Just Above Midtown Gallery opened as a commercial art space for Black artists working in New York City in 1974, with the aim of creating a Black collector base, educating artists on the business of being an artist, and establishing a hub for Black experimentation. What starts as a fledgling art gallery, however, becomes the first iteration of Linda Goode Bryant’s decades long engagement with social practice art. Over the years Goode Bryant has been revered in sects of the art world for her work in cultivating the artistic careers of successful Black artists, though few have examined her as a true artist herself. JAM was her first intervention of the art world after she experienced it in two disparate but equally troubling encounters. First, with the White establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, facing Director Thomas Hoving and his sheer ignorance of Black artists and their footprint in contemporary art. Then, with the Black establishment at the Studio Museum in Harlem — the supposed Mecca for Black art and artists — with the director Ed Spriggs who was chauvinistic and abusive. The NYC art landscape was desperately in need of a new start and JAM championed the artist over the dollar and created a space for some of the most seminal pieces of performance-based art to be made. It also sparked a twenty-five-year-old black woman to begin using socially engaged art as a means of bettering her community. This paper will analyze JAM not as an institution, but as a work of socially engaged art with which Goode Bryant began her career in social practice.

Linda Goode Bryant moved to New York City from her native Columbus, Ohio after being accepted to the art history master’s program at the City College of New York. When a fellowship position with the Metropolitan Museum became available, Goode Bryant saw an opportunity to get her voice heard at the upper echelons of the New York art establishment. During the interview process she informed the then director Thomas Hoving that she intended to burn down “the racist institution” that was “living on public money but not representing the full public.”[1] She by some stretch of the imagination is accepted into the Rockefeller Fellowship program, remaining a fellow for a mere six months.

 After acquiring the fellowship Hoving and Goode Bryant’s relationship was based mostly in debating the place of African American artists in the art market. Goode Bryant describes the “pervasive belief” in the art market at the time that African Americans could not make art — there was African art, but no worthwhile African-American art.[2] Challenged by Hoving to procure a list of working artists whom he could present to an acquisition committee — a gesture of condescension rather than intrigue — Goode Bryant realized these artists would be better off working with someone who both acknowledged and valued their contributions. The concept of JAM began percolating during Goode Bryant’s departure from the Metropolitan Museum in late 1972, well into her new role as the Education Director at the Studio Museum. Working alongside artists in the residency program at the Studio Museum, she became even more aware of the exclusion Black artists were facing in New York City. A conversation with artist David Hammons some two years after leaving the Met would propel her to finally bring JAM to fruition. The beginning stages of acquiring a location, sourcing funding for overhead costs, and maintaining a commercial art gallery program were arduous and Just Above Midtown was faced with opposition from the start, especially from the neighboring galleries on 57th Street. The prevailing sentiment was that Goode Bryant and her gallery did not belong, especially not the experimental performance art being created there.

“It wasn’t just about us being black. It was the idea of it being so out there, so experimental, very little painting. It was the thought that if you’re going to show David Hammons or you’re going to show Senga Nengudi, that’s SoHo shit; that’s not 57th Street shit. ‘What are you doing showing this on 57th Street?”[3] 

Goode Bryant, in her conception of the space, wanted to make certain the work was not seen as marginal or just experimental. She believed in the quality and the caliber of artists being shown, especially in respect to their White counterparts on 57th street. Once Goode Bryant solidified her vision for JAM, one described by artist and JAM member Lorraine O’Grady, as “an esprit formed in exclusion,” the work of social practice began to take shape.

Social practice is defined as art that strives to create social or political change through community-based or participatory projects outside of art’s traditional white cube gallery space.[4] Conceptualism in the 1970s ushered in the notion of the thought process as artwork, wherein a materialized work is optional and the experience of the creation is the central element. Besides toeing the lines between community activism, social work, and the fine arts, artists working in social practice also deal with how their work is “specifically at odds with the capitalist infrastructure that is the contemporary art market.” [5]

 Linda Goode Bryant with the opening of JAM began intervening into a white-male-dominated market, not for personal gain or benefit, but for the advancement of the Black artistic community that existed in New York City in the mid 1970s. To cement JAM in social practice, it is imperative that we examine the ways in which the gallery mirrors that of a socially engaged artwork. Pablo Helguera, Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, has written extensively on social practice and is an authority on navigating its implementation in fine arts education and the contemporary art market. His book Education for Socially Engaged Art serves as a framework for what constitutes a work of social practice and the varying mechanisms that shape its outcome.

