Tate - Soul of a Nation

INTRODUCTION

Was there a 'Black art' or a 'Black aesthetic'? Should an artist create legible images or make abstract work? Was a choice to be made between addressing a specifically Black audience or a 'universal' one? The exhibition looks at responses to such questions, with each room devoted to groups of artists in cities nationwide, or to different kinds of art. While showing strong communities and robust artistic dialogues, it also reveals necessary disagreements about what it meant to be a Black artist at this time.

In 1963, when the exhibition begins, the American Civil Rights Movement was at its height. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington D.C., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed that his children would live in 'a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character'. King referred to himself proudly as 'Negro', but by this time, many who were on the March would instead call themselves 'Black'. Taking issue with King's non-violent position - especially after appalling racist violence later in 1963 - many joined in calls for 'Black Power'. Others rejected the idea of an integrated America, and began to speak of a separate, autonomous Black Nation.

Looking at newly independent African nations, and understanding an ancestral connection to the continent, the terms 'Afro-American' and 'African American' also began to take root. The artists in Soul of a Nation were profoundly aware of these political visions and different senses of self, and each took an aesthetic position in relation to them.

ROOM 1 : SPIRAL

During the summer of 1963 at a time of crucial metamorphosis just before the now historic March on Washington, a group of Negro artists met to discuss their position in American society.

Many of the 15 members were established artists and they worked in wide-ranging styles. While they asked the question ‘Is there a Negro image?’, they gave no single answer. They mounted one joint exhibition in 1965, agreeing to show only ‘works in black and white’. The exhibition included one of Norman Lewis’s abstract paintings, Romare Bearden’s Photostat of one of his collages, and Reginald Gammon’s forceful painting of the March. Younger Black artists would look back to Spiral later, impressed both by the group’s determination to exhibit together in an artist-run space, and by the range of artistic viewpoints of its members.

ROOM 2: ART ON THE STREETS

The Ghetto itself is the Gallery for the Revolutionary Artist.

Emory Douglas

This room looks at ways artists positioned their work beyond conventional gallery and museum spaces. It reveals how they inspired and mobilised specifically Black and local audiences.

OBAC (pronounced ob-bah-see; The Organisation of Black American Culture) formed in Chicago in 1967. This group of artists and writers created The Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural in the city’s South Side. The Wall featured images of ‘Black Heroes’ - civic leaders, writers, musicians, sports stars and dancers - and became a gathering place for poetry readings, music, and performances. It sparked a wave of murals in African American neighbourhoods nationwide.

In 1966 The Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defence formed in Oakland, California. The ten-point party platform set out demands for improved housing and education, and an end to police brutality. Their statement began, ‘We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community’. Panthers carried guns to protect Black residents, and launched a free breakfast programme for working-class children and health clinics for locals. Soon after its founding, the BPP created The Black Panther newspaper. Young artist Emory Douglas was appointed the party’s Minister of Culture and designed the newspaper. In his back page illustrations, photomontages, posters and flyers, Douglas depicted the party’s demands, its leaders and recognisable scenes of both struggle and triumph.

ROOM 4: LOS ANGELES ASSEMBLAGE

West coast Black art stands in direct opposition to art for art’s sake. It insists that if art is not for the sake of something it is not art.

Noah Purifoy

Los Angeles was a city experiencing great racial tension. In 1962, police had entered a mosque and shot dead an unarmed member of the Nation of Islam. Two years later, another instance of police violence in a predominantly African American neighbourhood triggered the Watts Rebellion, which left 34 dead, and properties and shops in ruins.

Melvin Edwards began his Lynch Fragments in 1963. He used metal machine parts as well as chains, his title referring to the history of lynching. Two years later, after the Watts Rebellion, Noah Purifoy began collecting materials from the streets, using them to create constructions. By turning former consumer items into imaginative artworks, he hoped to inspire viewers to be creative and reject materialism. John Outterbridge reflected on racial oppression in his Containment series. Later, drawing on his memories of rituals in the American South, he began his Ethnic Heritage series, small doll-like figures made with found materials.

