black arts movement research paper

African American Heritage

Black Arts Movement (1965-1975)

The Black Arts Movement was a Black nationalism movement that focused on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts made up of Black artists and intellectuals. This was the cultural section of the Black Power movement, in that its participants shared many of the ideologies of Black self-determination, political beliefs, and African American culture.

The Black Arts Movement started in 1965 when poet Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones] established the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, New York, as a place for artistic expression. Artists associated with this movement include Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, James Baldwin, Gil Scott-Heron, and Thelonious Monk. Records at the National Archives related to the Black Arts Movement primarily focus on individual artists and their interaction with various Federal agencies.

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Prominent Figures of the Black Arts Movement at the National Archives

Maya Angelou

Amiri Baraka

James Baldwin

Gwendolyn Brooks

Nikki Giovanni

Lorraine Hansberry

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 - May 28, 2014)

Marguerite “Maya” Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was a writer, poet, activist, and actress. Angelou was exposed to the Civil Rights Movement and African culture during the 1960s. In the 1970s, she began her writing career, focusing on stories and anecdotes based on her life, Blackness, and feminism. In 1993, Angelou became the first poet to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration since 1961. Records at the National Archives related to Maya Angelou consist of appearances at Federal events and her time on tour with a production of Porgy & Bess .

Social Networks and Archival Context - Maya Angelou

Angelou Reciting "On the Pulse of Morning" at the Inauguration of President Clinton, January 20, 1993; Photo ID: P00162_24; William J. Clinton Presidential Library

Amiri baraka [everett leroi jones] (october 7, 1934 - january 9, 2014).

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey on October 7, 1934. In 1954 he earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Howard University. Following graduation, Jones joined the military and served three years in the Air Force. After receiving a honorable discharge, he settled in Greenwich Village in New York and began to interact with various musicians and artists. While living in New York, Jones became a well-respected novelist and poet for his writings on Black liberation and white racism. He also met Hettie Cohen, a Jewish writer. Later on, the two married and co-edited the literary magazine Yugen . They also founded Totem Press, which focused on publishing the works of political activists. Jones taught at several colleges and universities before changing his name to Amiri Baraka. Baraka continued to publish literary works for over 50 years until his death in 2014. Records at the National Archives pertaining to Amiri Baraka include a sound recording of Baraka reciting a poem that was considered to be an un-American activity.

Social Networks and Archival Context - Amiri Baraka

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 - December 1, 1987)

James baldwin and marlon brando at the march on washington, august 28, 1963 ( naid 542060 ).

James Arthur Baldwin was born August 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York. After graduating from high school in 1942, Baldwin began writing. In 1953, he published his first novel  Go Tell It on the Mountain . Prior to releasing his first novel, Baldwin chose to leave America and move to France because of his dissatisfaction with the open racism and homophobia in the United States. In 1962, he visited the United States in order to participate in the the Civil Rights Movement, namely attending the March on Washington (seen in the photo). During the height of the struggle for Black equality, Baldwin was widely known for his militant essays that illustrated the social and economic plight of Black Americans. His writings addressed the issues of race but also mentioned the complexity of homosexuality and sexual orientation among the Black experience in the U.S. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  in 1968, Baldwin returned to France and continued writing until his death in 1987. Records at the National Archives pertaining to James Baldwin include moving images from the Peace Corps, the Agency for International Development and an interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks.

Social Networks and Archival Context - James Baldwin

Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 to December 3, 2000)

Gwendolyn Brooks was an American poet and teacher and is known as the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her work  Annie Allen (1950). Brooks was born on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Six weeks after her birth, the Brooks family moved to Chicago. Growing up in Chicago and attending majority white, then Black, and then integrated schools gave Brooks a varied perspective on racial dynamics in America which would later come to influence her future work. In the 1940s Brooks became heavily involved in attending poetry workshops in Chicago, in particular workshops organized by Inez Cunningham Stark. World renowned poet Langston Hughes stopped by one of these workshops and after hearing her recite her poem "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee” he became a fan of her work and acted as her mentor.

She published several works of poetry including A Street in Bronzeville (1945), and In the Mecca (1968) which both earned critical acclaim. One of her better known poems “We Real Cool” was published in her third book of poetry, The Bean Eaters (1960), and is widely studied in literature classes and re-printed in literature textbooks. Brooks taught poetry and writing around the country at several well known colleges and universities such as the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Elmhurst College and continued on in that respect until her death on December 3, 2000 in her hometown of Chicago.

Social Networks and Archival Context - Gwendolyn Brooks

Nikki Giovanni (June 7, 1943)

Nikki Giovanni is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Giovanni was born as Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. on June 7, 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She attended Fisk University receiving a B.A. in History and later went on to attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Giovanni’s work covers topics ranging from race and social issues explored through poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays. She was a prominent figure in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and her work was heavily influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. Her poetry during this period in  Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement , reflected a strong African American perspective and because of this she was hailed as the "Poet of the Black Revolution." Over the years Giovanni would shift her focus to children’s literature, human relationships, women writers, and hip hop. Currently, Giovanni works as an University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech where she teaches courses on writing and poetry.

Social Networks and Archival Context - Nikki Giovanni

Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965)

A native of Chicago, Illinois Lorraine Hansberry is known as one of the most significant and influential playwrights of the 20th century. She wrote the landmark play A Raisin in the Sun , which opened at Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City in 1959.  A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The play depicted the characteristics, emotions, and struggles of an urban Black family and eventually won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and four Tonys for best play, director, actress and actor. Because of the success of the play, Hansberry was credited for breaking down racial barriers on Broadway and ushering in a new opportunity for African American women playwrights. 

In 1961, she wrote the screenplay to A Raisin in the Sun  in order to turn the play into a movie. The movie staring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee became as successful as the play and allowed the actors to gain considerable recognition for their roles. Hansberry’s second play, and only other production put on in her lifetime,  The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window  ran for 101 performances. The day that the play closed was the same day that Hansberry died at the age of 34 from pancreatic cancer. Hansberry had many other works, including writings for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) , and contributions to lesbian rights organizations. Records at the National Archives pertaining to Lorraine Hansberry include moving images among the records of the Agency for International Development and sound recordings of a radio broadcast.

Social Media and Archival Contexts - Lorraine Hansberry

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The black arts movement (1965-1975).

The Black Arts Movement was the name given to a group of politically motivated black poets, artists, dramatists, musicians, and writers who emerged in the wake of the Black Power Movement. The poet Imamu Amiri Baraka is widely considered to be the father of the Black Arts Movement, which began in 1965 and ended in 1975.

After Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, those who embraced the Black Power movement often fell into one of two camps: the Revolutionary Nationalists, who were best represented by the Black Panther Party, and the Cultural Nationalists.  The latter group called for the creation of poetry, novels, visual arts, and theater to reflect pride in black history and culture.  This new emphasis was an affirmation of the autonomy of black artists to create black art for black people as a means to awaken black consciousness and achieve liberation.

The Black Arts Movement was formally established in 1965 when Baraka opened the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem. The movement had its greatest impact in theater and poetry. Although it began in the New York/Newark area, it soon spread to Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, and San Francisco, California. In Chicago, Hoyt Fuller and John Johnson edited and published Negro Digest (later Black World ), which promoted the work of new black literary artists. Also in Chicago, Third World Press published black writers and poets. In Detroit, Lotus Press and Broadside Press republished older works of black poetry. These Midwestern publishing houses brought recognition to edgy, experimental poets. New black theater groups were also established. In 1969, Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare established The Black Scholar , which was the first scholarly journal to promote black studies within academia.

There was also collaboration between the cultural nationalists of the Black Arts Movement and mainstream black musicians, particularly celebrated jazz musicians including John Coltrane , Thelonious Monk , Archie Shepp, and others. Cultural nationalists saw jazz as a distinctly black art form that was more politically appealing than soul, gospel, rhythm and blues, and other genres of black music.

Although the creative works of the movement were often profound and innovative, they also often alienated both black and white mainstream culture with their raw shock value which often embraced violence. Some of the most prominent works were also seen as racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and sexist.  Many works put forth a black hyper masculinity in response to historical humiliation and degradation of African American men but usually at the expense of some black female voices.

The movement began to fade when Baraka and other leading members shifted from Black Nationalism to Marxism in the mid-1970s, a shift that alienated many who had previously identified with the movement. Additionally Baraka, Nikki Giovanni , Gil Scott-Heron , Maya Angelou , and James Baldwin achieved cultural recognition and economic success as their works began to be celebrated by the white mainstream.

The Black Arts Movement left behind many timeless and stirring pieces of literature, poetry, and theater. Ironically despite the male-dominated nature of the movement, several black female writers rose to lasting fame including Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez , Ntozake Shange , Audre Lorde , June Jordan , among others.  Additionally, the Black Arts Movement helped lay the foundation for modern-day spoken word and hip-hop.

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Darlene Clark Hine, et al., The African American Odyssey (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson, 2010); Thomas Aiello, “Black Arts Movement,” Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century , ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Research and Imagine the American Black Art Since 2005

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1 One hundred years ago, author, editor and civil right activist Freeman Henry Morris Murray published Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (1916), a pioneering study of the depictions of peoples of African descent in art. Although Murray’s primary focus was on figural works produced by some of the leading (i.e. white) American and European sculptors in the latter half of the nineteenth century, his sculptural survey also included works by several important African American artists (specifically, Mary Edmonia Lewis and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller) and, thus, marked his book as one of the very first histories and critical studies of black American art ( Murray , 1916).

2 Since Murray’s publication the art-historical literature on black artists, their artistic production, the aesthetics of racial difference and cultural distinctiveness, and the black image has grown incrementally, from a rare and happenstance phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century to a relatively common occurrence in the first decades of the twenty-first. A non-scientific method of gauging this proliferation of art-historical scholarship on African American artists and their works would be a simple comparison, say, between 1915 and 2015, of the frequency with which known African American artists are referenced in scholarly and popular literature. For example, in 1915 probably the names of only three black artists – William Edouard Scott, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller – would have appeared more than once in newspapers and art journals nationwide. In contrast, in 2015 no listing of significant, contemporary artists would be considered accurate without Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Nick Cave, Renee Cox, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Chris Ofili, William Pope.L, Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley, and Fred Wilson, among many other black artists of note.

3 In thinking about a historiography of African American art studies, it is important not to adhere too strictly to a conventional definition of art history: that is, a body of scholarship that, usually in the form of an article, treatise, thesis, or monograph, studies visual production in its historical and/or cultural contexts. African American art histories have not only been produced in these standard ways, but also in less overtly academic formats, such as exhibition catalogues, art gallery and museum publications, periodical art reviews, cultural criticism, and literary anthologies. The breadth and variety of these art-historical and critical studies of black artistic production encourage a broader scope and far more adaptable modes of investigation from scholars: approaches to research that not only take into account the blinders that most of the academy has historically worn when it came to seeing and appreciating African American artists and artistry, but also taking into account those unexpected sources and hidden archives – far off the treaded paths that art historians normally embark upon – in which black art histories can be rediscovered and reimagined.

4 Not unlike other chronological, national, or culture-specific studies in art history, African American art histories fulfill many objectives. Apart from bringing greater scholarly attention to the lives and careers of individual artists, describing certain historical moments or periods during which artists and patrons coalesce around particular ideas and stylistic sensibilities, or charting the contours of this particular subfield (and frequently questioning its very existence), historians of black visual culture scrutinize and visually deconstruct specific works of art. Such close readings invariably involve a quest for meaning, revealing artistic intent, and putting into words the art object’s affinities with a particular style or visual idiom. A matter of endless debates and conceptual disagreements, the question of the necessity of a distinctive African American or black category in art scholarship infiltrates the works of virtually every historian who ventures into this subfield, from Benjamin G. Brawley’s early twentieth-century musings on “Negro Genius,” to Derek C. Maus’ and James J. Donahue’s early twenty-first-century considerations of art and identity in the post-Civil Rights period ( Brawley , 1918; Maus, Donahue , 2014).

