SESSION NINE
Embedded Files
Sapphire Show, July 4, 1970, the first survey of African American women artists in Los Angeles and, likely, the United States.
( Excerpts from the NY Times, June 15, 2021)
'Sapphire Show: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby' debuted at Gallery 32, a Los Angeles oasis for the work of African American artists. It opened on a holiday — July 4, 1970 — and closed five days later, the penultimate show at the experimental gallery near MacArthur Park. It was the pop-up of its day — though in influence it was more of a supernova than a pop.
The gallery itself folded soon after.
“I remember the feeling,” said Senga Nengudi, one of the six featured artists, whose contribution included vinyl tubes filled with colored water. “It was exciting, fun and triumphant.” The show, named for the bossy character Sapphire Stevens of the radio and TV series “Amos ’n’ Andy,” also borrowed the famous Virginia Slims cigarette tagline for its sassy subtitle.
As likely the first show devoted to Black female artists in Los Angeles, and possibly in the United States, it shone briefly but brightly, and the energy it released can still be felt".
STUDY QUESTIONS
How was the energy released from these two shows- the 'Sapphire Show' and 'Where We At' show recognized?
How similar (or different) were the professional paths and recognized successes of the four "Artists of Note" ?
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER and THEIR WORK IN TWO SHOWS
ARTISTS OF NOTE: BETYE SAAR , DINDGA McCANNON , KAY BROWN and EMMA AMOS
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER
The Sapphire Show, Los Angeles, 1970
'The Sapphire Show , A Landmark Show of Black Women Artists Gets a Second Life " (Fifty years ago, the historic 'Sapphire Show' modeled a Black ethos of uplifting one another when others fail to do so.) by Alexandra M. Thomas, Hyperallergic, July 27, 2021.
Click on the right for an overview of this show including works by the artists.
An excerpt:
As a discipline, art history still has a long way to go when it comes to rectifying its glaring omissions. Yet among the most compelling recent curatorial interventions are ones that have centered Black women. The latest, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby: The Sapphire Show, gathers its Black feminist muse from a 1970 survey of African American women artists in LA — Sapphire: You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby. Organized by Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca, the reimagining of the historic show maintains the same stellar lineup, featuring works by Gloria Bohanon, Suzanne Jackson, Betye Saar, Senga Nengudi (then Sue Irons), Yvonne Cole Meo, and Eileen Nelson (née Abdulrashid), realized between 1966 and 2021.
See below three pieces of work from "The Sapphire Show", 1970
Eileen Nelson, "Wood City' (1970s), wood, tree limb, nails, magnet and 3 vials (containing white beds and soil) glued atop an open wood rectangular base, sculpture.
Betye Saar, 'Taurus" (1967), intaglio print, ink and watercolor on paper, sheet
Senga Nengudi (then Sue Irons) , 'Water Composition V' (1969 - 1970), heat sealed vinyl and colored water.
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER, cont.
The Sapphire Show, Los Angeles, 1970
OPTIONAL READING "A Rare Spotlight on Black Women's Art Still Shines After 51 Years : 'Sapphire Show'. a groundbreaking Los Angeles pop-up, lasted a mere five days - but it has proved worthy of an examination decades later in New York" by Ted Loos, NY Times, June 15, 2021.
Click the image on the right for a description of the Show.
An excerpt:
“Sapphire Show: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” debuted at Gallery 32, a Los Angeles oasis for the work of African American artists. It opened on a holiday — July 4, 1970 — and closed five days later, the penultimate show at the experimental gallery near MacArthur Park. The gallery itself folded soon after.
“I remember the feeling,” said Senga Nengudi, one of the six featured artists whose contribution included vinyl tubes filled with colored water. “It was exciting, fun and triumphant.” The show, named for the bossy character, Sapphire Stevens of the radio and TV series “Amos ’n’ Andy,” also borrowed the famous Virginia Slims cigarette tagline for its sassy subtitle.
9 A Rare Spotlight on Black Women’s Art Still Shines After 51 Years - The New York Times.pdf
The Granada Buildings in Los Angeles, site of the original Gallery 32 show.
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER, cont.
"Where We At", New York, 1971
"WHERE WE AT " BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS -From the Brooklyn Museum
“WHERE WE AT” BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS
From the Brooklyn Museum, 'We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85', April 2017 - Sept. 2017.
"In early 1971, Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, and Faith Ringgold gathered a group of black women at McCannon’s Brooklyn home to discuss their common frustrations in trying to build their careers as artists. Excluded from the largely white downtown art world, as well as from the male-dominated black art world, the women found juggling their creative ambitions with their roles as mothers and working heads of households left little time to make and promote their art.