Purifoy and Outterbridge both had exhibitions at the Black-run Brockman Gallery, one of a small number of spaces whose programmes featured Black artists. Another was Gallery 32 where Betye Saar exhibited her work. Saar made assemblages from racist material she’d gathered, scrutinising historical and present-day racism and fashioning images of proud defiance.

Wadsworth Jarrell Revolutionary 1972 Private Collection © Wadsworth Jarrell

How do you represent the ‘expressive awesomeness that one experiences in African art and life in the U.S.A.’? The Chicago artists’ collective AfriCOBRA – the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists - which formed in 1968, proposed an answer.

ROOM 6: THREE GRAPHIC ARTISTS, LOS ANGELES

This room brings together three artists based in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, who took different approaches to the graphic image.

I feel it my moral obligation as a Black artist, to try to graphically document what I feel socially.

David Hammons

Charles White was a respected painter, printmaker and esteemed art college professor. David Hammons had been one of White’s drawing students. In 1968, Hammons started making body prints, coating himself in vegetable fat and pressing his body onto printing paper before applying pigment to reveal the image saturated into the surface. Los Angeles native Timothy Washington, who was also a recent art school graduate, developed a technique of etching into enamel paint applied to sheets of metal. Both Hammons and Washington had exhibited at the Brockman Gallery alongside the Los Angeles-based artists shown in Room Four.

In 1971, White, Hammons and Washington were the featured artists in the exhibition Three Graphic Artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Three years earlier, Claude Booker and Cecil Fergerson, two art handlers at the museum, had founded the Black Arts Council (BAC) in order to show the work of African American artists and to engage Black visitors. The BAC quickly grew to around 3,000 members. Three Graphic Artists was the first exhibition resulting from their efforts.

The exhibition was met with some resistance. Booker and Fergerson picketed the opening reception, incensed by the exhibition’s relegation to a minor gallery within the museum and to White having been denied a prominent solo exhibition. Still, the BAC persisted in advocating for subsequent shows, culminating in Two Centuries of Black American Art in 1976.

Roy DeCarava was one of the first Black photographers to establish a successful career as an independent artist rather than as a photojournalist or studio portraitist.

You should be able to look at me and see my work. You should be able to look at my work and see me.

Roy DeCarava

DeCarava studied painting and drawing under Charles White (whose work is in Room Six) in the 1940s, but soon concentrated on photography. He collaborated with the poet Langston Hughes on The Sweet Flypaper of Life in the mid-1950s, creating touching pictures of family life in Harlem, and by the early 1960s was recognised by younger Black artists as the outstanding figure working in the medium.

DeCarava printed all his images himself, often using very dark blacks and greys, knowing viewers would need to slow down to look closely at his works. For many, his extraordinary handling of a dark tonal range amounted to a Black aesthetic in photography, as did his choice of subject matter. DeCarava sometimes photographed leaders associated with the Civil Rights Movement, but he was equally drawn to jazz musicians and to everyday people in the New York neighbourhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. His abstract photography and architectural studies were just as important to him.

KAMOINGE

DeCarava was the first director of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers who came together in the summer of 1963. The works on the wall opposite DeCarava’s photographs are by members of this group. ‘Kamoinge’ is a word from Kenya’s Kikuyu language meaning ‘a group of people acting together’. The group functioned as a discussion forum and its members showed their work together without ever putting forward a singular model for Black photography.

Several members were also highly involved with The Black Photographers Annual, published four times from 1973 until 1980, becoming the most useful platform for Black photographers at this time. The Annual was a publication where everyday Black life was represented in all its fullness, without an emphasis on deprivation and activism – the subjects of so much documentary photography in illustrated magazines of the time.

ROOM 9: BLACK HEROES

In this period many artists – both Black and white - created powerful images of famous Black Americans. This room brings together portraits of boxers, writers, and painters, such as Andy Warhol’s portrait of Muhammad Ali, Bob Thompson’s painting of the writer LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), and Alice Neel’s portrait of Faith Ringgold.

ROOM 1O: IMPROVISATION AND EXPERIMENTATION

In the early 1970s, many of the artists included in Room Seven (East Coast Abstraction) moved away from the conventions of abstract painting and sculpture, and began experimenting with materials and forms. For some artists and critics, this commitment to improvisation and experimentation connected to Black Americans’ ambitions for political freedom.

It is necessary to be free enough to create beyond the boundaries of any aesthetic … To improvise is the only real and constantly dynamic revolutionary way to be.

Melvin Edwards

Sam Gilliam took the canvas off the stretcher, knotting it at places along the top and hanging from these points so its folds would change from one showing to the next. Jack Whitten created a rake-like implement that he called a developer, and used it to move layers of acrylic paint across a canvas stretched out on the studio floor. Alvin Loving turned away from painting geometrical shapes, instead cutting up and collaging old paintings and adding strips of cloth, leather and fur, seeing his new works as an affirmative answer to the question ‘is there a black art?’

Artists looked back to a history of oppression while celebrating present-day community and looking forward to a brighter future. Evoking slavery and incarceration, Melvin Edwards used barbed wire and chains in a series of sculptures, but titled them in homage to friends. Joe Overstreet created gridded canvases strung up away from the wall, recalling, for him, a history of lynching, but defiant in their colourful optimism.

Bold colours also characterised Alma Thomas’s paintings, made in the wake of a NASA mission to Mars, and Frank Bowling’s Map Paintings, where vast continents appear to dissolve into and emerge from oceans of liquid paint.

ROOM 11: BETYE SAAR

Betye Saar Eye 1972 Collection of Sheila Silver and David Limburger © Betye Saar. Courtesy of the Artist and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, California. Photo Robert Wedemeyer.

In 1970, Betye Saar reached a turning point in her art-making. She attended the National Conference of Artists in Chicago, an annual gathering of African American artists, with fellow artist David Hammons.

ROOM 12: JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN

On 18 November 1974, JAM first opened its doors. Just Above Midtown gallery was founded by Linda Goode Bryant, former Director of Education at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Lorraine O'Grady Art Is. . . (Girlfriends Times Two) 1983/2009 Private Collection © Lorraine O’Grady/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York many pieces grid

I was motivated to pursue a way to change conditions that were causing Black artists I interfaced with every day to say, ‘they won’t let us'. I got tired of hearing that, and I said, ‘Fuck them! Let’s start a gallery'.

Linda Goode Bryant

JAM did what the rest of the New York art world didn’t – recognise the work being made by African American contemporary artists and provide a platform for their art to be seen and sold. Such was the appetite for this new space that opening night attendees spilled out of the gallery, onto the Manhattan street.

JAM made a unique commitment to representing new work, like Dawoud Bey’s photography and Randy Williams’s sculptural reliefs. Though New York-based, JAM regularly featured the Los Angeles community of artists, as seen in Room Four. The gallery also championed avant-garde artists such as Senga Nengudi, who produced sculptures made from nylon stockings she could interact with or ‘activate’. Lorraine O’Grady orchestrated the ambitious and inclusive performance Art Is… at the Harlem African American Day Parade, supported by JAM in 1983.

JAM’s artistic programme also included $5 lunches featuring a 30-minute talk with artists, critics or curators. When visitors first encountered David Hammons’ works made with greasy bags, barbecue bones and Black hair, Goode Bryant staged an on-the-spot discussion so everyone could share their opinions about Hammons’ art. JAM also showcased performance and music, providing a welcome to those unused to visiting exhibitions of modern art.

JAM closed its doors in 1986, having redefined itself with every project.