5 Among the many topics and theoretical directions African American art-historical studies have touched upon in the past decade, five themes and/or conceptual routes have produced an abundance of new scholarship and, thus, are prime for discussion. These five themes are: the two black movements (“The Harlem Renaissance” and “The Black Arts Movement”); Feminine - masculine - feminine; the Post-black ( noirceur chimérique ou l'art noir sans négritude ); the Insider outsiders; and the revised histories. In the realm of those aforementioned studies that focus on philosophically cohesive historical moments, many revolve around two black cultural movements: 1) the early twentieth-century project known as the Harlem Renaissance, and 2) the circa 1960s and 1970s cultural insurgency popularly known as the Black Arts Movement. These two “black movements,” approximately forty years apart from one another, collectively generate a strain of art-historical scholarship that, since the late twentieth century, has significantly reshaped earlier interpretations of these two cultural nationalist uprisings, by way of a greater emphasis on each movement’s nascent gender and sexual politics, their respective occasions for global outreach, and their mutations via early- and mid-twentieth-century mass media.

6 Parallel to the amplified presence of African American women writers in late twentieth-century American literature, art practitioners and historians throughout the African diaspora increasingly came to terms in their respective works with persistent questions of gender, sexuality, racial and cultural blackness, as well as their often uneasy interrelationships. These theoretical concerns, along with a new disciplinary commitment to highlighting the contributions of black women in art history and visual culture, have significantly reshaped African American art studies. A preponderance of African American art-historical studies in this period grappled with these themes and the ethical dilemmas they imposed upon audiences for art and, intentionally improvising upon the title of one of Jean-Luc Godard’s film classics, I make my subheading for this discussion feminine-masculine-feminine; a kind of methodological coda for this direction in art research, alluding here to the gender interdependency and, in particular, to the feminist focus of recent scholarship.

7 A popular topic in African American art scholarship over the past decade is the concept of a “post-black” aesthetic in contemporary art. Manifested in the actual examples of “post-black” art – rather than in the term’s connotations of a total departure from racial and/or cultural blackness – is a parallel (or “shadow”) racial/cultural preoccupation: one which privileges a kind of playfulness, or an irreverence, with regards to identity, history, and/or culture. Although art historians and critics who have written about this noirceur chimérique have tended to keep an objective distance when chronicling this phenomenon, many scholars are not as dispassionate, exploring instead the philosophical pitfalls of embracing racial ambiguities, or the broader political implications of taking a more inventive attitude toward black history. Very much like the research that has developed around the other African American art topics discussed in this essay, most “post-black” studies approach the topic without an a priori agenda that views this phenomenon, “l’art noir sans négritude,” uncritically.

8 Coinciding with the contemporary art scene’s heightened appreciation for works by socially marginalized, non-academically trained visual artists, art historians and theoreticians have begun to look closely at these part-artistic, part-sociological practices, from providing biographical information and career trajectories for these “insider outsiders,” to positing cultural and social theories about the artistic appeal of this work. Since African American artists figure prominently in this group, as do artists located mostly in the American South, much of the research is understandably indebted to critical race theory and cultural hypotheses that address center/periphery social dynamics.

9 Finally, a lot of the recent research in African American art history hasn’t been so much directed toward particular topics or a set of theoretical concerns, as fundamentally revising or offering correctives to an extant art history. These “historical revisions” have taken many forms, including alternative approaches to the art survey, multi-volume or multi-authored studies, and thematic investigations based on art genres, styles, or historical occurrences. Like the other categories of recent scholarship, monographic studies – usually in the form of exhibition catalogues published in collaboration with art galleries and museums – readily lend themselves to historical revisions, either providing augmented histories of recognized art-world figures, or introducing relatively unknown individuals to the art-viewing public. A more detailed description of each of these art-historical topics follows.

Two Black Movements: “The Harlem Renaissance” and “The Black Arts Movement”

• 1 Fully developed but relatively concise accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Moveme (...)

10 The Harlem Renaissance or, as it was popularly referred to the 1920s and 1930s, the “New Negro Arts Movement,” was an interlude in the larger span of modern history that most scholars agree was a period of major artistic flowering among African Americans, celebrated and championed by an assortment of advocates on many fronts: cultural, social, political, and racial. Commencing around the end of World War I and continuing well into the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance trained a virtual spotlight on African American artists, highlighting their contributions to the literary, performing, and visual arts, with a special emphasis on their almost libidinal powers during the jazz age. In contrast, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its comparable examples of an insurgent black creativity, has only recently become recognized – in the last twenty-five years or so – as another, very important moment in African American arts and letters. Born out of the ashes of the Civil Rights Movement and the alternative battle cries of “Black Power” and “Black is Beautiful,” the Black Arts Movement privileged a politically inspired aesthetic of figural expressionism and racial romanticism, as played out in spoken poetry, ritual theater, and hyper-visuality. In tandem with a new appreciation for the Black Arts Movement, cultural historians over the past decade have used the notion of a chronologically defined, black artistic “renaissance” to critically revisit the 1960s/70s and the 1920s/30s, perhaps seeing in both moments occasions for a radical rethinking of race and the role of the artist in re-conceptualizing society. Apart from a common emphasis on producing art that reflected “race pride,” or that exemplified a kind of conspicuous blackness, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement were both cultural projects in which cross-generational debates around the black artist’s responsibilities to the black masses abounded, often initiated by youthful black provocateurs who lambasted their opposers without formal restraints or political inhibitions. 1

11 Since 2005, several important books and anthologies have reassessed these two movements, questioning, for example, the efficacy of the Harlem Renaissance’s call to racial distinctiveness in the arts ( Calo , 2007), and critiquing the assumptions of racial exclusivity in the reception and understanding of art during the Black Arts Movement ( Collins, Crawford, 2006; Hassan, Crawford, 2011, 2012 ). The Harlem Renaissance has especially inspired art historians of late, fostering previously uncharted research into that era’s expansive, art-informed print culture ( Goeser , 2007), the underappreciated role of women artists ( Kirschke , 2014), Chicago, Illinois as an important, but frequently unmapped New Negro territory ( They Seek a City , 2013), and other thematic directions ( Tribe , 2007; Thompson K. , 2007). Recently, some of the most important Harlem Renaissance artists have been the subjects of major art exhibitions, such as Aaron Douglas ( Aaron Douglas , 2007), Hale Woodruff ( Amaki, Barnwell Brownlee , 2007; Rising Up , 2012), Nancy Elizabeth Prophet ( Amaki, Barnwell Brownlee , 2007), and Archibald J. Motley, Jr. ( Archibald Motley , 2014), while the life and work of sculptor Richmond Barthé were the focal points of two very important biographies ( Vendryes, 2008; Lewis, 2009 ). Journal articles have also offered alternative readings of the Harlem Renaissance, introducing into the topic the era's overtures toward the esoteric and spiritual in art ( Vincenti , 2006) and artistic explorations of stereotype and satire ( Ott, 2008; Wolfskill, 2009 ).

12 Given the contemporary visual appeal of classic works by such Black Arts Movement figures as Barkley L. Hendricks, Joe Overstreet, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Charles White, much of the recent scholarship surrounding this period can be found in exhibition publications. From a scholarly repositioning of some of the Movement’s most significant activities to Los Angeles, ( ‘Now Dig This!’ , 2013), to a philosophical volleying between the Movement’s activist orientations ( Witness , 2014) and its psychological performances of race ( Back to Black , 2005), the Black Arts Movement has prompted many historians and curators to go beyond the period’s agitprop façades and political rhetoric ( Black Panther , 2007) and, instead, to delve deeply into its philosophy of community ( Zorach , 2011) and its revamped aesthetic of the black quotidian ( Fine , 2005). Despite the focus on individual careers, many monographic studies on Black Arts Movement artists have considered their subjects within more theoretical frameworks, taking into account the broader question of artistic genre ( Barkley L. Hendricks , 2008; Dawoud Bey … , 2012) and divergent, alternative modernisms ( American People … , 2011; Fine, Francis , 2011; Romare Bearden , 2011).

Feminine-masculine-feminine

13 Feminist perspectives within recent studies of African American art and visual culture have traversed the rather obvious identity politics of gender recognition and the attendant critiques of historic, male-dominated institutions and social practices. Instead, some of the most interesting scholarship of late has been informed by a subset of cultural theorists and social scientists who foreground the situational realities of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and the need for rigorous, fully engaged examinations which address questions of fundamental rights, individual agency, engendering practices, and the full, conceptual arc of recognition/misrecognition ( Brand , 2006).

14 As suggested in this section’s subheading feminine-masculine-feminine, the sandwiched nature of an ontological maleness between concepts of the feminine, womanhood, and the entire gendered/sexual scale of lived experiences has shaped much of the scholarship, especially writings that definitively insert issues of racial and cultural blackness into art history ( Golden , 2012). Indeed, a good number of these investigations aim at the shifting perceptions of the black female subject in art ( Brown , 2012), from pictorial meditations on beauty and corporeality ( Willis , 2009) to case studies of real-life black women as paragons of elegance and style ( Williams , 2007) and investigations of cultural stereotypes ( Thompson C. , 2013).

15 Arguably, though, the never-ending need for original scholarship on forgotten or under-examined black women artists has persisted well into the present, and several art historians have addressed this historical void, utilizing the comprehensive overview ( Farrington , 2005a) as well as the monograph to examine such canonical figures as the nineteenth-century sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis ( Woods, 2009; Buick, 2010 ) and the twentieth-century painter Lois Mailou Jones ( Lois Mailou Jones … , 2009), the latter being one of the very few artists who participated in both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Contemporary black women artists have also inspired art historians and curators to bridge their work with feminist thought, identity politics, and unresolved questions of gender, sexuality and social difference. Again, recent monographic studies on artists such as Carrie Mae Weems ( Carrie Mae Weems , 2012), Mickalene Thomas ( Mickalene Thomas , 2012) and especially Lorna Simpson ( Enwezor, 2006; Lamm, 2011; Belisle, 2011 ) have all relied on modern and contemporary feminist theories for their impetus as much as on the artists’ careers and works themselves. Clearly, the gulf between examining the creative output of black women artists and investigating black female imagery in the visual arts is negligible when considering performance art or, rather, the black female body as an artistic vehicle, and several authors have taken up this topic with thought-provoking and compelling findings ( Smith, 2011; Bowles, 2011 ). An exhibition catalogue that took as its premise the uncharted occurrence of black women filmmakers and videographers since 1970 ( Barnwell, Oliver , 2008) added appreciably to these recent histories of African American art and visual culture, also augmenting the few extant studies of women across the racial spectrum working in media arts.

Post-black (noirceur chimérique ou l’art noir sans négritude)

16 The 2001 minting of the term “post-black” by Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden and visual artist Glenn Ligon was not only perspicacious to a shift in the cultural mindsets of the latest generation of African American artists, but it was prescient for what was on the artistic horizon: a parallel (or “shadow”) racial preoccupation among African American artists that unapologetically embraced the contradiction of making black art without bringing into play a platitudinous, archetypal blackness. Before the decade ended, scholars had given the post-black concept full-court scrutiny ( Keith, 2005; English, 2007; Murray, 2007; Schur, 2007; Taylor, 2007 ), and this interrogation and critical exegesis of the concept have continued unabated ( Gonzalez, 2011; Fleetwood, 2011; Walker H., 2013; Maus, Donahue, 2014 ).

