Adolphus Ealey (1941–1992) was an American artist, curator, educator, writer, and entrepreneur. He was African-American and a noted Black art authority, and he was the longtime curator of the Barnett–Aden Collection of Black art.^[1][2][3]

Adolphus Ealey was born on February 22, 1941, in Atlanta, Georgia.^[4] He attended Howard University (B.A. degree 1963) and studied under James V. Herring.^[4][1] He received a master's degree (1964) at Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris,^[5] and a Ph.D. in art from the University of Wisconsin.^[2]

Ealey was a longtime curator of the Barnett–Aden Collection of Black art starting in 1969; the collection was formerly associated with Barnett-Aden Gallery and bequeathed to Ealey by James V. Herring.^[7][8] Later the collection was located at the Museum of African American Art in Tampa, Florida (which has since closed).^[9][10] He took an anthropological approach to the collection of objects, emphasized culture and organized them around a village concept.^[11]

Ealey was a professor at Washington Technical Institute (now University of the District of Columbia) from 1969 to 1971.^[1] He also taught art classes at Sharpe Health School in Washington, D.C., a school for children with disabilities, from 1972 to 1975.^[1] From 1976 to 1978, Ealey was the first director of the Afro-American Cultural and Historical Museum of Philadelphia (now the African American Museum in Philadelphia).^[1]

In 1985, he designed memorabilia for the first national celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, commissioned by the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change; and it was said to have been personally approved by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr..^[12]

He was the president of Heritage Noir Inc. in 1983.^[5] Ealey had been friends with artist Alma W. Thomas.^[4]

He had AIDS and died of kidney failure on November 11, 1992, at Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C..^[1] He has artist files at the National Gallery of Art Library;^[13] and he is included in the public museum collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.^[14]

• 1972, Reflections: the Afro-American Artist: an Exhibit of Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphics, group exhibition, Benton Convention Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina^[15]
• 1973, Exhibition 73 (the D.C. Art Association), group exhibition, Anacostia Museum, and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture^[15]
• 1977, Black American Art from the Barnett Aden Collection, group exhibition, Frick Fine Arts Museum at the University of Pittsburgh^[15]
• 1979, Reflections of a Southern Heritage: 20th Century Black Artists of the Southeast, group exhibition, Gibbes Art Gallery, Charlestown, South Carolina^[15]

• Ealey, Adolphus (Spring 1977). Lewis, Samella (ed.). "The Curator". Black Art: An International Quarterly. 1 (3).

• Evangeline Montgomery
• Guy McElroy
• Carol D. Lee