Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, An Analysis

ABSTRACT

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power celebrates the work of Black artists working in the United States beginning in 1963, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, into the 1980’s. During this time Black artists sought to carve out a place for their work, experimenting with new techniques, defining the “Black aesthetic,” and ultimately creating vital contributions to the history of art. The exhibition, originally developed at the Tate Modern in London, has since traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, and is currently at the Brooklyn Museum, heading to the Broad in Los Angeles in March of 2019. This paper will analyze the differences between the iterations, focusing on the decisions made at the Brooklyn Museum as they relate to the overarching goal of the exhibition – showcasing the transformative art practices of Black American artists. Moreover, this paper will tackle the impact of race and background at a curatorial level, in the exhibiting of works by marginalized people and its implications in the future of the contemporary art museum model.      

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, an exhibition first conceived by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, at the Tate Modern in London, spans two decades of artworks created by Black artists in the year leading up to the signing of the Civil Rights Act, and the tumultuous years that followed. The Tate, according to Godfrey, had a long history of collecting and exhibiting American art, but admittedly not that of African American artists. With the acquisition of a number of works through the Tate Americas Foundation by Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Barkley Hendricks beginning in 2015, Godfrey as Senior Curator of International Art and his colleague Whitley began to develop a vested interest in further expanding their knowledge, and the institution’s experience, with African American art – specifically in the age of Black Power. 

WHAT IS BLACK POWER?

Black Power, in its first public articulation by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman, Stokely Carmichael, was a rallying cry to marchers during the Meredith March Against Fear in the spring of 1966. “Black power” would metamorphose from an expression to a full-fledged movement in a matter of months, emphasizing Black pride, economic empowerment and sustainability independent from that of the White power structure in the United States, and an intense appreciation for African ancestral culture. Self-identifying as “Negro” would give way to “Black” and “Afro-American” in the mid-sixties, fueled largely by Carmichael’s call for Black power in 1966. [1]Black Power would also usher in a new debate among Black artists on the aesthetic and conceptual principles of “Black art”, a debate Soul of a Nation takes on full force.  While the U.S. forged ahead in Vietnam, after nearly a decade of involvement, Black Americans launched a revolution of their own in the urban centers and major cities of the United States, as well as in their art studios.

Soul of a Nation, in the fall of 2018, made its penultimate stop in Brooklyn, New York at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Each city the exhibition has traveled to – London, England; Bentonville, Arkansas and now Brooklyn – has a distinct history in relation to the Black Power Movement, the Civil Rights Movement and its Black inhabitants.  For example, the percentage of Black residents of London, Bentonville, and Brooklyn are 41%, 4% and 34% respectively.  Bentonville, however, because of its small Black population, saw little resistance to integration in schools in the years leading up to the Black Power movement – especially in comparison to Little Rock just a few hours southeast.[2] Ironically, with all the diversity associated with the five boroughs, in 2018 New York City now has some of the highest rates of socio-economic based school segregation in the nation. [3] 

Though the exhibition covers two decades “framed by socio-political and historical events” it is not organized chronologically Rather, it relies on “aesthetic strategies” and the grouping of artists who shared a position on the debate of “Black art.”[4] As Soul of a Nation in its latest iteration at the Brooklyn Museum differs greatly from the previous versions, this paper will use the Brooklyn Museum’s model as the basis of comparison to the preceding showings. That is to say, this analysis will focus on the choices made at the Brooklyn Museum as they relate to the Tate and Crystal Bridges. 

