The Social Struggles of Contemporary Black Art

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AfriCOBRA

—“Art for people and not for critics whose peopleness is questionable.”⁹

The first week of the unit will consider some of the artists of the AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) collective. The group is impressive for many reasons, one of which is its focus on art of and for the people. Founding member, Jeff Donaldson, writes: “Our guidelines are our people, the whole family of African People, the African family tree. And in this spirit of familyhood, we have carefully examined our roots and searched our branches for those visual qualities that are most expressive of our people/art.”¹⁰ Rejecting the culture of galleries and museums, the AfriCOBRA artists seek to bring art to people’s homes and communities, and, in the case of Jae Jarrell’s clothing, to their bodies. Here, we find an important coherence with other forms of Black resistance that create space for expression and representation in personal style, music, and dance.¹¹ The first public work of the artists who would found AfriCOBRA involved the communal production of a mural on a building’s exterior wall in a Black, South-Side, Chicago neighborhood; the mural, called the Wall of Respect (1967), celebrated contemporary and historical Black athletes, musicians, and activists. Interestingly, the artists’ approach to the mural was modelled on that of Jazz musicians who improvise spontaneously on a theme while the rhythm section maintains the tempo.¹² [Improvisation, in fact, has been identified as an important element of all forms of Black art, linking it to its roots in African art and enabling it to accommodate “impermanence and change” in contrast to a sterile Western art that strives for permanence.¹³] The mural was also innovative in its combination of mounted photographs and painting.¹⁴ The future AfriCOBRA artists agreed that the work had been successful in its communal production, but more coherent political and aesthetic standards would develop the following year. With African-inspired, “cool-ade” colors, joyful representations of Black men and women, collage and craft techniques as well as reproducible posters (Jeff Donaldson asserts that “We want everyone to have some,”¹⁵ [emphasis mine]), AfriCOBRA found its aesthetic and established a productive community of artistic inspiration. This community included both men and women, and each artist sought to uplift the others. As founding AfriCOBRA member, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, stated during a 2010 interview, “Each one of us, individually, are good at what we do. But collectively, we’re gooder. You know. So, as a collective, we’re gooder than we are as individuals.”¹⁶

Works to study include: Wadsworth Jarrell (Home to a Giant, Boss Couple, Black Family, I Am Better [. . .] and They Know It, Revolutionary), Jeff Donaldson (Victory in the Valley of Esu, Soweto/So We Too, Stone Singer), Jae Jarrell (Urban Wall Suit, Revolutionary Suit), and Gerald Williams (Malcolm, I Am Somebody). Within these works, we see the combination of image and text which the artists—observing the effect in poster and billboard advertisements—used to communicate their message. We also see the celebration of Black families: Wadsworth Jarrell, in fact, painted himself and the members of his nuclear family in Boss Couple and Black Family. We see African colors and patterns as well as figures from the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements (Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; Angela Davis). More historical figures, like Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, also appear, and it is here that I see the opportunity to include instruction on historical Black activism. In sum, we find the compelling connection of past, present, and future that is integral to the group’s overtly political aesthetic.

Readings will include poems by Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, a letter from Frederick Douglas to Harriet Tubman, and excerpts from chapters one and seven of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself.

Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Kehinde Wiley

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.¹⁷

The second week of the unit will consider the art of Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Kehinde Wiley and examine the artists’ expressions of blackness as well as their subversive responses to European art. Kerry James Marshall is notable for the breadth of art historical knowledge that informs his work as well as the wealth of artistic skill acquired during his long career: The 2016-17 exhibition, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, celebrated thirty-five years of Marshall’s work. Born in Birmingham Alabama in 1955, Marshall moved west to Los Angeles with his family at the age of seven, part of the final wave of the Great Migration of Blacks leaving the South in the wake of the Civil War.¹⁸ Though escaping the extreme violence against Blacks of the Civil-Rights-Era South, Marshall and his family arrived in Los Angeles in time to witness the Watts riots of 1965.¹⁹ Years later, Marshall, then a young art student, attended David Driskell’s 1976 exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950.”²⁰ The exhibition was pivotal to Marshall and his contemporaries—as well as younger artists, who would see the images in the exhibition book (1976)—for its establishment of a previously unacknowledged—and, therefore, unseen—history of Black art in the United States.²¹ This play between visibility and invisibility would become a central theme for Marshall, who was powerfully influenced by Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man (1952): “Ellison’s ‘description . . . of the condition of invisibility literally changed everything for me. What I was reading there, the notion of being and not-being, the simultaneity of presence and absence, was exactly what I had been trying to get at in my artwork.’”²² Marshall would subsequently paint A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self (1980), expressing the invisibility of the Black artist while also celebrating the beauty of black as a rich and complex color rather than any absence of color.²³ Marshall includes only Black subjects in his artworks, and they are consistently painted in very dark (“‘unequivocally black . . . emphatically black’”²⁴ ) shades. Marshall would eventually develop seven kinds of black for the skin tone of his subjects, which photographer and art-historian, Teju Cole, describes as, “Black, black, black, black, black, black, black. Seven different kinds, an infinity.”²⁵