Out of this initial gathering came one of the first exhibitions of professional black women artists. “Where We At”—Black Women Artists, 1971, opened at Acts of Art Gallery in the West Village that June. Adopting the show’s title as their name, the collective began meeting at members’ homes and studios, building support systems for making their work, while assisting each other with personal matters such as childcare.
Influenced by the Black Arts Movement, members worked largely in figurative styles, emphasizing black subjects. While the group engaged politically with racism, their work also spoke to personal experiences of sexism, and members contributed to publications including the Feminist Art Journal and Heresies. Though the group’s mission was not explicitly feminist, Where We At recognized the power of collectivity—empowering black women by creating a network to help attain their professional goals as artists."
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER, cont.
"Where We At", New York, 1971
Exhibition Spotlight: "Dindga McCannon and 'Where We At", Black Women Artists in "We Wanted a Revolution : Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85, April 26, 2018.
Pat Davis (photographer) (1943 - 2017) , 'Where We At' , Black Women Artists, 1980.
Dindga McCannon, one of the co-founders of 'Where We At,' wrote about her inspiration for making Revolutionary Sister:
"In the ’60s and ’70s we didn’t have many women warriors (that we were aware of) so I created my own. Her headpiece is made from recycled mini flagpoles. The shape was inspired by my thoughts on the Statue of Liberty; she represents freedom for so many but what about us (African Americans)? My warrior is made from pieces from the hardware store—another place women were not welcomed back then. My thoughts were my warrior is hard as nails. I used a lot of the liberation colors: red—for the blood we shed; green—for the Motherland—Africa; and black—for the people. The bullet belt validates her warrior status. She doesn’t need a gun; the power of change exists within her. The belt was mine. In the early 70s bullet belts were a fashion statement, I think inspired by the blaxploitation movies of the time. I couldn’t afford the metal belts, probably purchased at Army Navy surplus stores, so I made do with a plastic one."
Dindga McCannon (b.1947) "Revolutionary Sister", 1971. Mixed media construction on wood, 62" x 27".
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER, cont.
An Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum - 'We Wanted a Revolution : Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85', April 21 - September 17, 2017.
"The Black American Women Who Made Their Own Art World - We Wanted a Revolution" at the Brooklyn Art Museum tracks the shape-shifting radicalism of black women artists, authors, filmmakers, dancers, gallerists, and public figures between 1965 and 1984 by Jessica Bell Brown, Hyperallergic, August 7, 2017.
Click on the right for an overview of this exhibition.
An excerpt:
"What comes to light in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, perhaps the most important exhibition New York has seen in recent years, is that in spite of an art world that tried to keep them on the margins, black women artists fostered individual and collective modes of expression through self-determination and networks of care."
Below are several examples of the work in this show.
Works from "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85" (Brooklyn Museum, April 21 - September 17, 2017.)
Faith Ringgold, “For the Women’s House” (1971) in "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85" at the Brooklyn Museum.
Work by Lorraine O'Grady in 'We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85" at the Brooklyn Museum.
Installation view of 'We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 "at the Brooklyn Museum.
RECOGNIZING WOMEN ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK - WOMEN ARTISTS COMING TOGETHER, cont.
An Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum - We Wanted a Revolution : Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85', April 21 - September 17, 2017.
A Statement on Black Feminism (Brooklyn Museum, 'We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85', April 2017 - Sept. 2017.)
"From the 1960s to the 1980s, black women were at the forefront of Civil Rights struggles in the United States. However, in the fight against racism, their efforts to address the concerns and oppressions specific to black women were frequently dismissed by their male counterparts as divisive and secondary to the larger struggle. Simultaneously, they were often suspicious of the mainstream Feminist Movement, since its primarily white, middle-class membership was largely blind to its own racial biases and class privilege. Queer, transgender, and disabled women were even further sidelined.
In response, black women developed their own ways of fighting gender inequity and racism, creating organizations like the Combahee River Collective, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Additionally, they differentiated themselves from the mainstream Feminist Movement through language, with some black women identifying as womanists. Coined by Alice Walker in 1983—and defined as “a black feminist or feminist of color...committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female”—the term allowed black women to underscore their own unique priorities for a new social order."
ARTISTS OF NOTE: BETYE SAAR , DINDGA McCANNON , KAY BROWN and EMMA AMOS.
ARTIST OF NOTE: # 1. BETYE SAAR (b. 1926) born in Los Angeles. One of the six featured artists at the Sapphire Show in Los Angeles, July 4, 1970.