ANALYSIS

Once inside the double doors of the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, visitors are surrounded by a vibrant aura, both visually with multi-colored walls and sonically with a sound track of jazz and soul music, mimicking that of music being played in a home. The first gallery introduces New York artists and the Spiral Group. Spiral, most notably led by Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, assembled in 1963 to bring African American artists from New York to the March on Washington. Soon they would begin investigating the need or possibility for a black aesthetic in their individual art forms. The group, more in name than in practice, did not subscribe to the Black Arts Movement —or any one unifying style for that matter — and ultimately disbands by 1965.[5] All three iterations of Soul of a Nation begin with New York, and although New York was the major art hub for the United States at the time, the choice of beginning with Spiral is more conceptual. Bearden, as well as Lewis, had been working since the 1940’s and had gained some traction in the New York art scene, but by the 1960’s they began to feel the strain of being both Black and Black artists. Being in the margins of the mainstream was certainly nothing new, but the push towards embracing their Blackness rather than merely accepting it as a facet of their identity brought to question their techniques and methodologies. Did their art posses a unique black identity? Should their art be political? It is in this first room of Soul of a Nation that we see this struggle play out across the gallery walls – this internal battle being the impetus of art in the age of Black Power.

In the same year Spiral assembles, another faction of Black artists springs up in Harlem, New York focusing on Black photography. The Kamoinge Workshop, led by Roy DeCarava — one of the first Black artists to attain success as an independent artist rather than a documentarian or portrait artist— occupies the second room of the exhibition, moving from a struggle of artistry to one of representation. In the exhibition catalogue for Black Romantic, a 2002 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Robin D.G Kelley notes, that Black photographers, following the rise of figurative painters like Henry Tanner and Edmonia Lewis, used the camera as a “mighty weapon” to combat the distortion of Blacks in mainstream culture.[6] It is no surprise the curators at the Brooklyn Museum presented these images as a precursor to more political works in the exhibition as the image of the Black American was a large priority for Black artists working in figuration in the 1960’s and 70’s. This however, is a departure from the exhibition layout of both the Tate and Crystal Bridges, which followed Spiral with “Art on the Streets” and “Figuring Black Power,” rooms dedicated to the Chicago Wall of Respect (Fig.1) and the emergence of a unifying aesthetic among Black artists with the advent of the Black Arts Movement.[7] This design choice prioritized the issues of mainstream exposure faced by Black artists in addition to the movement towards visual symbols of Black Power highlighted at the other institutions. At all three of the museums, visitors are also immediately introduced to the raised fist, eternalized in Black Unity (1968) by Elizabeth Catlett (Fig.2), as they progress to more politicized works, further emphasizing the connection between these artists and the cultural symbols they relied upon. As visitors move through the first rooms at all three locations, new questions also surface. Could a new canon of Black art be created without addressing the Black figure? Who was this new art for, the mainstream or the Black community?

Regionalism is essential to Soul of a Nation, as these questions and more are addressed differently on either coast and in the Midwest. Location greatly informed artmaking during this period, and the curators at the Brooklyn Museum saw the opportunity to draw out the existing regional theme present in the previous exhibitions to further emphasize that notion. Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Ashley James, explained the decision to highlight seemingly peripheral cities like Talladega and Atlanta, as well as the Historically Black Colleges and Universities predominantly in the south, as a way of presenting this nuanced thinking about artists’ relationships to their locales. She and the curatorial staff were aware of the level of understanding their New York audience possessed about these regions, compared to that of the Tate’s and perhaps even Crystal Bridges, and they capitalized on it. This curatorial choice is successful at the Brooklyn Museum for a number of reasons, but two are embedded in the essence of the exhibition. For one, the inclusion of cities that while not closely linked to the art mainstream were heavily impacted by the Civil Rights movement, bridges the gap between the creative and political identities of these artists who at times felt pressured to pick between the two. Secondly, it compounds upon a major tenet of the Black Arts Movement, a dedication to community building and a cooperative existence. The artists who doubled as educators – Dr. David Driskell and Charles White among many – at these Black universities were integral to the continuing of a legacy of educated Black Americans as well as the scholarship surrounding the art of African Americans. These themes, while not presented overtly, are educational moments – and throughout Soul of a Nation there are many – that open the floor for informed conversation around redefining the canon.             

