Now there are two subjects that don’t often share a headline.

But just this afternoon, as I was leaving the press tour of the “Inspiring Impressionism” show that’s about to open at Seattle Art Museum (worst title ever, but actually a decent show, and for the most part it makes the impressionists look bad by comparison to older artists, which seems right), I found myself right next to the unmistakable curly head of New York-based star artist Fred Wilson.

I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to him, so I introduced myself and asked for a few minutes on the record. (I had my digital recorder on me and was tempted to ask him for an on-the-spot podcast, but I thought better of it.)

He’s in Seattle (just until tomorrow morning) working with Dante Marioni, a glassblower he met during a residency at Pilchuck a few years ago, and he was visiting “my favorite museum,” he said with a grin, referring to when his “Mining the Museum” project came to SAM.

I asked what he thought of the architecture of the newly expanded museum (likes it), and we got to talking, too, about the museum’s recently installed “Black Art” show.

I asked, and he said he couldn’t think of another generalist museum with a room specifically devoted to artists of African descent—and he wasn’t sure he liked the idea long-term.

“It’s like this impressionism show,” he said. “It’s not your typical impressionism show. But if all people see is the label—’impressionism’—then they might not go in. Labeling is,” he started, but then someone came and interrupted us, and I couldn’t get him to finish the thought—but that seemed to capture his ambivalence.

He talked about one museum—he couldn’t remember the name—that got a “diversity” grant and wanted to use it to promote African artists’ works. “But many African American artists feel that as a segregation,” he said. “So it is that question of both doing it and not doing it.”

When he said that, I thought of a term I read in this morning’s New York Times: “anti-racist racism.” It appeared in a piece by Michael Kimmelman (both Wilson and I had read it and agreed it was some of Kimmelman’s finest recent work, though it’s not about art) about the problem of colorblindness in France.

Official policies promoting color-blindness have instead led to a total lack of honest discussion about what it means to be black in France—which deprives black French people of their voices and deprives non-black French people of truly knowing their fellow citizens.

I could barely believe it when I read the Kimmelman story this morning because I have a piece coming out in tomorrow’s paper about post-black art, and about these very ideas:

So [Youssoupha] turned to rap, out of frustration as much as anything, finding inspiration in “négritude,” an ideology of black pride conceived in Paris during the 1920s and 30s by Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician from Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became Senegal’s first president. Its philosophy, as Sartre once put it, was a kind of “antiracist racism,” a celebration of shared black heritage.

Négritude and Césaire are back.

… At the same time, it’s against the rules for the government to conduct official surveys according to race. Consequently, nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Estimates vary between 3 million and 5 million out of a population of more than 61 million.

“Can you imagine if French officials said, ‘Well, we’re not sure, the population of France may be 65 million, or maybe it’s 30 million’?” declared a somewhat exasperated Patrick Lozès, founder of Cran, a black organization devised not long ago partly to gather statistics the government won’t.

When he sat down to talk the other morning, the first two words out of his mouth were Barack Obama. “The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal,” he said. “But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal.”

I wanted to ask Wilson about what he’s working on (besides something involving glass), and about what he really thinks about all these ideas. But a curator came up and rescued him from me with an offer of free espresso. I had to say goodbye.

Here’s an image of a piece first seen in Wilson’s 2006 PaceWildenstein show, a crown to match the Queen of England’s, but made in black diamonds and black pearls: