptical about group exhibitions based on racial identity, like “Afro-American Artists.” He thought these exhibitions were tokenistic and “guilty of that hidden but quite positive decline of standards,” as he put it.