17 Even when the term “post-black” wasn’t prominently positioned in a publication’s title or text, its presence has hovered over certain scholarly enterprises in recent African American art histories and visual studies, whether the topic was conceptualism ( D ouble-Consciousness , 2005), heterodox belief systems ( NeoHoodoo , 2008); the enduring memory of the Civil Rights Movement ( After 1968 , 2008); African diasporic aesthetics ( Thompson K. , 2015), or contemporary art in general ( Black Light/White Noise , 2007; 30 Americans , 2008; Backer, 2013 ). And this same, shadowy blackness – which, again, Golden and Ligon first referenced in the context of a 2001 survey of works by African American artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem ( Freestyle , 2001) – would continue to loom in subsequent iterations of the contemporary African American group show ( Frequency , 2005; Flow , 2008; Fore , 2013); ironically, an exhibition format that was paradigmatic of the prosaically race-based Black Arts Movement exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s.

18 Also characteristic of the post-black phenomenon was, paradoxically, a greater visibility in major art galleries and museums for black artists and for works that expressed a decidedly ambiguous racial and cultural drift. Although not considered the principal proponents of a post-black philosophy, important African American artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Martin Puryear, Kerry James Marshall, and Wangechi Mutu all exuded enough complexity and opacity in their work to garner critical notice and visual currency in a post-black art world, resulting in a steady stream of exhibition publications and monographic studies ( Mayer, 2005; Martin Puryear , 2007; Jean-Michel Basquiat , 2010; Wangechi Mutu , 2013 ). But the artistic purveyors of a post-black aesthetic have been some of the most conspicuous art world figures and subjects for art criticism, as seen in Hank Willis-Thomas’s digital odes to visual appropriation ( Guzman , 2008), Glenn Ligon’s text-based paintings and sculptures ( Glenn Ligon , 2011; DeLand, 2012 ), Rashid Johnson’s racially deconstructive assemblages ( Morton, 2012; Rashid Johnson , 2012 ), and, last but not least, Kara Walker’s silhouetted satires and frank moral defamations ( Kara Walker , 2007; Berry, 2007; Walker K., 2007; Wall, 2010; Als, 2013 ).

Insider outsiders

19 Sociologist Gary Alan Fine’s 2004 study of the position and perception of artists operating on the fringes of the modern and contemporary art world had major consequences for subsequent African American art scholarship ( Fine , 2004). The typical profile of Fine’s subjects – African American, non-academically trained, and socio-economically vulnerable – represented a vital yet frequently ignored subset among African American artists: an artistic contingent that, following the critically acclaimed Corcoran Gallery of Art’s exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930 – 1980 ( Black Folk Art … , 1982), forever challenged the art world’s presumptive notions of authenticity, insularity, hierarchy, and difference. Indeed, Fine’s emphases on the social and economic forces that essentially created this artistic cohort shifted the discussion away from the stylistic vagaries of visual crudity and the individual eccentricities of these artists and, instead, prompted a close and critical scrutiny of the art world trends, market forces, and mythologizing around these “insider outsiders.”

20 Variously described as “folk,” “self-taught,” or “outsider,” these accidental artists and their champions troubled an already fractious art world. Because of their separate yet vaunted status, they provided additional fodder for viewing the greater art scene as often racist and exploitative, especially in light of more established and, yet, overlooked African American artists and their documented struggles for greater recognition. Social scientists and art historians have looked closely at this cultural phenomenon, and have not resisted casting a critical eye on the politics of institutionally embracing these artists ( Rothenberg, Fine, 2008; Cooks, 2014 ). Despite the formation of a “black folk art” canon decades earlier, several recent historical summaries ( Crown, Russell, 2007; Russell, 2011 ) and survey exhibitions ( ‘Great and Mighty Things’… , 2013 ; When the Stars… , 2014 ) have further institutionalized this subgenre, aligning much of this art with spiritual aims and/or regional interests. Artists who live and work in the southern United States and many within a small-town or rural context have often been studied from the perspective of such vernacular art forms as quilting ( Arnett , 2006a) or, with an eye directed more toward an urban visual lexicon like yard decorations ( Gundaker, McWillie, 2005) and street performances ( Becker, 2013).

21 As with the other research-generating areas of African American art history, recent case studies of individual self-taught or outsider artists have both strengthened the primary source materials on these artists, and used the monographic format as a vehicle for thinking about the theoretical issues that impact the outsider art category ( Arnett, 2006 b ; The Treasure of Ulysses Davis , 2008). Artist Bill Traylor, an ex-slave working in Depression-era Alabama, inspired several scholars to grapple with the idea of an African diasporic racial memory in art ( Bill Traylor , 2005, 2012; Sobel, 2009 ), while both Clementine Hunter and Horace Pippin, two celebrated mid twentieth-century folk artists, encouraged art historians and curators to reconcile these artists' social isolation and provincialism with their well-connected gallery representation and market notoriety ( Whitehead, Shiver, 2012; Horace Pippin , 2015 ).

Revised histories

22 The enduring value in African American art scholarship of conducting original research and reexamining important historical figures and subject matter cannot be overstated. Twenty-first-century scholars of African American art have wholeheartedly embraced historical revisionism in multiple ways, from reimagining earlier versions of the art-historical survey ( Bernier , 2009), to reworking the standard narratives surrounding the art and artists of the African Diaspora, both well-known and relatively obscure ( Afro-Modern , 2010). In using the term “historical revisionism” in this particular context, what is not being suggested are recalibrations that invent false accounts or ignore historical truths. Rather, what has transpired in the literature is a critical enterprise that, by asking different questions and conducting new research into uncharted art-historical waters, amends the record with a fresh and, yet, an anarchistic perspective.

23 The most comprehensive of these art-historical reconsiderations was the African American artists-themed volumes The Image of the Black in Western Art ( Bindman, Gates , 2014), which conceived modern and contemporary black artistic production in a part-chronological, part-international, and wholly original fashion. In a somewhat different manner, a number of American art museums have organized major African American art exhibitions with accompanying catalogues that, exclusively focusing on their own, occasionally encyclopedic collections, utilized the survey exhibition formula for somewhat different purposes ( Golden, 2010; African American Art , 2012; Mercer V.J., 2012 ; Represent , 2014; Common Wealth , 2015 ).

24 Original scholarship has continued to take place around individual artists and their artistic production, but often integrating novel ways of interpreting these artists’ works and careers. One observes this radical rethinking of African American artists and their art in studies chronologically located in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the memories of enslavement, the specters of racial prejudice, and the movements toward African American social activism undergirded many art-historical studies ( Shaw, 2005; Charles Ethan Porter , 2008; Ketner, 2011; Henry Ossawa Tanner , 2012 ). From relatively under-appreciated but historically significant artists such as sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller and painters William Edouard Scott and Norman Lewis ( Ater, 2011; Pinder, 2011, From the Margins , 2014 ), to canonical American art figures like Jacob Lawrence ( Hills, 2009; Jacob Lawrence , 2015 ) recent art histories have revisited the standard African American art narrative in light of alternative readings of American nationalism, mid-twentieth-century gestures and aspirations toward universality, and a corresponding race- and class-informed modernism.

25 Since 2005 theme-based research has continued to capture the attention of many historians of African American art ( Francis , 2012), enabling scholars to focus more intently on unresolved issues in the literature, such as race and abstraction ( Energy/Experimentation , 2006), philanthropy for black artists ( A Force for Change , 2009), African Americans and art museums ( Cooks , 2011), and art, race and trauma ( Tribe , 2013). Several anthologies ( Farrington, 2005 b ; Jones, 2011 ) and exhibition catalogues ( Portraits of a People , 2006; Cooksey, 2013) brought greater attention to the notion that African American art scholarship could be deeply topical, and particular enough to engage with comparable and similarly focused research in the visual arts and the humanities. Cultural historian and theoretician Kobena Mercer successfully integrated and assembled many of these thematically focused studies of African American art into the four-volume series, Cross Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, framing this scholarship within the larger contexts of cosmopolitanism, abstraction, the vernacular, and expatriation ( Mercer, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

26 This fairly recent theoretical turn in African American art history – conterminous with many humanities subfields and their shift toward more critical and ideational approaches to history – has manifested itself in many ways over the past decade. For example, the often pedantic and moralistic lens through which the history of slavery has been viewed was deconstructed through a part-thematic, part-theoretical perspective ( Copeland , 2013), and a similar multi-pronged tack was undertaken on the subject of black portraiture ( Powell , 2008). Likewise, certain basic themes in African American art, such as the African diaspora and the idea of a distinctive black aesthetic, have been significantly reconceived, both through the conceptual mechanisms of the dialogic ( Mercer, 2012 ) and the synaesthetic ( Thompson K. , 2009), and by means of the relatively traditional, yeoman-like processes of historiography and critical interpretation ( Thompson K. , 2011).

• 2 For an in depth examination of the historiographic breadth of African American art research, includ (...)
• 3 Kobena Mercer, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization” ( Bindman, Gates , 2014, (...)

27 In closing, one might assume that the assorted texts discussed here and the new directions in African American art-historical research are indebted to all of the scholarly undertakings and intellectual “dream work” that preceded them. Today's art historians and cultural critics could not have even imagined pursuing the study and analysis of something called “black” or African American art without the intellectual substratum that had already been surveyed and leveled by the following: William Dawson, Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Benjamin Brawley, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Husrton, Meville Herskovits, James V. Herring, James A. Porter, Dorothy Porter Wesley, Cedric Dover, Sidney Kaplan, David C. Driskell, Robert Farris Thompson, Regenia Perry, Elsa Honig Fine, Marcia M. Mathews, Deirdre Bibby, Ed Spriggs, Harry Henderson, Romare Bearden, Samella Lewis, Edmund B. Gaither, Jeff Donaldson, Floyd Coleman, Murry DePillars, Rosalind Jeffries, Maude Wahlman, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Steven Jones, Lucy Lippard, John Michael Vlach, Henry Drewal, Monni Adams, Lynn Igoe, Leslie King-Hammond, Lowery Stokes Sims, Patricia Hills, Sharon F. Patton, Guy McElroy, Lizzetta LeFalle Collins, Judith Wilson, Greg Tate, Ann Gibson, James Smalls, Marilyn Richardson, Albert Boime, Jospeh Ketner, David Lubin, Juanita M. Holland, Beryl Wright, Michael D. Harris, Deborah Willis, and Maurice Berger, among countless others. 2 Prior to the twenty-first century these forerunners in African American art scholarship engaged in intellectual pursuits that, through many decades of archival research, bibliographic groundwork, personal interviews, cultural retrievals, artistic rediscoveries, and thoughtful, desk-bound writing, culminated in what theoretician Kobena Mercer has described as a “multi-vocal dialogue on matters of cultural difference, in which the identities of all participants were open to new possibilities.” 3

28 Scholars working in the early twenty-first century have witnessed a period of creative exchange and intellectual re-engagement with the discipline, in which not only longtime scholars of African American art and culture have participated, but also art historians and theorists from across the geopolitical, ideological, and racial/cultural spectrum. As seen in this state-of-the-field reflection, recent scholarship in African American art touches on a multiplicity of issues, including such previously unexplored or barely addressed topics as the vernacular arts, performance art, mass media, embodiment, corporeality, historicity, spirituality, racial indifference, visual queering, satire, migration, nativism, multi-linguistics, global violence, urbanism, and homelessness, to name just a few.

