Exhibition held at Kenkeleba Gallery, 1991
It's doubtful whether by declaring that the discussion 'Black Art' is moribund will make it go away. Vanish! And so lighten a burden which often seems, in its onerousness, well night unbearable to those of us as artists, wh also happen to be ethnically African in origin. Yet the ramifications of Black art appear to me somewhat as institutionalized civil war. It's an enduring irony that in a democratic republic such as is the current United States of America this aberrant, racist, rubbish continues to gain legality. Black art is about repression. Great, even good art is ever about distinction and quality inspired by and wrought through the strict confines of a given discipline. Quality from Black people: made by the hands and from the minds of able, stirring, revolutionary African Americans exists, in this land of dreams and continuing promise. Of this fact there can be little doubt, and searching for Black art will have contributed to the discovery of some of these treasures.
However, obvious instability, irresolution and weakness visits all discussion on Black art, a slip, a conceptual fault in all talk about art in general as it concerns and involves Blacks, and also discourse about Blacks doing art in particular, a particular kind of visual art, such as painting or sculpture. Following from culpable reporting of what these Black people are actually doing has come and, inevitably, unsteady grasp of an at once bold, changing and fragile Black temperament. This much is revealed in an overall reservation to African American abstract art. An art, which even in the variety of skills involved, is never looking, through its productions, for reminders of life; its practitioners tend more to responding inside pulsating living forces through each individual medium. As though egressing like the Cimmerian veins and tributaries of a very great river, flowing every which way into histories and pasts spread wide; African American abstract art is hybridization on the very outer reaches -constituted, as it must be, from a bewildering range of original human types -locked into a world where gender multiplied by tincture and grace addresses the order of living day.
Trouble arises along these varied lines, these compelling if dizzying directions, where real endeavor abuts historical territory and zones that remain open and free for all to enjoy, to exploit and to use, including whites, in America. Suffice it to say that in this fraught maze any argument is bound to be obscured when given in a series of pictures transformed by a narrative carrying other burdens besides predication. For Black art also impairs the traditional soothing which art and culture administers in the name of consesus, by too manifest a political message stressing fundamental differences in ethnic outlook.
Tearing asunder, the scene is further compounded by recent violent political upsurge of feminism. A special intimacy, one we might say very close to the art making activity, has been undermined. And my understanding is this exhibition is meant for the first time to locate that landscape, accurately described, of Black temperament to a real firmament in its attempt to establish quality from existing art productions by Black people across age and gender divides in America.
It's elementary to perceive how past conditions in America made it impossible to combine for political action. Although African American culture cannot be thought entirely independent of those general and economic influences. But the old Black art notion is not really graspable except in its own terms; it has autonomy represented by its radical venerable assumptions and exercised by the brute fact that it is not white. Hurt feelings never made art which is about celebration, and at this point we were left with nothing so much as spectacle; much entertainment, little joy, no satisfaction.
American Black people never had the political clout to impose their vision on American culture, yet ineluctably, this same vision has pawkily done so in music and style. Whereas the ideology of utilitarianism is the origin of American states' relations and dealings with Blacks, randomly if not calculatedly seeing in Black life only obedience to necessity and the satisfaction of elementary vital needs. Original and creative Black have resisted the imposition, finding it senile and spiritually corrosive.
In my time the "Harlem on My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1968 opened a can of worms into the smooth running of culture in New York City; though essentially it was a media event and obviously it was not an art exhibition. Newspaper reports commented harshly that the show stressed information and communication over art and culture. This resulted in cunning, neurotic interference in Black and Jewish community bonding where a showing of painting and sculpture would not have, and would have served merely to add ginger to an already pretty hot discussion on the subject of Black artists and their position in American mainstream society. And in my mind served to agitate two peoples who for decades had had something of an alliance. Even if it remains true that Black people continue to believe themselves mortgaged, as being in hock to the system.
That same year 1968, the African American curator and historian Henri Ghent, who was then the director of the Brooklyn Museum's Coommunity Gallery, organized a show uptown at the newly created Studio Museum on 125 th Street and 5 th Avenue in Harlem. The exhibition "Invisible Black Artists of the Thirties," was intended as a counter show to the Whitney Museum's "The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America," also of the same time frame. Mr. Ghent was later to put together an exhibition "Eight Afro-American Artists" for Switzerland in 1971.