Following works of “periphery” artists, a group of assemblage artists in Los Angeles becomes the focus of the exhibition. Though Los Angeles can also be seen as a periphery city, with New York being the only true center of the art mainstream, these artists and their contributions are ineradicable from the Black Arts Movement. Orbiting the Los Angeles Watts Rebellion, the majority of works in this section were created with materials found at Watts post-uprising or from the surrounding communities, and the artists all felt compelled to restore and renew the community through their artwork.[8] These assemblages, reliant on African ancestral motifs and American material culture of both past and present, were also steeped in protest and defiance. Los Angeles, by the late 1960’s, was beginning to unravel under the pressures of police brutality and racial injustices. Artists like Melvin Edwards, Betty Saar (Fig.3) and Noah Purifoy represent one of the many facets of activist art that emerges in the age of Black Power, working in more nuanced forms social commentary. The Brooklyn Museum strays from the formula of the Tate and Crystal Bridges yet again following the Los Angeles group: rather than following up with the energetic and empowering work of the AfriCOBRA artists, the curators headed north to The Bay Area.[9] It is in this next room, “The Black Panthers and Emory Douglas,” that the Brooklyn Museum begins to solidify their stance on how the social and political climate of a region necessitates certain artforms.           

Emory Douglas in his capacity as the Minister of Culture of The Black Panther Party was able to create a singular, recognizable artform on the pages of the Black Panther Party Newspaper. His use of bold line and vibrant monochromatic palettes applied to images of Black solidarity, police brutality and the extreme poverty in the inner city, defined the visual aesthetic of the paper for nearly two decades. The dissemination of information within the community as a counternarrative to the mainstream media was of the utmost importance to the Panthers and Douglas, though he was also acutely aware of the educational disadvantage many of the paper’s readers possessed. Still in the midst of the Great Migration, Jim Crow era laws had already wreaked havoc on the literacy of a generation of African American’s and Douglas’s adept use of visual vernacular (Fig.4) made the Panther’s newspaper an incredible success.[10] His work, deservedly, is separate from the graphic arts highlighted at the Tate and Crystal Bridges by Charles White, David Hammons, and Timothy Washington. Though these artists were undeniably a part of the movement, the work Douglas did with the Black Panther Party Newspaper was crucial to the galvanization of African Americans at the height of the Black Power era, and to the foundation of the exhibition.           

Unlike the previous iterations of Soul of a Nation, the Brooklyn Museum broke the exhibition in to two distinct parts over two floors. The beginning of the show focused on regionalism as a catalyst for artistic expression, while the second segment pondered the place of abstraction in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements. Could artists convey the struggles of a people who’d been oppressed and exploited for centuries, abstractedly? This line of questioning is not the creation of the Brooklyn Museum curators, rather it is the tattered rope with which artists of the Black Arts Movement played tug of war in the 1960’s and 70’s. The internal battle between figurative and abstract artists – as well as those who would teeter between practices – largely relegated those who worked in aesthetics to the periphery. Their work would be discredited within the Black art establishment as an attempt at appealing to the burgeoning minimalist and abstraction movements of their White counterparts, while also abandoning their duty to the African American community as Black creators. The works by the expansive, though not exhaustive, group of artists in this section illustrate the reasons why that notion holds little validity.           

Once again the curators at the Brooklyn Brooklyn Museum expanded upon an existing idea in the previous exhibitions to delve deeper into subject matter they felt was most compelling and crucial to understanding of art in the age of Black Power. Assistant Curator Ashley James and her team took advantage of the availability of a larger exhibition space to fully parse out the connections between the “East Coast Abstraction” and “Improvisation and Experimentation” rooms seen at the Tate and Crystal Bridges. A New York context coupled with the larger space, according to James, allowed for greater specificity around artistic strategy. The Black abstractionists of the 1960’s and 70’s did not adhere to any one “Black aesthetic,” rather their individual works were reactive – or at times proactive – to the hateful climate of the period. Though artists like Al Loving (Fig.5) posited that within abstraction, there was still a tie to “Black art” as it was improvisational and dynamic like jazz. Whether eschewing stretcher bars in quiet protest of western art standards, utilizing the relics of African American culture in sculpture, or including members of the community in a piece performance art, the experimentation by these artists is another defining characteristic of art in this time period. What the Tate and Crystal Bridges were unable or unwilling to do in expanding the conversation around Black Abstractionism and Experimental Art, the Brooklyn Museum makes up for in their subtle alterations to an already fascinating display of work.