29 Clearly, an intellectual project such as the study of African American art is, by design and necessity, one that privileges an African diasporic or black perspective. However, the scholarly outpourings of the last decade have made it apparent that the centrality of a black perspective does not mean blackness can be successfully reduced to an inviolable racial category, or a succinct definition. Many of the writings discussed in this essay argue that, in spite of an assumed singularity, blackness and the African diaspora are, in fact, hybrid entities, multilayered in their discursive acts, historically transnational in scope and, yet, reliably unstable and transitory.

30 Although much of this writing opens up art history to a twenty-first-century world of radically different ideas, new artists, and critical, cutting-edge methodologies, probably all of the authors under review perceive the previous century as a key moment for creating unprecedented black images and for reimagining how art history might be more thoroughly documented and democratically narrated. The twentieth century’s chronicled instances of: disenfranchisement and the eventual re-enfranchisement of black peoples; political and cultural imperialism perpetrated on black communities; questions of alliances from both within “the race” and beyond; mass migrations of African peoples to Western metropolises; the flowerings of assorted black cultural “renaissances”; and the ad infinitum debates over racial discrimination; are all proof of that century’s importance to the development of black narratives, whether art-historical or quotidian, retrospective or contemporaneous. If, in 1916, African American art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray had had a crystal ball, magically enabling him to observe how the study of art by and about peoples of African descent had evolved from his solitary vantage point to, say, one hundred years in the future, not only would he have marveled at the many social and cultural changes that had transpired, but he would have been amazed by a discipline and subfield that, unlike in his more apathetic time, acknowledged the historical importance of black artists, as well as the intrinsic value of studying works that placed questions of race and culture at their very core.

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–  Willis , 2009: Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present , New York, 2009.

–  Witness , 2014: Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties , Theresa Carbone, Kellie Jones, (exh. cat., Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, 2014), Brooklyn, 2014.

–  Wolfskill , 2009: Phoebe Wolfskill, “Caricature and the New Negro in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden,” in Art Bulletin , 91, 2009, p. 343-365.

–  Woods , 2009: Naurice Frank Woods Jr., “An African Queen at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 1876: Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra ,” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism , 9/1, 2009, p. 62-82.

–  Zorach , 2011: Rebecca Zorach, “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum,” in Art Journal , 70/2, 2011, p. 66-87.

1 Fully developed but relatively concise accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement can be found in the author’s two chapters “Enter the Exit the ‘New Negro’” and “Black is a Color” ( Powell , 2002, p. 41-65, p. 121-160).

2 For an in depth examination of the historiographic breadth of African American art research, including many of the historians and critics listed in this Conclusion, see Sharon F. Patton’s comprehensive “Bibliographic Essay” ( Patton , 1998, p. 283-299).

3 Kobena Mercer, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization” ( Bindman, Gates , 2014, p. 225).

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Richard J. Powell , «  Research and Imagine the American Black Art Since 2005  » ,  Perspective [En ligne], 2 | 2015, mis en ligne le 10 décembre 2015 , consulté le 02 avril 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/6043 ; DOI  : https://doi.org/10.4000/perspective.6043

Richard J. Powell

Richard J. Powell is Dean of the Humanities and the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University. He has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (2002), and Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008). From 2007 until 2010, he was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin.

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Black Arts Movement

Summary of Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement, sometimes referred to as the Black Aesthetics Movement, was influential in its ability to put together social, cultural, and political elements of the Black experience and established a cultural presence in America on a mainstream level. By incorporating visual motifs representative of the African Diaspora, as well as themes of revolutionary politics supporting Black Nationalism, the Black Arts Movement overtly distanced itself from white Eurocentric forms of art. It not only highlighted the work of Black artists but sought to define a universal experience of Blackness that expressed empowerment, pride, and liberation.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• The Black Arts Movement celebrated Afrocentrism by exploring and blending images from the past, present, and future into visual imagery that would inform a modern-day lexicon using contemporary modes such as poster and commercial art, lettering, and patterning.
• The Black Arts Movement arose in tandem with Identity Art and Identity Politics, a genre in which artists focused on presenting the faces and experiences of their marginalized populations which also included women and the LGBT community. Strong aesthetics and powerful statements representing the Black racial identity emerged during this time that would come to be synonymous with the Black community such as Black Power, "cool-ade" colors and militant chic.
• The Black Arts Movement saw the rise of collectives which would, bond together and provide a solidified front for Black artists to showcase their experiences as a separate and cohesive cultural identity within the nation.
• The Black Arts Movement spurred the rise of many educational and advocacy-related initiatives that would integrate into overall American culture providing the opportunity for immersion into the communal psyche of the country.

Artworks and Artists of Black Arts Movement

The Wall of Respect

The Wall of Respect was a twenty-by-sixty-foot mural painted on the facade of a two-story building at the corner of East 43rd Street and South Langley Avenue in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. The piece was an homage to Black historical and contemporary figures involved in politics, education, athletics, and the arts. Fifty unique portraits were represented of individuals who lived and worked in line with the Black Power and Black Nationalist ideologies. This included Nat Turner, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and Harriet Tubman. During the creative process, the artists decided not to include Martin Luther King Jr. among the political leaders because he wasn't radical enough from their perspective. Art historian Kirstin Ellsworth noted that the reasoning behind this notable omission was, "the change from what Civil Rights advocates viewed as the fight for equality-based integrationist policies within the American system to separatist politics that answered to the cause of revolution on a global scale created dissension among OBAC artists contributing to the mural." Many of the artists who contributed to the public artwork were associated with the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), whose mission was to highlight the Black experience and struggle for racial justice in the United States through art. The mural was laid out by graphic designer Laini (Sylvia) Abernathy, while Jeff Donaldson and William Walker facilitated the painting process. The layout Abernathy developed was a modular design that divided the surfaces of the building into seven sections. These sections were the substrates that the artists painted on. Donaldson recalled that the project "was a clarion call, a statement of the existence of a people." The location of the mural was relevant as a celebration of Black culture. Bronzeville is known as Chicago's Black metropolis due to its history as an early-twentieth-century incubator for African American business and culture and home to one of the mural's subjects, the poet and educator Gwendolyn Brooks. Additional subjects were added to the Wall of Respect as the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements progressed. Wall of Respect 's existence was short-lived and it was impacted by several acts of vandalism. The building was severely damaged by a fire in 1971, officially ending the mural's tenure in the public space. However, as historians Mariana Mogilevich, Rebecca Ross, and Ben Campkin have noted, Wall of Respect "claimed an everyday surface as a highly visible celebration of black experience and successfully elicited reciprocal identification, and a sense of collective ownership, by local people. In spite - and because - of its destruction, this revolutionary act of image-making had profound influence in the neighborhood, and inspired community mural movements around the USA and internationally."

Artist: Noah Purifoy

Sir Watts depicts an abstracted human-like torso clad in armor. The piece is an homage to the casualties of dissent between race, informed by a historical event the artist, Noah Purifoy, experienced. Beginning on August 11, 1965, racial tensions in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts reached a violent climax, leading to a six-day riot that caused thirty-four deaths and more than forty-million dollars in property damage. Writer Ismail Muhammad called the sculpture "the sign of a mind investigating itself, a member of a discarded class discovering its own beauty and feeling a little sad that others cannot discover it as well." At the time of the riots, Noah Purifoy and fellow artist and arts educator Judson Powell had only recently founded the Watts Towers Art Center before the neighborhood was ransacked during the uprising. In the aftermath, they collected materials from within the rubble and piles of debris. They then fashioned remnants from the devastation into a group of sculptures. They also recruited other artists to make works with the salvaged materials. The resulting sixty-six artworks were presented at the Watts Summer Festival in 1966, under the title 66 Signs of Neon . The name of the exhibition references the burnt out and shattered signage from the neighborhood's businesses that had been destroyed during the riots. More than an exhibition, Purifoy and Powell considered 66 Signs of Neon to be an extension of educational and activist driven philosophy behind the Watts Towers Art Center. Purifoy noted that art can be an effective form of communication and a way to galvanize diverse groups of individuals. He wrote, "The artworks of 66 should be looked at, not as particular things in themselves, but for the sake of establishing conversation and communication, involvement in the act of living. The reason for being in our universe is to establish communication with others, one to one. And communication is not possible without the establishment of equality, one to one." Purifoy is known for assemblages made from found objects, which often communicate poignant and socially engaged statements. Curator Connie H. Choi explained that the riots "changed Purifoy's artistic vision as he moved toward assemblage and a more obviously socially charged aesthetic. The debris from the riot served as material for Purifoy, whose work explores the relationships between Dada assemblage practices, African sculptural traditions, and black folk art. Once the products of industrial and consumer culture, the rubble became art through its recontextualization by residents of Watts." African American studies scholar Paul Von Blum recalled that, "most [of the artwork in 66 Neon Signs ] found no permanent home and the materials returned to the junk heaps from which they originally came." Purifoy recreated the sculpture in 1996, calling it Sir Watts II .

Mixed-media assemblage

Black Unity

Artist: Elizabeth Catlett

Black Unity is a double-sided wooden sculpture merging symbols and representations of Black identity. One side depicts two human faces, while the other is shaped like a fist. The color of the wood, a dark cedar, alludes to dark skin. The profound message in Cartlett's sculpture is due to its synthesizing of cultural themes and social ideologies into nearly universally recognized symbols. The simplified representations in Black Unity offer an effective contextualization of Black power and serve as an object-based gesture of unity and protest. Curator Kanitra Fletcher analyzed the sculpture as being "simultaneously a gesture of protest and solidarity," adding that the juxtaposition of peaceful and sublime busts on one side and the clenched fist on the other, "represents quiet strength and defiant resolve." Fletcher also noted that the symbolism in Black Unity would be widely recognized as a symbol of Black Nationalism, therefore acknowledging that, "some viewers might be put off by her interpretation of the fist, a symbol of Black power." Catlett reflected that, "It might not win prizes and it might not get into museums, but we ought to stop thinking that way, just like we stopped thinking that we had to have straight hair. We ought to stop thinking we have to do the art of other people."

Wood sculpture

Revolutionary Suit

Artist: Jae Jarrell

Revolutionary Suit is a two-piece, salt and pepper jacket and skirt combination from Jae Jarrell's series of garments intended to communicate pride, power, vitality, and respect within Black culture. The skirt's style reflects the simple A-line design with ¾ length bell sleeves that was popular among 1960's women's fashion. The suit was made from gray tweed and embellished with a bright, pastel yellow, suede bandolier stitched along the edge of the jacket, which resembles a military style ammunition belt. Blurring the line between couture and militaristic styles of fashion, Revolutionary Suit embodied the tenets of Black Power and the Black aesthetic. The garment is both a symbol of revolutionary politics and artistic liberation. Jarrell noted that "We were saying something when we used the belts. We're involved in a real revolution." Jarrell began sewing and developed a sophisticated appreciation for fabric at a young age, inspired by her grandfather who worked as a tailor. She recalled, "I always thought of making clothes in order to have something unique, and later I learned to sew very well and made it my business to always make my garments. And I also have a love for vintage, knowing that it has secrets of the past that I can unfold." Jarrell remade Revolutionary Suit in 2010, which now resides in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Jihad Nation

Artist: Nelson Stevens

Jihad Nation features portraits of a Black man and woman sporting afro hairstyles with contemplative upward gazes. The faces are painted on top of a geometric background with a warm palette alluding to familiar color combinations of Pan-Africanism. Signs and symbols such as the ankh, pyramid, and modern-day apartment complex signify the act of Black nation building, which is a common theme throughout Stevens' art. Stevens was a key member of AfriCOBRA, whose paintings are prime examples of the artist collective's unique aesthetic. For example, the faces of the man and woman are stylized with a gestural application of "cool-ade colors," a chromatic scheme that references the flavors of the popular Kool-Aid flavored drink as well as the bright hues worn widely within the Black population. Jihad Nation was exhibited in the 1970 exhibition AfriCobra 1: Ten in Search of a Nation at Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The exhibition was significant because it was the first time that art by AfriCOBRA was presented in a major art museum.