BETYE SAAR
The Art Story , Betye Saar, African American Assemblage Artist.
Click the image on the right to follow the progression of Betye Saar's work.
An excerpt"
"Summary of Betye Saar - A cherished exploration of objects and the way we use them to provide context, connection, validation, meaning, and documentation within our personal and universal realities, marks all of Betye Saar's work. As an African-American woman, she was ahead of her time when she became part of a largely man's club of new assemblage artists in the 1960s. Since then, her work, mostly consisting of sculpturally-combined collages of found items, has come to represent a bridge spanning the past, present, and future; an arc that paves a glimpse of what it has meant for the artist to be black, female, spiritual, and part of a world ever-evolving through its technologies to find itself heavily informed by global influences. This kaleidoscopic investigation into contemporary identity resonates throughout her entire career, one in which her work is now duly enveloped by the same realm of historical artifacts that sparked her original foray into art. Over time, Saar's work has come to represent, via a symbolically rich visual language, a decades' long expedition through the environmental, cultural, political, racial, and economic concerns of her lifetime."
Betty Saar, "The Liberation of Aunt Jemina", 1972. Wood, cotton, plastic, metal, acrylic paint.."
"Saar’s work was so powerful that the Black Panther leader Angela Davis later credited it with launching the black women’s movement.'
BETYE SAAR, cont.
"How Betye Saar Transformed Aunt Jemima into a Symbol of Black Power' by Alexxa Gotthardt, Art, October 26, 2017".
Click on the right for an overview of how Aunt Jemima became a symbol of black power.
An excerpt:
"The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was born: an assemblage that repositions a derogatory figurine, a product of America’s deep-seated history of racism, as an armed warrior. It’s become both Saar’s most iconic piece and a symbol of black liberation and radical feminist art."
BETYE SAAR, cont.
"Behind The Scenes Betye Saar: Reclaiming the Legacy of Jim Crow", New York Historical Society, March 1, 2019.
Click on the right for an overview of Betye Saar's work.
An excerpt:
"It is fitting that the exhibition 'Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow' coincides with 'Betye Saar : Keepin It Clean' for it is the legacy of Jim Crow that the contemporary artists Betye Saar tackles. Black Citizenship begins with the struggle for equality during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction and ends with the late-19th and 20th century challenges to legalized discrimination that culminated in the civil rights movement. In between appear objects that epitomize the concerted campaign of racial violence and anti-democratic actions that defined Jim Crow."
Work by Betye Saar
Betye Saar, 'A Call to Arms', 1997.
Betye Saar, 'Liberation' (cupboard), 2014
Betye Saar, ' Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines", 2017
Work by Betye Saar at "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85", Brooklyn Museum.
Betye Saar, “Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail” (1973), mixed-media assemblage, 12 x 18 in
BETYE SAAR, cont.
"How the black radical female artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s made art that speaks to today’s politics" by Carolina A Miranda, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 29, 2017
"How the black radical female artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s made art that speaks to today’s politics" by Carolina A Miranda, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 29, 2017
An excerpt
"In scale, it is small — barely 18 inches tall — but its message couldn’t have been more explosive when Los Angeles artist Betye Saar turned a vintage California wine jug, with a label featuring a handkerchief-bedecked mammy, into a sculpture of a Molotov cocktail. Imprinted on the bottle is a black power fist. It’s degrading kitsch remade into fiery cultural armament."
BETYE SAAR, cont.
Interesting to know : ALISON SAAR, born in 1956, daughter of Betye Saar
"Saar credits her mother, acclaimed collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar, with exposing her to metaphysical and spiritual traditions. Assisting her father, Richard Saar, a painter and art conservator, in his restoration shop inspired her learning and curiosity about other cultures.
Saar’s style encompasses a multitude of personal, artistic, and cultural references that reflect the plurality of her own experiences. Her sculptures, installations, and prints incorporate found objects including rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery, glass, and urban detritus. The resulting figures and objects become powerful totems exploring issues of gender, race, heritage, and history. Saar’s art is included in museums and private collections across the U.S. "(From the National Museum of Women in the Arts)
BETYE SAAR, cont
Interesting to know: Alison Saar born in 1956, daughter of Betye Saar.
"Transforming Outrage Into Art" by Jori Finkel, NY Times, Nov. 5, 2020.