The choices made by the curators at the Brooklyn Museum were ones necessary for fully developing a narrative that, though conceived with great consideration and skill at the Tate, lacked an intimate relationship to a national history. Crystal Bridges, though in the heart of the United States, is a younger museum not even a decade old, and therefore could not match the experience or practical accommodations provided by the Brooklyn Museum.[11] For these reasons, the Brooklyn Museum’s version of Soul of a Nation is possibly the most successful at carrying out a narrative steeped in unpleasant history while maintaining an individuality between artists unified by more than their skin color. 

EXHIBITING BLACK ART

Soul of a Nation is certainly not the first exhibition to bring together a group of Black artists in a survey style presentation at a major museum. It is important to note though, that “Soul of a Nation is above all an exhibition about artists who transformed the parameters of American art,” as eloquently stated by Godfrey, not a “Black art show.” Beginning with the rise of modernism there have been waves of intense interest in African and African American artforms at the major art institutions of the United States, that result in little more than robust collections in storage.  Mounting Frustration: The Museum in the Age of Black Power, describes this phenomenon of acquisition, exhibition, and subsequent alienation.[12] In examining the many instances of this practice Susan E. Cahan points to two assertive observations by Director and Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden, and arts scholar Michelle Wallace. Golden would note the cyclical “big Black shows” that museums check off their proverbial to-do lists, draw major corporate sponsorship, tour the country and then fade into oblivion as most of the art objects are then banished into storage rooms following their initial draw. Wallace quipped that “perhaps the dominant discourse is given to these lapses of amnesia [at the museums] because some ideas are so repugnant to Western culture that they are forced to emerge again, and again as if new.” That idea being the possibility of pioneering artists of color.  Cahan also points to the “undeniable correlation of racial politics in the United States and the visibility of Black artists at the American art museum.” This formula is admittedly not untrue of Soul of Nation. This was the Tate’s first foray into a strictly African American exhibition – a decision they have been highly lauded for. All three iterations garnered major corporate sponsorship – The Ford Foundation, Walmart, and Universal Music Group to name a few – and the curators have added another institution to the originally conceived tour since the show’s opening to rave reviews. There is also the somewhat convenient timing of mounting a show surrounding the work of artists in the age of Black Power, with such obvious parallels present in the Black Lives Matter movement and social climate of the United States in 2017. With all this evidence of Soul of a Nation possibly just being another “Black art show,” why has the exhibition been met with nothing but praise and accolades?           

To understand the success of this exhibition is examine the curatorial direction behind a show of marginalized people.  When considering who should be at the helm of such an undertaking, logically, those who have the greatest depth of knowledge or experience with the subject matter should be the obvious choice. Historically, however, this has not always been the case. The curatorial staff behind any museum exhibition, but particularly those of marginalized groups, must possess a dedication to correctly and adequately exhibiting the work of the artists. The success of Soul of a Nation on a now international level is due to that very concept, for if not for the scholarship and commitment of curators like Godfrey, Whitley, James, and Lauren Haynes of Crystal Bridges, this exhibition, like many exhibitions of Black artists could have been a huge misstep.           