Acrylic on canvas

Ghetto Wall #2

Artist: David Driskell

Ghetto Wall #2 is a painted representation of a mural on a public wall made of dark red rectangular bricks. The mural itself consists of a Black silhouette of a person surrounded by a flaming yellow glow. To the right, down its vertical plane hovers a muted red hint of a face, strong lips and nose protruding at the bottom yet covered by the American flag, one of its white stars loose in the foreground. Abstract geometric shapes dance across the lower half of the piece, alive with vibrant color. On top of the mural, spans a black bar filled with the gritty scrawls of graffiti, including in red, the words "you," "I," "me," "LOVE," and a heart. According to DC Moore Gallery, which presented a survey of Driskell's work in 2019: "While works with overt protest are rare in Driskell's oeuvre, he found compelling reasons to initiate several works of sociopolitical commentary during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Important compositions in this vein include Ghetto Wall #2 (1970). Driskell imagines a painting-within-a-painting: a mural that covers an inner-city brick wall, a distinctly American phenomenon that arose with the Civil Rights movement, as a community effort to counter blight in stressed neighborhoods. The form of the X appears, a mark symbolic in this work of Civil Rights leader Malcolm X, as Driskell himself has noted. He also alludes to the American flag, its stripes appearing in two places on the canvas, and which also prefigure the African ribbon forms he would soon incorporate into other works."

Oil, acrylic, and collage on linen - Portland Museum of Art

Homage to Malcolm X

Artist: Jack Whitten

Homage to Malcolm X is a monochromatic oil painting on a triangular shaped canvas. The color, shape, and gestural application of paint signify the essence of Malcolm X's powerful leadership and influence. While many examples of visual art from the Black Arts Movement can be described as figurative art with recognizable and representational elements, Jack Whitten utilized abstraction and non-representational modes of painting to make similar statements of Black empowerment. Regarding the social and cultural messages within his abstract paintings, Whitten declared, "The political is in the work. I know it's there, because I put it in there." He said that "The painting for Malcolm, that's symbolic abstraction. That painting was done right after the assassination. Malcolm X had a grasp of the universal aspect of the struggle he was involved with. It's that conversion into the universal that gave him more power." The triangle has significant connections to strength in both the arts and applied physics. Triangles are the strongest of all shapes because any weight placed on them is evenly distributed via its three sides. In a work of art, triangles represent geometric sturdiness while adding a sense of visual unity. The triangle has been historically used by artists as a representation of spiritual hierarchy and integrity. Whitten described the use of the triangle in Homage to Malcolm X as a fitting and symbolic way to show the universal power that Malcolm X evoked. He also asserted that the "painting had to be dark, it had to be moody, it had to be deep. It had to give you the feeling of going deep down into something, and in doing that I was able to capture the essence of what Malcolm was all about."

Oil on canvas

Revolutionary

Artist: Wadsworth Jarrell

Revolutionary is a portrait of Black activist and educator Angela Davis in what artist Wadsworth Jarrell considered to be "an attempt to capture the majestic charm, seriousness, and leadership of an astute drum major for freedom." The graphic portrait combines imagery and text in a manner that is indicative of the syncopated rhythm and vibrant tones of jazz music. The distinctive color palette consists of what Jarrell and his fellow AfriCOBRA artists called "cool-ade colors," a play on the unique and notable color scheme associated with the Kool-Aid line of beverages. Jarrell based this portrait on a photograph of Davis giving a speech. He improvised on the photo's composition to show Davis wearing fellow artist Jae Jarrell's Revolutionary Suit . Also notable throughout the painting are Davis' uplifting phrases, including "Black is beautiful." Her poignant quote, "I have given my life in the struggle. If I have to lose my life, that is the way it will be," runs down her left arm and chest.

Acrylic and mixed media on canvas - Brooklyn Museum

Artist: Barbara Jones-Hogu

Unite shows a group of people, right fists raised, facing each other, expressing an activist stance of Black power and community. All wearing dark clothes, the figures' bodies and hair reflect the dark shadows and angular planes of African masks. The word UNITE is seen in multiple shards, sizes, and shapes in the background in a style reminiscent of collaged posters with vivid color and bold lettering. Along the bottom of the image is the signature of the artist, along with signatures of seven other artists from the AfriCOBRA group. Overall, the piece reflects a loud, proud, and strong unified body. The silkscreen print conveys the deep parallel that artists of AfricCOBRA and the Black Arts Movement had to the Black Power Movement and the Black Nationalist Movement. The work was created in the style of popular advertising billboards and posters of the time; a metaphor for widely disseminating and promoting the Black American voice. Artists were expressing their social and political views through the mouthpiece of creativity, stamping their own identities within their creative process, and modeling a uniquely contemporary Black aesthetic within the arts.

Screenprint - © Barbara Jones-Hogu, Collection of National Museum of African American History and Culture, Museum purchase, TR2008-24

Artist: Gerald Williams

In Wake Up , we see the head of a Black man floating amidst a colorful "cool-ade" array of bold lettered words and phrases such as "Awake," "Can You Dig," and "Check This Out." The words appear to be referring to a document in the man's hands, which can be seen as a manifesto of sorts, alluding to the group AfriCOBRA's manifesto. The piece was inspired by Williams' desire to get people to wake up socially, and to get involved with evolutionary change on a cultural and political level, much as he had been doing with his role in AfriCOBRA. In AfriCOBRA's manifesto, this call was instrumental: "It's NATION TIME and we are now searching. 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 more expressive of our people/art." This print was created as part of a suite of works with other members of AfriCOBRA for the show AFRICOBRA II in 1971 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The print was taken from William's original painting made the year prior.

Screenprint on wove paper - Brooklyn Museum

Revolutionary Sister

Artist: Dindga McCannon

Revolutionary Sister presents a hybrid woman, marrying the American symbol of freedom, the statue of liberty, with the contemporary Black woman celebrated by the Black Arts Movement and Black Nationalism. Making bold fashion statements that included looks such as militant chic, wearing dynamic Afrocentric colors, and forging their own roads into the burgeoning regions of feminist empowerment, Black women were busy forming their own identities alongside the men. McCannon, in explaining her inspiration for making this piece, wrote: "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 flag poles. 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."

Mixed media construction on wood - Brooklyn Museum

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima

Artist: Betye Saar

In a shadow box, encased with a glass pane, we find three versions of the Southern Black slave/maid/mammy stereotype. The largest and most dominant figure is adorned in a red floral dress with a handkerchief wrapped around her head. In her right hand is a broom and in her left hand is a pistol. In front of her, smaller and painted on a piece of notepad paper, the likes that used to hang on walls in homes meant for task or grocery lists, is another Black woman holding a screaming white baby. The bottom half of her body is covered with an upraised Black fist, the symbol of Black Power. The third female representation lies in the repeating pattern in the background - a woman's jovial face displayed multiple times - a face that graced the bottles of Aunt Jemima, a popular American maple syrup brand of the time. These three impressions of the subservient and jovial Black woman were common tropes during the pre-1960s Jim Crow era, in which white people created, and widely disseminated, grotesque caricatures of Black people throughout mainstream American culture. By co-opting of these images and placing them in juxtaposing context with symbols of contemporary Black activism, the rifle and the fist, Saar not only showcased her strong feminist mission to help liberate and speak up and out for her Black sisters who had been pigeonholed in subservient roles, but also positioned her as a strong voice in the Black Arts Movement. According to Professor of Art History & Critical Studies Sunanda K. Sanyal, "The Black Panther party was founded in 1966 as the face of the militant Black Power movement that also foregrounded the role of Black women. Many creative activists were attracted to this new movement's assertive rhetoric of Black empowerment, which addressed both racial and gender marginalization." She goes on to say, "The centrality of the raised Black fist - the official gesture of the Black Power movement - in Saar's assemblage leaves no question about her political allegiance and vision for Black women." According to Angela Davis, a Black Panther activist, this piece by Saar, sparked the black women's movement.

Assemblage - Berkeley Art Museum

Beginnings of Black Arts Movement

The uprising and mainstream repositioning of Black identity in America bears historical roots dating back to 1917, when the New Negro social movement was founded by Hubert Harrison, referred to popularly during the 1920s' Harlem Renaissance .

The ideology behind the New Negro was instrumental in fostering assertiveness and self-confidence among modern Black populations within the United States. It signified Black empowerment and resistance to the Jim Crow Laws which upheld racial segregation.

The concept was further highlighted by philosopher Alain Locke in his 1925 anthology The New Negro , which highlighted cultural contributions by a myriad of Black visual artists and writers. Locke exclaimed that the New Negro was an "augury of a new democracy in American culture."

Amiri Baraka and Black Nationalism as an Artform

The Black Arts movement began in 1965 under the influence of American writer, poet, and cultural critic, Amiri Baraka. It was one of several movements that uprose, influenced by the assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, which sought to uplift and empower Black communities throughout the United States. Alongside the equally impactful Black Panther Party that centered on revolutionary political activity, the Black Arts Movement focused on revolutionary cultural expression.

Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, New York. The theater, which also operated as an arts school, was partially inspired by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Baraka's intent was to combine the artistic ingenuity and spirit fostered by Black artists during that era with the contemporary zeitgeist of the politically charged Black Power movement.

Theatrical productions developed by the Black Arts Repertory Theater gave Black artists and actors professional and social opportunities that were not readily available to them in mainstream cultural settings. Plays became symbolic expressions of daily life within Black communities. Themes included the reality of struggles with segregation and racial bias due to living under a white hegemonic society.

At the upstart of the Black Arts Movement, theater and poetry took precedence. Baraka's poem, "Black Art," published in The Liberator in 1966, was a call to arms for Black artists to galvanize and assert themselves using language and aesthetic expressions that were uniquely indicative of the Black experience. In the poem, Baraka wrote: "We want a black poem. And a / Black World. / Let the world be a Black Poem / And Let All Black People Speak This Poem / Silently / or LOUD."

In addition to Baraka, other notable Black Arts Movement authors and poets include Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gil Scott-Heron, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Dudley Randall, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. The movement also highlighted the work of Black visual artists. Baraka's circle of fine artists included Figurative Expressionist painter Bob Thompson , who painted a portrait of Baraka and his wife Jewish-American poet Hettie Jones, and their children Kellie and Lisa. Baraka's 1969 poem "Babylon Revisited," is a tragic homage to Thompson, who died of a heroin overdose.

Jazz music also played a significant role in the contextualization and proliferation of the movement. Baraka believed that music such as jazz and rhythm and blues could express profound political messages and social messages throughout Black culture. The blues, according to Baraka in his 1963 book Blues People , has a lyrical and cultural connection between African Americans and their roots prior to being enslaved in the Americas. It represents a distinctly empowered Black voice and language within a white cultural hegemony.

The Black Arts Movement quickly expanded to other major cities throughout the United States.

Black World and the Organization of Black American Culture

In 1942 in Chicago, John H. Johnson founded and published a cultural periodical called Negro Digest . However, due to low sales and the popularity of Johnson's other Black-centered magazines Ebony and Jet , production of Negro World stopped in 1951. However, beginning in 1961 the magazine returned. In collaboration with writer and intellectual Hoyt W. Fuller, Johnson rebranded the magazine as Black World . The name change coincided with calls from activists to use the word Black instead of Negro.

