When the current director of the Longwood Art Project in the Bronx, Edwin Ramoran, saw South Bronx resident Ernie Woo airbrushing a T-shirt near Yankee Stadium, Mr. Ramoran realized that he was looking at a potential gallery piece. Mr. Woo’s design — a skull wearing a Yankees baseball cap atop crossed baseball bats — is now a part of Longwood’s upcoming 25th anniversary show, “South Bronx Contemporary.” The show consists of four exhibits; Mr. Ramoran’s, “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” features new art from emerging borough artists. Three other exhibits were curated by former directors of the Project: Betty-Sue Hertz’s “Street Disturbance”; Eddie Torres’s “Iconoclasm,” and “Black Now” by Fred Wilson, Longwood’s first curator and a winner of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants” in 1999.

In early December, Mr. Woo and Mr. Wilson came together for the show’s opening at Longwood’s 22,000-square-foot gallery at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, where Mr. Woo’s design, which protests the renovation of Yankee Stadium and the resulting ejection of residents from a local park, was on display only a few feet away from “Black Now.” The two aren’t as disparate as they may at first seem, according to Mr. Wilson and the other past Longwood directors who came together to curate “South Bronx Contemporary.”

This is what Longwood has always been about — seeking out art that might not be accepted elsewhere in the New York art scene, especially when it concerns issues relevant to South Bronx residents.

“The Bronx was, and still is, an outpost of the art world,” Mr. Wilson said, recalling his days as curator of Longwood in the 1980s. Back then, artists of color had yet to penetrate the downtown art scene in large numbers. Mr. Wilson, who was born in the Bronx in 1954 to a black father and a mother of Caribbean descent, took the opportunity to work with artists who “were not getting shown elsewhere, and mixing it up with artists who were more tried and true, and letting that dialogue happen with no pressure from the market or the art world.”

It didn’t take long for the art world to take notice of the dialogue happening at Longwood, which often focused on identity politics, urbanism, and racism. Long after Mr. Wilson himself became famous with the 1993 exhibit “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, important dialogue is still happening at Longwood.

In “Black Now,” Mr. Wilson explores the myriad meanings of the word “black” in 2006, through works by artists like Chakaia Booker and ordinary items Mr. Wilson collected over the years or ordered on the Internet, from black soap to pasta to videos.

In the similarly themed “The Black Factory,” part of Ms. Hertz’s “Street Disturbance” installation, performance artist William Pope.L traveled around the country with an interactive workshop on wheels, asking people to contribute and discuss items that represented black culture to them.

It is Mr. Ramoran’s installation, “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” that devotes the most attention to “underrecognized” Bronx artists, testing the boundaries between amateur and professional art through works like Mr. Woo’s anti-Yankees T-shirt, and “South Bronx Monopoly,” by longtime Bronx resident Sally DeJesus.

Ms. DeJesus created “South Bronx Monopoly” to reflect her concerns about gentrification, covering the game’s tiny red hotel pieces with photographs she snapped of the CVS stores and McDonald’s restaurants that are popping up from 149th Street to Hunts Point.

Ms. DeJesus, 48, has produced artwork all her life, but almost never showed it in public. She said she’s thrilled Mr. Ramoran chose to focus on people like herself, who can’t devote all their time to art. “I have a child I’m raising, ” Ms. DeJesus said. “I’m not able to spend as much time making things as I would like. It’s nice to be recognized.”

Until March 10 (450 Grand Concourse, between 144th Street and Hostos Boulevard, the Bronx, 718-518-6728).

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