A cautionary example that Cahan analyzes is Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney in 1969.  This survey of Black artists, it would seem, served two purposes: to quell the outrage and demands of the Black Emergency Cultural Council – an organization of Black activist artists that forms following another flub at inclusion, Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier in 1969 – and to solidify the museum’s standing as a “facilitator of access to African American artists.” This approach to exhibiting the work of Black artists was a failure from its conception. Cahan posits that the racial identity-driven nature of this survey allowed the staff at the Whitney to mount an exhibition of Black artists without grappling with cultural implications, formulating an exhibition thesis or identifying any unifying artistic tendency. In order to do so, curator Robert M. Doty would have needed to possess a level of understanding to discern the at times glaring differences between the group of 75 artists. With the guidance of a co-curator, versed in African American Art, as proposed by the BECC in their numerous talks with leadership at the Whitney, the exhibition would not have lost a third of its participating artists by the time of its opening. The artists who withdrew their work in protest recognized the Whitney leadership’s unflinching dedication to maintaining the status quo while purporting inclusion. The mainstream media at the time began sifting through the rhetoric of the BECC and other vocal artists and a prevailing theme emerged. Is it an impossibility for a non-black curator to mount an exhibition of Black artists both thoughtfully and successfully in the eyes of Black creators and consumers of art?           

This question has re-surfaced time and time again since the age of Black Power in relation to, not just exhibitions, but leadership appointments and the expanding of the narrative of “American art.” The announcement of the appointment of a White consulting curator to the department of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum in March of 2018 was met with almost immediate backlash on social media, disregarding Dr. Kristen Windmuller-Luna’s extraordinary background and experience, as well as endorsements from some of the field’s most revered professionals. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum has recently begun an initiative to expand the “American Wing” of the museum to include Indigenous works and artifacts, presenting a counternarrative to the federal and colonial-centric American collection. At the time of this paper, an official curator has not been hired, yet the first year-long exhibition of the expansion opened in October of 2018, largely under the guidance of scholars and consultants of Indigenous descent according to the Met. It is unclear whether the Met’s leadership will “cover their bases,” and hire someone of Indigenous heritage to avoid the backlash suffered by the Brooklyn Museum. Although the institution would not suffer under any circumstances from having a more diverse curatorial staff, a person of any racial background with the experience and qualifications to properly exhibit the works of Indigenous people is who should be hired.        

 In the case of Soul of a Nation, museum-goers were fortunate to have experienced a show put on by industry professionals with both scholarly and cultural ties to the precarious history of African American art in the United States. As the exhibition travels to the Broad in Los Angeles, expectations will be high – The Broad’s west coast locale furnishes a similar opportunity to alter the exhibition, following the lead of the Brooklyn Museum, to create more specificity and context. Like the Met, it is however, left to be seen who will spearhead the curatorial efforts in the final installment of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.    

NOTES

[1] Mark Godfrey, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. (New York: Tate Publishing, 2017), 13.[2] “Segregation and Desegregation,” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System, accessed November 28, 2018, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=3079.[3] “Why are New York’s Schools Segregated? It’s Not as Simple as Housing,” New York Times, May 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/02/nyregion/new-study-school-choice-increases-school-segregation.html.[4] Mark Godfrey, 13.[5] Amiri Baraka, “Black Art,” The Black Scholar 18, no.1, (January/February 1987), 23. The Black Arts Movement, often regarded as the artistic and cultural sister of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, would evolve out of the creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School by Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka. [6] Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African American Art, (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2002), 19.[7] Painted by the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a group of artists from the South Side Chicago area in 1971 to inspire the community. Features notable sports figures, civic leaders, musicians and athletes.[8] The Watts Rebellion of 1965 erupts after years of intense hostility between law enforcement and civilians in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.[9] African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, established in 1968.[10] The Great Migration was the movement of some six million African Americans from rural southern America, states in the grip of Jim Crow and segregation, to northern and midwestern cities like New York City, Chicago and as far west as Los Angeles. Visual vernacular can be described as visual cues and symbols used to convey ideas or actions in visual culture. When coupled with cultural traditions of gesture or iconography, it creates a codified language.[11] The Brooklyn Museum has successfully mounted similar shows of Black art from previous decades, most recently Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties in 2014. They also possess a large amount of works by these artists in their permanent collection.[12] Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 3.