The second iteration of the publication was far more successful. Black World extended its content to cover cultural, political, and social issues related to everyday Black experiences in the United States and the African diaspora at large. Issues generally consisted of journalistic articles, short stories, poems, and a special section called "Perspectives," curated by Fuller that featured unique and timely cultural information. Black World also highlighted works of visual art via reproductions of artwork by Black artists.

In May 1967, Fuller and several other Black activists, academics, and cultural producers formed the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). The mission of OBAC was to address freedom, equality, and social justice through the arts. According to OBAC's founding documents, their mission was to "work toward the ultimate goal of bringing the Black Community indigenous art forms which reflect and clarify the Black Experience in America; reflect the richness and depth and variety of Black History and Culture; and provide the Black Community with a positive self-image of itself, its history, its achievements, and its possibility for creativity."

OBAC held workshops for writers, actors, playwrights, and visual artists. Alumni and participants from these creative workshops included artists William Walker, Wadsworth Jarrell, and Jeff Donaldson; actors and playwrights: Dr. Ann Smith, Bill Eaves, Len Jones, Harold Lee, and Clarence Taylor; writers: Don L. Lee (known as Haki Madhubuti), Carolyn Rodgers, Angela Jackson, Sterling Plumpp, Sam Greenlee, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Johari Amini.

Among the most notable artistic contributions created during OBAC's operation is the Wall of Respect , an outdoor mural painted in 1967, which paid tribute to notable Black individuals throughout modern history. The mural is considered one of the first large-scale outdoor community-based murals in the United States. The OBAC Drama Workshop also influenced the foundation of the Kuumba Theater, which was Chicago's first Black run theater.

Visual artists associated with OBAC and those who participated in the Wall of Respect mural, went on to form the AfriCOBRA artists collective in 1968. Founding members were Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Nelson Stevens, and Gerald Williams. The title of the group is an acronym for The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. The word bad means good in Black English slang and has been used culturally since at least the nineteenth century.

AfriCOBRA's establishment was due to the realization that as a collective, they could increase their visibility and confront segregation in both cultural and political sectors. Through showing their art together, AfriCOBRA sought to extend their reach to Black communities throughout the world. Art historian and educator Shana Klein explained, "In a society that has for so long depicted African American people according to the cruelest stereotypes and awful caricatures, the black artists of AfriCOBRA set out to create African American art on their own terms and create a movement that spoke to both African American and black diasporic experiences."

The individual artists in the group created works of art that reflected the ideology of Afrocentrism by synthesizing imagery and motifs from cultures throughout the African diaspora. Many of the artists worked in printmaking to make their art more accessible to larger audiences. The form and content within AfriCOBRA alluded to a spectrum of past and present modes of art. Art historian Kirstin Ellsworth noted that they "elucidated an agenda for Black visual aesthetics within a contemporary visual idiom that combined Pop Art, poster art, commercial art techniques, lettering, and fragment-like patterning associated historically with African American artists including Romare Bearden , Jacob Lawrence , and John Biggers."

According the AfriCOBRA's manifesto, written by Donaldson, the major aesthetic tenets behind the group's operation included: 1. Definition: images that deal with the past. 2. Identification: images that relate to the present. 3. Direction: images that look into the future.

Also, according to Donaldson, much of AfriCOBRA's aesthetic reflected a transAfrican style, characterized by "high energy color, rhythmic linear effects, flat patterning, form-filled composition and picture plane compartmentalization." Distinguished AfriCOBRA member, Barbara Jones-Hogu, wrote how the works were created "...using syncopated, rhythmic repetition that constantly changes in color, texture, shapes, form, pattern, and feature."

In 1970, AfriCOBRA's first exhibition at a major museum, titled Ten in Search of a Nation , opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Arts in Boston and Black Expo in Chicago. African American art scholar Corey Serrant wrote that "the work they produced [for the exhibition] was created with a singular purpose: to educate. They did not want to promote individual gains over their unified message. Poster reproductions of the works were given to exhibition attendees to take home, to better experience the spirituality and symbolism of the art shown." Jae Jarrell reinforced the pedagogical impetus behind AfriCOBRA in a 2012 interview: "We made an effort to raise consciousness. In our hearts, when we put this all together we thought it was going to be an explosion of positive imagery, and things that gave kids direction, and knowing some of our leaders now portrayed in a fresh way. I saw a result of our raising consciousness, particularly about our history."

In 1977, AfriCOBRA participated in Festac '77, also called the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria. This international event showcased the work and ideas of artists and academics within the Pan-Africanist movement. At the time, it was the largest convention of cultural contributions representing the African diaspora.

AfriCOBRA's work collectively carved a unique place within both artistic and political circles. Serrant assessed that "The artists of AfriCOBRA had no reason to appeal to critics that omitted them from the timeline of art and concurrent movements. The works produced by these artists were intended to empower the black community. They strove to create images that expressed the depth of black culture and Pan-Africanism, embracing a family tree with branches stretching beyond the United States, reaching the Caribbean and African ancestral homes."

Emory Douglas' Revolutionary Aesthetics

The Black Panther Party had its own art and design wing and artistic director named Emory Douglas. Douglas joined the Black Panther Party in 1967 after meeting Black Panther party co-founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

Douglas came into the Black Panther Party with a background in the visual arts. He studied graphic design at the City College of San Francisco, where he was a member of the school's Black Students' Association . As a student, he collaborated with Amiri Baraka to design sets and props for theatrical performances.

Douglas convinced Newton and Seale that he could enhance the design of the Black Panther Party's newspaper, The Black Panther , and he became the party's Minister of Culture. In addition to livening up the party's periodical by incorporating colorful layouts, Douglas made graphics that supported the revolutionary tenets behind the Black Panther Party's mission and expressed the sentiment behind the Black Nationalist ideology.

Douglas' style of art incorporated revolutionary signs and symbols from the Black Nationalist movement and iconography that represents Black empowerment and resistance to white supremacy. His no-holds-barred imagery includes biting critiques addressing the corruption of white political leaders and police brutality. In 2007, Jessica Werner Zack wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that Douglas, "branded the militant-chic Panther image decades before the concept became commonplace. He used the newspaper's popularity (circulation neared 400,000 at its peak in 1970) to incite the disenfranchised to action, portraying the poor with genuine empathy, not as victims but as outraged, unapologetic and ready for a fight."

The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition

In New York City, Black artists, academics, and cultural activists also collectively organized to advocate for more opportunities, visibility, and agency for Black artists in cultural institutions.

The first instance of galvanized activity occurred in January 1969, in response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harlem on My Mind exhibition. The exhibition was considered offensive to Black artists, scholars, and curators due to the exclusion of work by Harlem-based artists. Large groups of Black cultural workers gathered outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest the exhibition, which led to a highly publicized account of inequality and inequity within the institutionalized arts and cultural scene.

The strong communal response to Harlem on My Mind influenced artists Benny Andrews and Clifford R. Joseph to establish the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC). The group's mission was to actively bring about changes in the cultural sector that reflect the overarching Civil Rights movement. BECC fought for greater representation and opportunities for Black artists, such as advocating for museums to collect the work of contemporary Black artists, as well as for the foundation of Black-centered cultural venues. They also sought to have a significant number of Black curators employed in major art institutions.

After the Harlem on My Mind protests, BECC was involved in talks with the Whitney Museum of American Art's leadership regarding the representation of Black artists, curators, and arts administrators in present and future exhibitions and public programming. They discussed collaborating on a major exhibition showcasing African American art which would have extensive input from the Black arts community. However, the talks ended up in a stalemate. Art critic, Grace Glueck wrote in a New York Times article that "that the Whitney Museum reneged on two fundamental points of agreement - that the exhibition would be selected with the assistance of black art specialists, and that it would be presented during the most prestigious period of the 1970-71 art season." The museum did end up organizing Contemporary Black Artists in America .

The exhibition was curated by Robert M. Doty, a white curator, without the guidance and perspective of Black artists, art historians, and curators. BECC opposed the exhibition by curating Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum at Acts of Art Gallery. Both exhibitions opened on April 6, 1971. Additionally, fifteen of the seventy-five artists from the Whitney Museum's exhibition were motivated to withdraw from Contemporary Black Artists in America in solidarity with BECC's boycott of the show.

BECC's cultural outreach included the creation of the Arts Exchange program in 1971, which was an arts-centered social justice initiative addressing issues related to mass incarceration. The program was spurred by the deadly riots at the Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York, which highlighted the need for greater human rights in prisons and the humane treatment of inmates. BECC advocated for sponsored art programs in prisons, as well as mental health facilities and public schools. The first class of the Arts Exchange program was held at the Manhattan House of Detention in September 1971. By 1972, the classes were implemented in twenty states.

Benny Andrews continued to foster opportunities for marginalized professional artists while serving as the Director of the Visual Arts Program for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982 through 1984.

David Driskell and Curating Two Centuries of Black American Art

David Driskell was an artist, educator, collector, and curator. His ability to assume many roles was integral in the Black Arts Movement's proliferation throughout mainstream culture. In 1976, Driskell organized the exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Akin to what some might call a "blockbuster exhibition," it was one of the most renowned and high-profile shows to solely feature Black artists. More than 200 works of art by sixty-three artists were featured. Additionally, Driskell highlighted the artisan work of anonymous craft-makers.

Altogether, the show and its supplementary scholarship and publication provided an essential narrative of the contributions by Black artists and crafts workers throughout the course of visual culture in the United States. According to a feature on Driskell written by journalist Pamela Newkirk and published in ARTnews , Two Centuries of Black American Art has "staked a claim for the profound and indelible contributions of black and African American art makers since the earliest days of the country." After LACMA, the exhibition traveled cross-country, with stops at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Throughout his career Driskell collected a wide variety of art from the African diaspora including tribal objects, crafts, folk art, and modern and contemporary art. This personal collection has been utilized as an informative means to promote the work of Black artists in institutions and art galleries across the United States. A 2000 thematic exhibition at the High Museum of Art called, Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection , showcased a large selection of key works of drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, craft, and photography. Some of the notable artists included Elizabeth Catlett, Hale Woodruff, Augusta Savage , Aaron Douglas , and James Van Der Zee. The five themes addressed in the exhibition were organized chronologically starting with the nineteenth and early twentieth century and ending in the contemporary era. The themes were: Strategic Subversions: Cultural Emancipation, Assimilation and African American Identity; Emergence: The New Negro Movement and Definitions of Race; The Black Academy: Teachers, Mentors, and Institutional Patronage; Radical Politics, Protest and Art; and Diaspora Identities/Global Arts .

Concepts and Styles

Black nationalism and pan-africanism.

Black Nationalism is an activist movement with roots dating back to United States abolitionism during the Revolutionary War period. Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement with an intent to form social and cultural solidarity among all peoples of the African diaspora. Its historical origins are in the early nineteenth century Black abolitionist movement. These concepts are intended to inspire the cultural, economic, political, and social empowerment of Black communities.

The modern Black Nationalist movement of the twentieth century was significantly impacted by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who established the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, which Garvey explained was "organized for the absolute purpose of bettering our condition, industrially, commercially, socially, religiously and politically." Garvey's advocacy for unity among Black people from the African diaspora reflected prior Black Nationalist ideologies including Martin Delany's nineteenth century proposal for recently freed Black slaves to return to Africa and collaborate with Indigenous Africans for the purpose of universal nation building. The Pan-Africanist theory posits that Black people of the African diaspora share both a common history and destiny.

Black Nationalist principles strongly eschew white supremacist structures and resist Black assimilation into white culture. The overarching goal within Black Nationalism is to maintain a strong and distinct Black identity. During the 1960s, the Black Nationalist movement was influenced by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Black Nationalists countered certain Civil Rights activists who they felt were not radical enough. Art historian Kirstin Ellsworth explained, "Black Power and Black Liberation movements associated the demands for equality within the American Civil Rights Movement with the objectives of oppressed peoples around the world."