Faith Ringgold—a child of the Great Depression, born in Harlem in 1930—had a similar interest in the color black while producing her Black-Light series of the 1960s. In this series, Ringgold rejects representations of light that use the color white, which she associates with Western culture, and experiments with darker colors while exploring African influences: “‘Black art [. . .] must use its own color black to create its own light, since that color is the most immediate black truth.’”²⁶ Ringgold, however, over the course of a career even longer than Marshall’s—she is twenty-five years his senior—has produced art in diverse styles using varying materials and forms (among them, painting, quilting, soft sculpture, performance, and even a series of children’s books), and I am most interested in her French Collection of story quilts in which she combines painting, quilted borders, and written narratives in a creative response to the absence of Black, women artists in Paris of the 1920s. I particularly enjoy The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1991), in which Ringgold contrasts the artistic isolation of Vincent van Gogh, whom she sets in a corner of the artwork, with a quilting group of eight Black women, each an important American activist. Where van Gogh stands alone, the women enjoy a rich and productive community. Ringgold’s experiences during art school are instructive: Though her teachers criticized the colors of her figures as “exotic,” they were unable to show her how to mix paints to represent Black skin.²⁷ Ringgold left art school “doing French Impressionist flowers and trees” in her attempt to produce something “acceptable” to her teachers.²⁸ Ringgold later celebrated her liberation from limiting influences and the discovery of her own voice. Interestingly, Ringgold’s feminism stemmed from her experiences of exclusion from the same Black male artists who benefitted from her organization of demonstrations for museum access.²⁹

Kehinde Wiley, born in Los Angeles in 1977, grew up in poverty. Like Kerry James Marshall, however—whom he considers an important influence—Wiley benefitted from extracurricular art classes, won scholarships for art education, and was awarded a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Like Marshall, Wiley produces enormous, majestic canvases that engage with the long history of European art. As in earlier artworks (for example, Willem van Heythuysen and the paintings of the Rumors of War series described in the “Introduction and Rationale” above), Wiley’s Trickster series shows Black subjects replacing the privileged subjects of traditional European portraits. In the Trickster series, however, Wiley paints fellow Black artists rather than unnamed models selected at random. I am especially interested in Wiley’s portrait of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, in which the violence of hunting is emphasized by the abundant presence of dead game absent from the 1763 painting, Jacob Morland of Capplethwaite, that the portrait references. We will also, however, consider Wiley’s portraits of Kerry James Marshall and Hank Willis Thomas.

Works to study include: Kerry James Marshall (A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self; Portrait of the Artist and a Vacuum; selections from the Garden Project and Souvenir series; De Style; School of Beauty, School of Culture), Faith Ringgold (Dancing at the Louvre, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, and Mona Lisa and Little Girls), and Kehinde Wiley (selections from his Trickster exhibition).

Readings will include the “Prologue” of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, an excerpt from James Baldwin’s Notes from a Native Son, and poems by Claude McKay and Maya Angelou.

The third week of the unit will consider the work of photographer and conceptual artist, Hank Willis Thomas, as well as the ideological content of advertising. Thomas, born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey, and living and working in Brooklyn, New York, focused much of his early work on advertising photographs. Interestingly, Thomas, who has degrees in Photography, Africana Studies, and Visual Criticism, understands photography to be a “lie,” describing his under-graduate work as an attempt to “comment on the lie that is photography.”³⁰ Thomas adds that, although photographs are frequently perceived to be evidentiary documents, they capture only a fraction of a second of an extremely limited perspective (determined by the camera’s framing) of a further limited—two-dimensional—image.³¹ Thomas elsewhere observes: “My work is about framing and context. More specifically, I am fascinated with how history and culture are framed, who is doing the framing, and how these factors affect our interpretation of reality.”³² Those with the power to direct the composition of visual images, then, determine the narratives by means of which we understand the world. Finally, Thomas’s work considers the ways that these narratives “shape our notion of who counts in society.³³ I am looking forward to sharing some of the artworks from Thomas’s B(r)anded Series with students as I expect the works (with their slick images of professional athletes and references to popular brands like Nike) to appeal to students while the thematic focus on the commodification of Black, male bodies and the connection of that commodification to the legacy of slavery will elicit interesting and challenging ideas and debate. Later, we will consider the ways that Ester Hernandez and Betye Saar subvert brand mascots in Sun Mad and the Liberation of Aunt Jemima respectively.

Works to study include: Hank Willis Thomas (Branded Head, Cotton Bowl, I Am. Amen., Absolut No Return, Absolut Reality, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around, and selections from Punctum), Ester Hernandez (Sun Mad), and Betye Saar (Liberation of Aunt Jemima).

Additional texts will include “Advertising and Youth” from JAMA—Pediatrics and John Green’s “Evaluating Photos & Videos: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #7.”