 Helguera outlines “defining elements” surrounding the dynamic created through socially engaged work, these elements are critical in establishing JAM as a work of social practice art. Beginning with “the construction of a community or temporary social group through a collective experience,” socially engaged work depends on a community for its continued existence as well as seeks to instill a community building mechanism.[6] This notion of the work being both driven by and created for the community is echoed in Lorraine O’Grady’s description of JAM and the works she created there. O’Grady began her formal art career while volunteering at JAM in the 1980s. Her breakthrough performance as Mlle. Bourgeoise Noir — a personification of the restless and unimpressed black middle-class — was first staged at a JAM opening reception. Her criticism of the art market and the ill-advised cautiousness of black artists throughout the performance was surprising but welcomed by most, including Goode Bryant. She felt, as O’Grady did, that Mlle. Bourgeoise Noir’s interruption was the type of work that belonged at JAM — experimental, introspective, and above else beneficial to her fellow black artists.  O’Grady once wrote about “the joys of a unique art-making moment, one when the enabling audience—the audience which allows the work to come into existence and to which the work speaks—and the audience that consumes the work are one in the same.” This sentiment is one that many JAM artists have expressed, and while Helguera notes there is no rubric for what constitutes a “meaningful interaction or social engagement” within a work of social practice, the dependence on social intercourse is an absolute factor for its existence.[7] At JAM, social intercourse was the driving force behind programming. On the internal structure of JAM and the way it functioned as an institution O’Grady writes:

JAM was a place as much as a world, a place where people ate together, discussed and argued, drank and smoked together, collaborated on work, slept together, pushed each other to go further, and partied ’til the cows came home. JAM was a complete world... Between the business model of the gallery and the clubhouse model, JAM was definitely the clubhouse where people gathered.[8]

Following the formulation of the community in a socially engaged work, is the “construction of multi-layered participatory structures,” which becomes particularly of interest when speaking of JAM, as the participants themselves were artists working on bodies of work, as well as parts of a body of work. The distinction between participant types as defined by Helguera, puts JAM in the category of “collaborative participation,” which comes as no surprise. In terms of the participants’ predisposition towards participation, it is important to note that the artists whom Linda Goode Bryant showed at the inception of JAM, and through its twelve-year existence, were not acutely aware of the circumstances under which they convened. That is not to say Goode Bryant was completely conscious of her gallery being a social practice artwork either. She speaks retrospectively about seeing JAM as a “kind of art project,” and that David Hammons had taken issue with her “using him like a paint brush,” but her intentions at the opening of JAM were not consciously grounded in social practice.[9]Nevertheless, a socially engaged artwork like JAM, with collaborative participation, is structured so that the participant is also responsible for the development of the content, working in direct dialogue with the artist. [10]

Audience also plays a major role in the creation and actualization of a socially engaged artwork. According to Helguera, socially engaged artworks are built around an audience; the audience does not gravitate to the work.[11] The intent of these works is to capitalize on an opportunity to speak to an audience, marginalized or otherwise, that already exists. The way in which the work transitions following that initial interaction varies from project to project, but at its inception JAM as a work of social practice formed out of a clear dialogue between the “black avant-garde” and Goode Bryant. Helguera also presents a counterargument to the notion of audience: Does a preconceived audience predicate a body of work that is non-diversified and reductive? He posits that it is near impossible to create an experience that is intended to be public without bias toward a certain type of interlocutor or participant. In the case of JAM, in its earlier years specifically, this is crucial to the development of the space as an incubator of experimental Black performance art. In an interview at the Guggenheim with David Hammons in 1975 Goode Bryant spoke about how historically Black artists were expected to respond to White culture and the White experience, and that the artists at JAM relearned to express themselves in terms of the Black experience.[12]The question remained though, could Whites respond to work derived from this experience? Though the concept of JAM called for the proliferation of a Black collector base, mainstream success in the art market was of course something to consider. Goode Bryant has commented on the critical support of the gallery during the end of the 1970’s and that Hammons work, although enshrouded in a black presence could be broken down into aesthetics and prove stimulating to a White audience. That, however, only speaks to the individual work of Hammons and the support of the gallery as an art institution, not the experience of JAM as its own work of art.

In 2019 alone, however, JAM has been exalted into the mainstream; the gallery was spotlighted at the Frieze New York art fair, on the heels of an announcement of an exhibition at MoMA in 2022. It would seem JAM and Linda Goode Bryant are finally getting their much-deserved recognition from the art establishment. Both the art fair spotlight and the MoMA exhibition, however, follow Just Above Midtown’s focal inclusion in the Soul of a Nation exhibition that has traveled to four major art institutions since 2017.[13] With respect to audience, as posited by Helguera, it may come as no surprise that the curators of Soul of a Nation -- who aptly included JAM in an exhibition surrounding the wellspring of Black artists in America in the 1960s through to the 1980s -- have been predominantly Black. As mentioned previously, Linda Goode Bryant and JAM have been revered for sometime now by those residing in the margins of art history programs and curatorial departments; recognized, though maybe not as a social practice work, by a small sect of the art world as deserving of mainstream attention and scholarship. The audience has evolved from that of the participants the work was designed to engage, to a select group of art historians who’ve ushered JAM into the canon.