Black Nationalism's reach has extended to institutions such as schools, museums, and churches with each venue focused on providing aid, education, and platform for Black individuals and communities to express themselves intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.

The Black Aesthetic

Through contextualizing the Black Arts Movement, Baraka and others developed a theory of the Black Aesthetic. The broad term includes works of visual art, poetry, literature, music, and theater centered around the Black experience in contemporary society. In 1968, Larry Neal, a renowned scholar of Black theater explained that the Black Arts Movement was the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept."

The Black Aesthetic was not interested in race assimilation. It was not a major concern for Black art and artists to be integrated within the prevailing white culture. The Black Arts Movement prompted Black artists to counter the marginalization of Black culture within a white hegemonic society by celebrating the profound and diverse contributions within the African diaspora.

The Black Aesthetic represented the fluctuation of African American identity through a revolutionary lens. Artworks depicting the Black Aesthetic highlighted the value of maintaining strong Black communities and confronting social issues affecting Black individuals and groups. Visual artwork, such as paintings by Bob Thompson and Wadsworth Jarrell, incorporated a vibrant palette that alluded to the tonality of Black jazz musicians. In addition to utilizing a rich spectrum of color, the Black Aesthetic in visual art was replete with symbols and representations of Black cultural prowess. Popular subject matter included jazz musicians and political activists. Jae Jarrell likened the artwork of AfriCOBRA members to the music made by their jazz peers, stating that, "the unity in our voice, what it does is it behaves very much like a jazz concert, where one person solos and somebody ups him, and you're all building the grid."

Cultural critic Candice Frederick wrote, "In acknowledging the historical usage of the term and understanding Blackness to be iterative - something that is evolving, abundant, and prolific - we can begin to understand that the creativity of Black people contributes, always, to a Black aesthetic."

Identity Art and Identity Politics

The 1960s saw the beginning of the Identity Art and Identity Politics movement, in which many artists began using art to interrogate social perceptions of their identity, and critique systemic issues that marginalized them in society. Black artists, representing an entire race, became a major voice in this arena which included women artists, LGBTQ+ artists, disabled artists, and indigenous artists. The burgeoning outpour of Black art and Black activism caused a discernible presence of contemporary Blackness in society in a way that could no longer be ignored, stereotyped, or pigeonholed, spurring identifying aesthetics that would come to be synonymous with the emerging of the long-suppressed Black voice in contemporary culture.

Often appearing in the works of AfriCOBRA artists, then emerging amongst the Black Arts collective, were "cool-ade" colors, a clever riff co-opted from the name of the popular powdered drink brand Kool-Aid. Artist Wadsworth Jarrell explained, "The colors we were using were part of the AfriCOBRA philosophy we call 'cool-ade colors,' which related to the colors that African Americans were wearing in the '60s all over the country." Barbara Jones-Hogu described these hues as "bright, vivid, singing cool-ade colors of orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime, and grape. Pure vivid colors of the sun and nature."

"Militant chic" fashion also emerged during this time. Inspired by the uniform of the militant group, the Black Panthers, many Black designers started using Kente cloth in their fashions, as well as ammunition strips as belts. The Afro (a natural African hairstyle) became a championed signature and de riguer . Both Jae Jarrell's Revolutionary Suit , and Dindga McCannon's Revolutionary Sister highlighted these styles, bringing clothing as communal identity to the movement.

Later Developments - After Black Arts Movement

Major artists who were associated with the Black Arts Movement would come to include Betye Saar , Cleveland Bellow, Kay Brown, Marie Johnson Calloway, Ben Hazard, Ben Jones, Carolyn Lawrence, and Dingda McCannon.

The Black Arts Movement dissipated in the mid-1970s after Baraka transitioned from Black Nationalist ideology to Marxism. He stated, "I think fundamentally my intentions are similar to those I had when I was a Nationalist. That might seem contradictory, but they were similar in the sense I see art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution. It's just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms. Once defined revolution in Nationalist terms. But I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned and had to reach out for a communist ideology."

Although Marxism represented a significant shift in ideology, Baraka's socialist-inspired art still centered around empowering and galvanizing the Black community, which author and editor William J. Harris notes in the introduction to The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader .

The legacy of the Black Arts Movement is clear from the number of significant works of art, theater, and literature created during its span, as well as the proliferation of publishing houses, magazines, art institutions, and collectives established by Black individuals since.

James Smethurst, a scholar, and historian of African American Studies, mentioned that: "the Black Arts movement produced some of the most exciting poetry, drama, dance, music, visual art, and fiction of the post-World War II United States." He went on to explain that the movement was unique for reaching "a non-elite, transregional, mass African American audience to an extent that was unprecedented for such a formally (not to mention politically) radical body of art."

Although the Black Arts Movement and AfriCOBRA formally dissolved in the 1970s, the principles behind the Black Aesthetic remain relevant and have influenced pursuant generations of artists and collectives including Titus Kaphar, Mickalene Thomas, the Black Lunch Table, and the Black School. This continual focus on providing platforms for the lives and work of Black artists reflects Wadsworth Jarrell's assessment that the "AfriCOBRA influence never leaves. It became a part of you, like breathing."

The overall influence of the Black Arts Movement, and efforts from individual Black artists led to the foundation of African American Studies programs in colleges and universities. One example is the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies program at University of Massachusetts Amherst, which was founded by long-term faculty members including AfriCOBRA artist and educator, Nelson Stevens.

The Black Arts Movement has been reexamined in major museum retrospectives such as the 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power , which was displayed at the Tate Modern in London, as well as several United States venues, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, the de Young, and The Broad. Another major exhibition surveying artwork and ephemeral materials from the Black Arts Movement era was AfriCOBRA: Nation Time , which was on view during the 58th Biennale di Venezia held at the palazzo of Ca'Faccanon in Venice, Italy in 2019.

In the early twenty-first century, curator Thelma Golden used the term "Post-Black art" to describe a contemporary zeitgeist of Black artists who were "adamant about not being labeled 'Black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of Blackness." The paradoxical genre reflects art about the Black experience that simultaneously posits the idea that race does not matter within the context of the work's message. Noted artists working in this realm today are Kori Newkirk, Laylah Ali, Eric Wesley, Senam Okudzeto, David McKenzie, Susan Smith-Pinelo, Sanford Biggers, Louis Cameron, Deborah Grant, Rashid Johnson, Arnold Kemp, Julie Mehretu , Mark Bradford, and Jennie C. Jones.

Useful Resources on Black Arts Movement

• The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader By Amiri Baraka and William J. Harris
• The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s By James Smethurst
• For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights By Maurice Berger
• Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s By Jonathan Fenderson
• New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement By Margo Natalie Crawford and Lisa Gail Collins
• The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago By Romi Crawford
• Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power By Mark Godfrey, Zoé Whitley, Linda Goode Bryant, David Driskell, Edmund Gaither, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, and Samella Lewis
• The Black Arts Movement in the National Archives
• How David C. Driskell Shaped the Story of Black Art in America: From the Archives By Pamela Newkirk / ArtNews / May 2000
• Author Amiri Baraka: 'Tales of the Out & the Gone By Farai Chideya / NPR / January 9, 2007
• The revolutionary art of Emory Douglas, Black Panther The Guardian / October 27, 2008
• Africobra and the Negotiation of Visual Afrocentrisms By Kirstin L. Ellsworth / Civilisations / Vol. 58, no. 1, 2009, pp. 21-38.
• Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell By Rebecca Zorach / Never the Same / 2012
• Chicago's Wall of Respect: how a mural elicited a sense of collective ownership By Ben Campkin, Mariana Mogilevich, and Rebecca Ross / The Guardian / December 8, 2014
• Chicago's 'Wall of Respect' inspired neighborhood murals across U.S. By Patrick T. Reardon / Chicago Tribune / July 29, 2017
• Women of the Black Arts Movement By Femi Lewis / ThoughtCo / May 30, 2019
• Body and Soul By Kanitra Fletcher / The Houston Museum of Fine Arts / February 22, 2020
• Artist Noah Purifoy Saw Value in the Discarded. What if L.A. Didn't Throw People Away? By Ismail Muhammad / Los Angeles Times / May 26, 2021
• Black Power Art
• Malcolm X and the Black Arts Movement
• I See You: A Conversation with Jae Jarrell and Jeffreen M. Hayes PhD
• The Black Arts Movement and Politics - Nikki Giovanni
• Talib Kweli & Sonia Sanchez On The Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka, Hip Hop
• Jack Whitten - 'The Political is in the Work'

Related Artists

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Adam Zucker

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Cooper

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement

An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 9, 2020 • ( 0 )

The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights movement that preceded it. The Black Arts movement was one of the only American literary movements to merge art with a political agenda. Because poems were short and could be recited at rallies and other political activities to incite and move a crowd, poetry was the most popular literary genre of the Black Arts movement, followed closely by drama. Poet, playwright, activist, and major figure of the Black Arts movement, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) coined the term Black Arts when he established his Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem. Although the Black Arts movement began its decline during the mid-1970s, at the same time as the Black Power movement began its descent, it introduced a new breed of black poets and a new brand of black poetry. It also inspired and energized already established poets like Gwendolyn BROOKS and Robert Hayden. The Black Arts movement created many poetic innovations in form, language, and style that have influenced the work of many of today’s spoken word artists and socially conscious rap lyricists.

The poets most often associated with the Black Arts movement include Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, Mari Evans, Don L. Lee (now known as Haki Madhubutti), Carolyn Rodgers, Marvin X, Jayne Cortez, Askia Toure, and June Jordan. A number of important African-American playwrights, fiction writers, and scholars also made significant contributions to the Black Arts movement, creatively as well as philosophically and theoretically, by defining and outlining the objectives and criteria of the movement and its “black aesthetic.”

An Introduction to the Beat Poets

Several publishing houses and workshops were founded during the period of the movement, and several magazines and journals emerged, all of which provided a vehicle for the literary work of Black Arts poets. Literary publications, such as Freedomways, Negro Digest (later renamed Black World ), the B lack Scholar , the Journal of Black Poetry, and Liberator, brought Black Arts movement poets to a larger audience when more established publications rejected their work. Two important publishing houses—Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in Detroit and Madhubuti’s Third World Press in Chicago—were also instrumental in helping to introduce new poets and to disseminate their work. Umbra Workshop (1962–65), composed of a group of black writers, produced Umbra Magazine and gained significance as a literary group that created a distinct voice and often challenged mainstream standards concerning literature. Lastly, Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, founded in 1965, brought free plays, poetry readings, and musical performances to the people of Harlem, thereby carrying out the idea of art as a communal experience.

The Black Power movement, from which the Black Arts movement derived, sought to empower African- American communities economically and politically by relying solely on resources within the black community. It also sought to celebrate blackness and restore positive images of black people from the negative stereotyping that took place in the larger society. Thus slogans, such as “Black Is Beautiful,” were prominent during the time. Members of organizations, such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, demanded racial equality, not through the methods of passive resistance associated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but “by any means necessary” (a slogan of the party), including “violent revolution,” as stated by Malcolm X. Moreover, “black cultural nationalism,” the belief that blacks and whites had two separate worldviews and outlooks on life, was a prominent idea in both the Black Power and the Black Arts movements. As a result, Black Arts movement writers experimented with methods of artistic expression that were characteristic of African-American culture and experience. First all of the poetry was infused with a certain level of black consciousness, meaning that its subjects and themes reflected the quality and character of black experience. In form, Black Arts movement poets often rejected standard English in favor of Black English, a more colloquial and vernacular language and syntax. They peppered it with street slang and idiomatic phrases that were simple, direct, explicit, and often irreverent. In addition the poetry borrowed greatly from black music, using rhythmical effects from jazz and blues, as well as from other forms of black oral speech, such as sermons, folktales, signifying (an intricate, humorous language style that uses indirection, innuendo, puns, metaphors, and other wordplay to persuade, argue, send a message, or insult), and the dozens (a form of signifying that involves trading insults, primarily about a person’s relatives). Other common features of the poetry include free verse, short line lengths, call-and-response patterns, chanting, and free rhyming.