An Excerpt:
Alison Saar likes to make sculptures of strong Black women standing their ground: broad shoulders, wide stance, unmovable in their convictions. She made a bronze monument of Harriet Tubman that presides over a traffic island at 122nd Street in Harlem. She created a small army of enslaved girls turned warriors, inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character Topsy, for a major gallery show in Los Angeles. And now Ms. Saar, 64, has a new public sculpture on the Pomona College campus, commissioned by the Benton Museum of Art there: “Imbue,” a 12-foot-tall bronze evoking the Yoruba goddess Yemoja.
9 Alison Saar on Transforming Outrage Into Art - The New York Times.pdfARTIST OF NOTE: # 2. DINDGA McCANNON (b. 1947), born in Harlem. A cofounder with Kay Brown and Faith Ringgold in 1971 of the collective "Where We At", Black Women Artists, Inc.
DINDGA McCANNON, "The World Catches Up with Dindga McCannon " by Jillian Steinhauer, NY Times, Published Sept. 10, 2021, updated Sept 16, 2021.
Read the article on the right for an overview of Dindga MccCannon's work, including visual images.
An excerpt:
For more than five decades, McCannon has been making work rooted in who she is: an African American woman and third-generation Harlemite (although she lives in Philadelphia now). She has a longstanding reputation in Black and fiber art communities: in an interview, Michelle Bishop, the founder and director of the nonprofit Harlem Needle Arts called her “already famous.” But, as is the case with so many Black female artists, the white mainstream ignored her dazzling, hard-to-categorize assemblage quilts as well as her bright, figurative paintings and prints — until now. “I just kept making what was right for me,” said McCannon, who is both happy about and unfazed by her late-in-life success. “Eventually, the world catches up with you.”
9.the World Catches Up With Dindga McCannon - The New York Times.pdf
McCannon working on her main showpiece, “Blues Queens,” a homage to female blues singers
The portraits of blues singers were sewn into deep blue fabric that, at the base, branched into golden strips.
Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
DINDGA McCANNON, cont.
Dindga McCannon on 'Where We At' and the women of the blues, ARTFORUM, September 29, 2021.
Click on the image on the right for a brief overview of Dindga McCannon's work.
An excerpt:
Colors, especially bright tones, amaze me. Over the years, I’ve learned to embrace this fascination instead of holding it back. Western art tends to favor muted tones, but when I visited Africa, I saw that women dress up early in the morning as if they’re going out at night. The occasional circles on the figures’ cheeks add youth and liveliness but also play with facial composition, with depth and flatness. The paintings organically reveal to me what the women in them should wear.
Work by the artist are below.
Dindga McCannon, The Magal-Senegal, Tribute to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, 2016, mixed media quilt, 34 x 44''.
Dindga McCannon, Hattie McDaniel, 2021, mixed media on canvas, 14 x 11 x 2''.
ARTIST OF NOTE: # 3. KAY BROWN (1932 - 2012, born in NYC) Cofounder of the collective "Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. with Dindga McCannon and Faith Ringgold in 1971. Member of the Weusi Artist Collective.
Weusi Artist Collective (established in 1965 - to the present)
KAY BROWN
"Where We At Black Women Artists Collective", Weusi Artist Collective KAY BROWN," Joel Elgin Athraigh Print Studio, July 7, 2020
Click on the right and view some of the work of Kay Brown.
An excerpt:
Kay Brown, "First Kick of Life", ca. 1974, Color etching and aquatint, printed in blue and orange, on moderately thick, moderately textured wove paper, 19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in.
"…Kay Brown (1932-2012) was an African American artist and one of the founders of the Where We At Black women artists’ collective in New York City. She was also the first woman member awarded membership into the Weusi Artist Collective, based in Harlem during the 1960s and 1970s against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement.
"Weusi" is a Swahili word meaning blackness.
View below some work by Kay Brown from this article.
The Devil and His Game, collage of various papers and mixed media on canvas, 1970.
Other work by Kay Brown
Kay Brown, Meditation, etching, aquatint
Kay Brown, Black Mother and Male Child, etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 1974 -1975,
ARTIST OF NOTE:# 4. EMMA AMOS ( 1937 - 2020, born in Atlanta, GA). An early member of Spiral.
The artist Emma Amos with her 2006 work "Head First". "Her paintings often depicted women flying or falling" (Becket Logan)
"Emma Amos Died Just Before Her Retrospective But Her Art is Alive As Ever", NPR, Jan. 13, 2021.
An excerpt
"This is Emma Amos' moment. Her themes — gender and race — press on our minds now. For six decades Amos explored them in prints, paintings and fabrics. She died May 20, just months before a retrospective of her work, "Emma Amos: Color Odyssey," is to open at the Georgia Museum of Art, in Athens. Complications from Alzheimer's took her at age 83, but she knew the show was in the works."
