This week in Newly Reviewed, Holland Cotter covers two group shows: one devoted to an important gallery from the past, the other focused on language and silence.

Upper East Side

Acts of Art in Greenwich Village

Through March 22. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, 132 East 68th Street, Manhattan; 212-772-4991, huntercollegeart.org.

D.E.I. didn’t exist in the mainstream New York art world a half-dozen decades ago. Black artists eager for shows had to find them mostly in Black neighborhoods, and live with the fact that a fiction called race would determine their audience.

A rare exception was a storefront gallery called Acts of Art, which opened in the West Village of Manhattan in 1969. It not only exhibited new art by Black artists but also became, de facto, a place where diversity, equity and inclusion were demonstrated and promoted.

Although the gallery is long gone — it lasted for just six years — its spirit is revivified in a small, tightly researched and impeccably mounted exhibition at Hunter College.