Finally, when narrowing the focus on JAM as an artwork, it is also necessary to distinguish the category of social practice work it falls into. The two major categories are socially engaged works that act through representation, responding allegorically or metaphorically to an issue, and those that convene to achieve a specific goal or create meaningful impact.[14] An artists who galvanizes a large group of community members to install a mural that deals with the effects of over-policing and police brutality in a minority neighborhood is creating a representative piece of work. The mural is symbolic of the group’s outlook and addresses a socio-political issue but provides no solution or meaningful intervention. JAM, on the other hand, served as a somewhat commercially viable art institution with the intent on intervening the White establishment, which it successfully did with its first location on 57th street. Though as a dealer Goode Bryant was admittedly not the best, she was able to accomplish two vital agendas. The first was getting the work of Black experimental artists in the same commercial playing field as their White counterparts, out of the context of community centers or alternative spaces. Secondly, she instilled a spirit of dignity among artists who’d been taught to consistently aim for acceptance. JAM is a lesson in how an individual or a community can create opportunity when access has been denied.  

Goode Bryant’s career as an art dealer did not end as a result of lack of business prowess -- she received an MBA from Columbia University during JAM’s reign -- nor lack of quality art to sell -- her roster included Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger and Fred Wilson -- but JAM did come to a close in 1986. The 1980s art market saw the rise in the commodification of both art and the artist and Goode Bryant, still invested in experimentation and providing an alternative space to the “white cube,” was all but driven out of her final space along Broadway in Soho. In an interview with Rujeko Hockley in 2017, Goode Bryant asserts:

Things like JAM disrupting the practice of capitalism in America—any of us that were activists in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. JAM and everything I’ve ever done in life is about how one creates wealth that is in the community, whereas these other players that shut that down are only about individual wealth.

She and Hockley ruminate on the ways larger systems of capitalism often make certain that the status quo remains intact. Hockley, assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and co-curator of the 2019 Whitney Biennial continues:

People trying to provide alternatives are given few avenues by which to succeed, but it’s those alternatives that are the main bulwark against the market being the only arbiter of value or opportunity. You were trying to provide a way for artists to eat and live and work that wasn’t predicated on the market, and so the market cut it down. It’s very interesting what happens when people, particularly black people, try to create self-sufficient alternatives to capitalism.[15]

Following the closing of Just Above Midtown, Goode Bryant lingers around the art market consulting, and independently curating, though by the 1990s she discovers film as a means of intervention. By 2003 she produces Flag Wars along with Laura Poitras, a documentary on the gentrification of her hometown Columbus, Ohio by white gay homebuyers. The film encapsulates more of the representational type of social practice mentioned previously, wherein no impact is immediately made as a result of the work. Goode Bryant, never able to sit by passively, did act on behalf of constituents facing litigation throughout the duration of the film, but the work itself was mostly symbolic. Following the country-wide tour of the award-winning film, Goode Bryant moved on to working with disenfranchised Americans on a number of local and state elections, attempting to bring more agency to those in the margins of the political sphere. However, it was not until 2008 in the midst of a global food crisis that Goode Bryant found her most recent and most civically impactful work to date.

Project Eats, a non-profit organization founded under Goode Bryant’s Active Citizens Project, uses art, urban architecture, and community partnerships to “sustainably produce and equitably distribute” food resources in neighborhoods where people live on working-class and low incomes.[16] Goode Bryant became knowledgeable of the exponential effects -- medical, psychological and otherwise -- that food deserts have on predominantly minority communities, and lower income communities in general. Her urban farm projects inject sources of fresh and healthy foods to these communities, in addition to teaching skills in sustainable food production and entrepreneurship. Project Eats, according to Goode Bryant, is without question her latest work of social practice. Still concerned with creating wealth within a community rather than building individual wealth, Goode Bryant persists: “How do we create art that actually has a direct impact on conditions that are social, economic, environmental, human, and historical?”[17] With her beginnings at Just Above Midtown, infiltrating one facet of the capitalist structure, to intervening in a humanitarian issue of food accessibility, Linda Goode Bryant is aptly positioned to continue make meaningful impact through her socially engaged work.

 NOTES

[1] Randy Kennedy, “Making Doors: Linda Goode Bryant in Conversation with Senga Nengudi,”Ursula no.1, (Winter, 2018)[2] Linda Goode Bryant, Bomb Magazine, The Oral History Project Series,” 2017.[3] Ryan Kennedy, Ursula.[4] Margaret Carrigan, “What Happens When Social Practice Art Meets the Market,” Artsy, August 30 2017.https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-social-practice-art-meets-market[5] Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. Mexico City: Jorge Pinto Books, 2010.[6] Pablo Helguera, 9.[7] Pablo Helguera, 2.[8] Lorraine O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown,” Lorraine O’Grady exhibition catalog. New York: Alexander Gray Associates, 2015, 4.[9] Randy Kennedy, Ursula.[10] Pablo Helgueera, 15.[11] Pablo Helguera, 22.[12] Linda Goode Bryant, Interviewed by Mimi Poser in conversation with David Hammons. WNYC Round and About the Guggenheim series. New York City, 1975.[13] Soul of a Nation, originating at the Tate Modern in London, traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of Contemporary Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Broad.[14] Pablo Helguera, 7.[15]Linda Goode Bryant, Bomb Magazine.[16] Project Eats mission statement.[17] Linda Goode Bryant, Bomb Magazine