EMMA AMOS, cont.
"Emma Amos, Painter Who Challenged Racism and Sexism, Dies at 83" by Holland Cotter, NY Times, published May 29, 2020, updated June 4, 2020.
Early in her career she created brightly colored scenes of black middle-class domestic life. Her later work was increasingly personal and experimental.
Click on the article on the right for an overview of the work of Emma Amos.
An excerpt:
A key event in Ms. Amos’s career came in 1964. A 27-year-old graduate student in art education at New York University, she was invited to join a newly formed artists group called Spiral.
Its members, all African-American, included Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and the muralist Hale Woodruff — mid career artists with substantial reputations. Organized in response to the 1963 March on Washington, the group was formed to discuss and debate the political role of black artists and their work.
View work below by Emma Amos described in the article.
9.Emma Amos, Painter Who Challenged Racism and Sexism, Dies at 83 - The New York Times.pdf
Emma Amos, (l) "Will You Forget Me?" , 1991 (r) "Tight Rope", 1994
Emma Amos’s 1966 painting “Baby.”
EMMA AMOS, cont.
The Many Styles of Emma Amos, and Her Drive to Get Free, NY Times, published Oct. 21, 2021, updated Oct. 24, 2021
Click on the right to read an overview of the work of Emma Amos.
An excerpt:
"The question of liberation — how to get free — became a driving force in her practice in the late ’80s. You can feel it in the third gallery, where her art erupts with new dynamism and energy. Suddenly, her figures are in motion, whether suspended amid feats of athleticism or falling and floating through the air. The solid ground of reality has given way to expressionistic, metaphorical spaces that might be cosmic, as in the delightfully chaotic triptych “Flying Circus” (1987), or more expressly political, as in “Equals” (1992), which features Amos floating against the backdrop of a waving American flag. The flag’s stars have come unmoored, and the blue rectangle that held them has been replaced by a reproduction of a Depression-era photograph of Black southern laborers. “Equals” suggests that the only way for African Americans to achieve equity and justice is to dislodge the existing paradigm of this country, as Malcolm X — whose image repeats along the top and bottom of the piece — tried to do."
View below some work by Emma Amos including "Flying Circus" and "Equals" referenced in the article.
9 the Many Styles of Emma Amos, and Her Drive to Get Free - The New York Times.pdfEmma Amos's pieces at the Spiral exhibition
An excerpt: These two radically different artworks hang side by side at the Philadelphia Museum, where they seem to represent a crossroads for their maker: abstraction or figuration, black and white or color? She chose chromatic representation and never looked back, but she didn’t give up her commitment to expressive paint either.
Emma Amos, Without Feather Boa” (1965), a print of Amos wearing blue sunglasses and seemingly nothing else.
Emma Amos, “Untitled” (1965) was shown in the only exhibition mounted by Spiral, an influential but short-lived Black artists’ collective.
Two other works by Emma Amos
Emma Amos, "Flying Circus,” 1987, an acrylic painting that uses African fabric as borders, which gives it literal texture as well as historical depth.
"Equals", acrylic on linen canvas, photo transfer and African fabric borders, 1992.
EMMA AMOS, cont.
"How Emma Amos's Art and Activism Powerfully Confronted Racism and Sexism" by Maximiliano Duron, ARTnews, April 30, 2021.
Click on the image on the right for an overview of the work of Emma Amos.
An excerpt:
"The influence of Amos, who died last year at 83, now looms large in the art world, but that wasn’t always the case. She struggled to find gallery representation early on in her career, and for much of her life, she didn’t sell many works. Even fewer of her paintings entered museum collections while she was alive. But Amos was never one to give up easily. She used her art to ponder her anxieties about being erased from a canon of which she wanted to be a part, and she joined collectives like Spiral, Heresies, and the Guerrilla Girls, which called out racism and sexism in the art world."
Emma Amos, "Black Dog Blues", 1983
Another excerpt:
In 1965, Amos married Robert Levine, who was white, and they had two children, Nicholas in 1967 and India in 1970. Her marriage and raising her children would also become important components of Amos’s art practice going forward. “I think this reconciliation of both imposed, as well as invented, racial identity is something that she always wanted to deal with in her art, because she was dealing with it in her personal life,” Harris said. “It was something that she also felt was a part of the conversation in the art world. These artificial definitions of what Black art is, what women’s art is. She wanted to be able to change the conversation and shake things up and show that our preconceived notions about these things are not always as clear as we want them to be.”
Emma Amos, "Two Standing Women", 1966
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