As the politics of protest dominated the thinking of the early sixties official establishment, the young and forward-looking Kennedys had died and it was Lyndon Johnson's, Texas, White House that prevailed. Political survival adressed the conditions of the day, not ideals, not any theory. After all LBJ had bested the allegedly racist South West, but he was no less a racist himself.
When word filtered down with concerns for the given culture and its art world, things took a different shape. Museum people, collectors, salesroom bods and educators were more familiar and therefore more receptive to ideas. Militant art workers like Benny Amdrews came to prominence and were celebrated, and Mr. Andrews' art was lauded by critics in the August, New York Times as well as other publications.
The situation forced certain art making acts for African American artists that smacked of expedience under the banner of Black art. My own work which had not yet developed into abstraction, could be said to fall into this trap. My pictures were concerned with map making and an attempt, by me, to understand my personal and historical journey across the Middle Passage. Black artists were not to be outdone in the mainstream of art trends which most Black artists then felt they were not a part of. William T. Williams made a trough for Larry Rivers, a hog trough, welded steel minimal art which it was hoped they could both puke in. Peter Bradley's Marcus Garvey was tampered with by, it is claimed, Larry Rivers and or his assistants, who placed glossy, grainy advertising photographs on an original piece of Bradley's sculpture; newspaper snaps of the fiery West Indian leader in his many costumes. And a growing number of African American or Black art shows, up and down the country, catered to this; and even worse perpetuated the consistent lowering of artistic standards. A move clearly assumed by some museums in attempting to accommodate works by Blacks. In fact, those Black artists and their sponsors did more to help themselves individually than their less politico-system oriented brothers who were making works that appeared too lack ethnic commitment; even if socially their behavior did. From then popular current talk, Peter Bradley and Joe Overstreet were pariahs; regarded as bad boys, "niggers" in the manner of the late great Bob Thompson. And as a result more acceptable to hip whites, part of the white/Negro syndrome. A right double bind.
Yet, all the discerning in the African American community knew this said social, rather anti-social posturing was consistent with a clear history of anarchism given to Black radical behavior, American radical behavior in the Western tradition. Overstreet was seen as from the rough mean streets of New York City's Lower East Side; but Peter Bradley, a Yale graduate with something of an education in classical African art, and who at the time worked in an esteemed Madison Avenue gallery dealing blue chip early 20 th centurt European expressionist art, like Chaim Soutine, Bradley appeared as something of a nine day wonder.
At the same time there could be no doubt of the quality of the art productions from these two artists. Overstreet more consistently, but Bradley whenever he did his pictures they looked good. And Bradley possessed, moreover, a youthful cunning professional sense that often seemed theatrical. More, perhaps, in tune with what passed in the white world; Norman Mailer's ever so notorious Advertisement for Myself.
Neither Bradley's nor Overstreet's work was included in "5+1" at Stony Brook and Princeton in 1969, a first attempt by me in the struggle, and which was helped by the good offices of Lawerence Alloway and Sam Hunter. Bradley and Overstreet may have scorned us. No. Me, the English nigger. "5+1" consisted of antagonist pairs. Hot/cold, moist/dry. Bill williams, Mel Edwards; Al Loving, Jack Whitten. A convenient grouping of your all male club. Drawing attention, now in retrospect that show clearly reveals our, then, innocence.
What all are now aware of is that making essential and significant art in any culture is an urgent political business; at least it is of intense moment to our controllers, leaders and masters. Even if sadly, these people are not our betters; people who alas must fly the flag. And the thing was out about quality in Black artist's work.
Come the seventies exhibitions such as "Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston curated by Barry Gaither minding solely for an all Black viewing public, appeared to be mistaking the productions of vernacular culture for high art. Where in a museum setting [any museum, ethnographic or other] the works they tended t show could not compare with classical African art or contemporary works of an advanced order made across the board by Blacks as well as whites.
The most courageous if not, as it turned out, the most sensitive attempt to put flesh on the bare bones of the controversy about the position of Black artists [painters and sculptors] on the American scene was, of course by a white artist, Larry Rivers. It's well to remind ourselves what brought to a head the simmering and unchecked resentments below what in the end was an exhibition titled, "Some American History."
Bill Williams' cousin Walter Jones published an article in Arts magazine titled "Larry Ocean Swims the Nile." Cousin Walter set about Rivers with vitroil and what was considered an "undiscerning and narrow" aspect. And this even before the show was complete and mounted at Rice University in Texas under the auspices of the De Menil Foundation in February, 1971.
But the whole attempt turned to disaster through the fact that Rivers, who was commissioned by the De Menils to do an exhibition, took upon himself, rightly, to make most of the pieces. Of course, some of it was about money. The Black artists involved grumbled about being used by Rivers, and about how much more he, Rivers, got than they did. The real tragedy remains two fold. First, attitudes soured art performance; and the show ended up looking like inside the most awful musty ethnographic museum display which had since post-colonial late 1950s never seen the light of day. And second, some of the artists in trying to undermine and to upstage Rivers and his white studio assistants' work, fell short of their best.
An exception was Joe Overstreet's stark New Jemima depicting a Black woman, her tommy gun ablaze in vivid popular image style. Coupled with this, Rivers, whose intention appeared to be to assemble a comprehensive overview of most of the talented younger Black artists around, found that several artists refused his invitation. He thus in a passionate overkill ended up rather manic in his attempt to do justice to the subject matter. The Black artists he invited were not into narrative vernacular but formalist abstract artists by intent and determination, as well as militant Afrocentric Black activists. This combination overbalanced the entire project and led Rivers to compensate by taking up the challenge he himself threw down. Besides which Rivers' American history is rather different from the American history of the gifted Black artists he tried to employ.
By the early seventies, now open-minded curatorial staff at the most forward looking museums were looking too at quality from African American artists. Offering firm commitment to redress the balance in favor of works by those coming forward. The then newly built Whitney Museum of American Art was an obvious target. The first artist mentioned by Robert M. Doty in his catalogue essay for his 1971 "Contemporary Black Artists in America" exhibition is Joe Overstreet. Mr. Doty, an early admirer of Mr. Overstreet's work, chose the pieces. But in this show, as hung, there was not a single piece by J. Overstreet. And Bradley's work was not seen in any of the Whitney Annuals and subsequent Biennials, until 1973. And then only through the lobbying and good offices of Mr. Kenworth Moffett, who by this time was curator of modern and contemporary works at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. In those days Mr. Moffett was considered a Greenberger, but he also happens to be an authority on the 19 th century German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe. Mr. Moffett is also a champion of the radical abstract art of Jackson Pollock through to David Smith, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland.
As the situation began to change there appeared beginning with Mr. Doty's show of 1971, at the Whitney Museum, outstanding women artists like Howardena Pindell. With the advent of Mr. Doty's show, the dominant male preserve seemed broken. It was a false dawn. Marcia Tucker, easily the most acute and willing curator around then, was sacked. Mainstream artistic activity coopted a large following from Blacks and it did seem for a brief moment that the day of the Black artist and Black art had come. What began as an issue oriented quarrel settled into a fierce and continuing debate about quality.
The courage of the women artist in this present exhibition of African American abstraction cannot be exaggerated, and as artists all seem to share certain characteristics. In choosing to make abstract or semi-abstract art works, they decalred their allegiance to the avant-garde, responding organically to the "Harvest of the Heritage." What indeed looked to some eyes, and will, as the new and experimental, to Alma Thomas came unattended by zeal. Together with Vivian Browne, Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Betty Blayton, Howardena Pindell and Mildred Thompson they represent something of a Black constellation of model artists displaying, in their fashion testimony to quite the opposite of a recurring theme that Blacks are pathologically married to a past of oppression.
Sprouting like a Gorgon's head willful Medea is paint material in Mary O'Neal's work. Spreading spatters, and, drips of color suggesting landscape and figure embracing, clinging to, the picture surface as one. Reminding the eye, but yet not quite, of early German Expressionist work; Munch, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, etc. But more recently to be glimpsed in much weakened and watered down state in the productions by Rainer Fetting, the fashionable young German artist pressently living in New York City. Ms. O'Neal is very likely far more influenced by examples closer by in Hale woodruff, De Kooning and Diebenkorn.
Vivian Browne is an improvisor, capable, according to circumstance, of being able to articulate with almost oriental clarity. Her ideation of "African sounds to which we respond so completely and directly" is a sort of breathtaking grasp of the resulting space-force on which line, in art [ in painting] functions, the variety on display indicating the direction of color and also in defining shape, links her pictures to the great Russians, Kandinsky and his circle.
From the African American scene what emerges, principally, is diversity. Some have gone far down the road to separating; others are struggling with pre-New World histories in Africa, which was also pre-national or tribal in Africa. What can be retrived from the chaos; intense discourse, individual accents, auricular confessions. The pushing and pulling, of structures collapsing into new colors; new directions seeking simultaneously to enforce their own rule, must weaken the central political axis and dominate their works.