The Black Arts movement had much in common with another period of increased artistic production among African-American writers—the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. During both periods, there was an increased interest in establishing a more assertive black collective identity than had previously existed (during the Harlem Renaissance, it was called “the New Negro”) and in searching for ethnic identity and heritage in folk and African culture. Thus poets from both periods experimented with folk elements, such as blues, spirituals, and vernacular idioms in their poetry, and venerated Africa. However, despite these similarities, many Black Arts movement writers were critical of the objectives of the Harlem Renaissance, believing it had failed to link itself concretely to the struggle of the black masses. Adherents of the Black Arts movement were also critical of Harlem Renaissance writers’ reliance on white patronage, as well as their tendency to esteem Western art, to desire mainstream recognition, and to write with a white audience in mind. They felt that this compromised black writers’ ability to be completely honest in their depiction and expression of black life and struggle.

The Black Arts movement established a number of objectives and criteria for its creative artists to follow. Primary among them was to persuade African Americans to reject the mainstream culture and the process of Americanization and assimilation, instead encouraging them to embrace a “black aesthetic,” whereby black people would look to their own culture and aesthetic values to create and evaluate African-American literature. The three major criteria of the Black Arts movement, established by Ron Karenga, were that all black art must be “functional, collective, and committed” (33). The functional nature of black art meant that the literary work must serve a purpose larger than merely the creation of art. It had to be connected to the social and political struggles in which African-American people were engaged. The second criterion, that black art must be “collective,” meant that it must serve the people; it must educate, inspire, and uplift them. Reciprocally, the artist must learn from and be inspired and uplifted by the people. The artist must be prepared to sacrifice her or his own individuality and, instead, always write with the good of the people in mind. Third and lastly, black art must be committed to political and social reform and supportive of the revolution that will bring this about. In essence the Black Arts movement’s objectives were to reach the masses of black people, to make them understand their message of self-sufficiency and dignity, and to inspire them to act upon it.

Many of the criteria and objectives of the Black Arts movement are discernible within the poetry itself. For example, in “From the Egyptian” in his 1966 collection Black Art, Baraka makes clear that violent confrontation with the oppressors of black people is an imminent reality as he asserts that he is prepared to murder “the enemies / of my father.” Likewise, in “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro” in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Giovanni tells black people: “We ain’t got to prove we can die / We got to prove we can kill.” Giovanni also demonstrates the criterion of commitment with “My Poem” (1968), when she writes in support of the revolution and its enduring nature, stating that “if i never do anything / it will go on.” The didacticism of much Black Arts poetry is visible in Baraka’s “A School of Prayer” (1966). In this poem, Baraka tells his black audience: “Do not obey their laws.” “Their,” of course, refers to white society. Essentially Baraka urges black people to rebel against white authority and be wary of the words spoken by those who seek to oppress them because their purpose is to deceive black people and curtail their advancement. The celebration of blackness is also noticeable in Black Arts poetry. Sanchez, perhaps the female poet most closely identified with the Black Arts movement, reclaims the dignity of black womanhood in an unnamed poem in her volume We a BaddDDD People (1970), when she links herself as a black woman to a regal African queen who will, “Walk / move in / blk queenly ways.” Similarly, in “Ka Ba” (1969), Baraka affirms the uniqueness of black expressive culture and of black people, whom he describes as “full of masks and dances and swelling chants / with African eyes and noses and arms,” despite the present condition of oppression and degradation under which many African Americans live. In both of these poems, Sanchez and Baraka seek to restore to black people a positive representation of blackness and raise their collective sense of identity.

Many of the poems in Sanchez’s collection We a BaddDDD People exemplify experimentation with language. In “indianapolis/summer/1969/poem,” Sanchez provides a new spelling of the words mothers (“mothas”), fathers (“fathas”), and sisters (sistuhs”); the word about becomes “bout,” the word black becomes “blk,” and the word I becomes “i.” The changes in spelling, as well as the use of nonstandard English in Sanchez’s poems, are meant to capture the syntax and vernacular speech of many within the black community, while the abbreviated spelling of “blk” and the lower case “i” are part of Sanchez’s refusal to adhere to the rules of standard English. Many Black Arts poets perceived language to be a tool of the oppressor and therefore sought ways to make it their own. Lastly, the use of pejorative terminology and irreverent language was also common among Black Arts poets. The police were often referred to as “pigs,” and white people were termed “honkies” or “crackers.”

Several criticisms have been leveled against the Black Arts movement. One was that it tended only to address issues of race and to promote racial hatred. Also the functional aspect of the Black Arts movement came to be denounced by newly emerging black literary critics who claimed that the literature itself was often subordinate to the political or social message of the movement. These critics saw this as detrimental to black literature, creating a narrowness of focus that creatively limited the artist and the kinds of literature he or she could compose. In addition there was a tendency in the Black Arts movement to devise theories prior to the creation of an actual body of literature that would prove the theory. Therefore the literature was driven by the theory rather than the other way around. Lastly, some Black Arts movement writers were known to judge harshly any black writer who did not conform to the criteria and objectives of the movement. Even black writers of the past were not exempt from being maligned, and Black Arts movement writers often did criticize them without always taking into consideration the historical period and context in which these past writers were composing their literature.

Still the Black Arts movement’s influence and contributions to American poetry were far reaching. It made literary artists rethink the function and purpose of their work and their responsibility to their communities and to society. It also influenced and continues to inspire new generations of poets to experiment with a variety of artistic forms to refuse the pressure to conform to Western standards of art and to write, embrace, and derive their art from within their own expressive culture

African American and Post-colonial Studies

Analysis of Amiri Baraka’s Plays

Phases of African Postcolonial Literature

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow, 1968. Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Karenga, Ron. “Black Cultural Nationalism.” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971, pp. 32–38.

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The Black Arts Movement was a politically motivated, loosely connected group of poets, painters, musicians, dramatists, and other artists active in the African American community from 1965 to 1976. The movement is often cited as the "artistic sister of the Black Power Movement." The Black Arts Movement saw immense growth in every aspect of the arts for African-Americans all over the country. Poetry, however, saw the most growth during the movement. The Black Arts Movement saw the rise to fame of numerous African-American poets of the time, and some of their most powerful and influential works were published during that era. 

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Ready for the revolution

Education, arts, and aesthetics of the black power movement.

By Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Black is Beautiful (1970) by Ilka Hartmann Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

The Black Power movement (1966-1976) sought to create a new revolutionary black consciousness.

It fostered a new aesthetics, declared that black was beautiful, saw art as an integral part of the revolution and promoted education as a vehicle for social and political transformation. 

Wall of Respect by Darryl Cowherd Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Alternative schools, study groups, graphic arts, newspapers, poetry, music and theater helped shape and spread the Black Power message in all its diversity.

Wall of respect, Chicago.

Panther School (1972) by Stephen Shames Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Education for Liberation.

Panther schools were designed to sharpen the political consciousness of children. Chicano, Native American, and Puerto-Rican groups followed the Black Panther model and established their own alternative schools.

Inspired by the Black Power movement, communities developed new educational models in small institutions that played a key role in the intellectual and cultural development of young children.

Malcolm X College, Chicago.

Malcolm X Liberation University (1969) by Bill Boyarsky Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Malcolm X Liberation University opened in Durham, North Carolina in October 1969 and moved to Greensboro in 1970. The objective of its founder, Howard Fuller, was “to provide a framework within which black education can become relevant to the needs of the black community and the struggle for black liberation.” 

Education for Liberation (1969) by Stephen Shames Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Newspapers and other publications were used to educate and politicize readers.  

Emory Douglas, minister of culture of the Black Panther Party (BPP) working on the party’s newspaper, Black Panther. Members were asked to read, discuss and evaluate the Party’s work as presented in the paper.

Rising Up Angry (RUA), the newspaper of the white progressive organization Rising Up Angry covered the struggles of various groups regardless of race or class.

An activist selling RUA walks past a poster by Emory Douglas, minister of culture of the Black Panther Party.

Art for Revolution (1969) by Robert Wade Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Art for Revolution.

Visitors to the Afro-American Center set up by the Black Panther Party in Algiers view and buy posters by BBP minister of culture Emory Douglas.

Black Power/Black Arts (1988) by Margaret Randall Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

 “The Black Arts Movement is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept”--Larry Neal

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was created by radical black writers, poets, musicians, visual artists, dancers, playwrights, actors, and cultural workers. Like the Black Power militants, they saw culture as a central element of political liberation and self-determination. Poet, playwright, fiction writer, and critic Sonia Sanchez, is seen here with Republic of New Afrika activist Queen Mother Moore.

Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka was a key figure in both the BAM and Black Power politics.

Wall of Respect (1967) by Darryl Cowherd Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Wall of Respect

Twenty artists affiliated with the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) created the Wall of Respect in 1967 on the South Side of Chicago.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Nina Simone, and Amiri Baraka were some of the people honored on the Wall, which was destroyed by fire in 1971.

Leading figures of the BAM contributed articles to The Drama Review special issue on black theater. The flyer on the cover announced a benefit for the Black Panther Party.

Chicago’s Affro-Arts Theater featured plays, dance, and music and was also a meeting place for Black Power activists. The theater’s Free Black Community Cultural College offered various classes.

Askia Muhammad Touré, a leading poet, is often considered the most influential poet-professor in the BAM.

The Afro (1968) by Stephen Shames Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael asserted that black people “have to stop being ashamed of being black. A broad nose, a thick lip, and nappy hair is us and we are going to call that beautiful whether they like it or not. We are not going to fry our hair anymore.” 

Left: Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary of the BPP.

Young Lords Rally by Carlos Flores Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Some Young Lords, including leaders, adopted the Afro that showed their African ancestry.

Urban Militants (1968) by Stephen Shames Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

Following the Black Panthers’ lead, urban militants’ attire consisted of sunglasses, black leather jackets, berets, and Afros.

The Black Panther Party was critical of cultural nationalism and its African-inspired clothes; but this Panther mixed the Panthers uniform with an “African” necklace.

Stokely Carmichael wearing the Panthers' black leather jacket. As a Pan-Africanist, he also donned a dashiki.

Africa became a source of inspiration. Chokwe Lumumba and his wife Anasa of the Republic of New Afrika.

Berets (1969) by Bob Fitch Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

The beret was an important symbol of militancy and political consciousness. Berets were first adopted by the Black Panthers in 1966. Latino, white, Native and Asian American activists donned berets too.   

Brown Berets.

The Black Power movement's valorization of blackness and black aesthetics reflected a new consciousness of self-love and racial pride that continues to shape the present.

Curator Sylviane A. Diouf, PhD Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Photographers Bill Boyarsky Darryl Cowherd Risasi Zachariah Dais Detroit News Bob Fitch Carlos Flores Ilka Hartmann Stephen Shames Neil Kenlock Margaret Randall Rising Up Angry Staff Photographers Robert Wade In each instance, we have tried to make sure that we have secured all necessary rights. If you believe that we have made a mistake, please contact us so that we can correct the oversight.

Black Power!

Schomburg center for research in black culture, the new york public library.

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