Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Creative Souls

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-7199331

2164-0041

Paul Von Blum,

For many decades, I have embarked on a long personal journey to bring African American visual artists out of the shadows of marginality into a level of recognition and visibility, at least at the local and regional levels in Southern California. This emerges from my personal activism in the civil rights movement in SNCC and CORE more than 50 years ago and my desire to infuse my teaching and scholarly work with this spirit of civil rights and political activism.I have written regularly on African American art, including various books, catalogue essays, reviews, and articles, including some in Tikkun. Recently, I have focused on the vibrant community of Los Angeles’ Black artists. Throughout my research, these women and men have transcended the status of artistic subjects; they have become my friends. I have been privileged to share their lives and to become part of their extended community. I have spent countless hours in their homes and studios and have regularly attended their exhibitions. My scholarly work about them has been openly political, in deliberate contrast to the prevailing (and absurd) tradition of academic objectivity.Not surprisingly, these gifted artists have endured substantial marginalization and exclusion from mainstream museums, galleries, university, and college curricula, and mainstream media coverage. They have created alternative venues serving the African American community effectively, including major museums and cultural institutions like the California African American Museum, the Museum of African American Art, the Watts Towers Art Center, the William Grant Still Arts Center, and various other galleries catering to this community. But artistic racism—that is exactly what it is—remains the norm and Black artists as well as Latinx, women, LBGTQ, and other artists outside the mainstream of white male artistic hegemony still face substantial barriers and exclusion in the masculine art world of 21st century America.The major change today is sophisticated tokenism where the white art establishment, consisting of wealthy philanthropists and conventional (but of course politically liberal) curators, critics, and museum directors, decide to “anoint” various African American artists as worthy of inclusion in mainstream discourse and commerce. In Los Angeles, artist Mark Bradford (and a very few others) has been the recipient of this status. A dramatic example is billionaire Eli Broad’s recent purchase of Bradford’s painting “Helter Skelter I” for $12 million for his Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles.Mark Bradford is, by any critical standard, a magnificent, award-winning artist. A substantial body of scholarship has been published on his work. I note this in my introductory chapter in Creative Souls and explain that this is why he is not included in this volume. Many of Bradford’s works are socially conscious and he has been a major contributor to the cultural life of the Black community in Los Angeles. He fully deserves all the recognition he has received. But he is an anointed one, among several others including Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Mikalene Thomas, and a few more in the U.S., all of whom, like Mark Bradford, are thoroughly first-rate visual artists with justifiable international reputations.This tokenism is identical to that of society in general, which conceals its structural racism by allowing and highlighting a small percentage of people of color to have highly visible positions in corporations, government, non profits, colleges, universities, and the like. Meanwhile millions of other African Americans and Latinx endure segregation, poverty, police brutality, and other hardships while privileged white Americans ignore these realities and often congratulate themselves about their country’s social and racial “progress.” The art world is a mirror image of that disgraceful arrangement.I wrote Creative Souls and co-curated its eponymous exhibition at the Watts Towers Arts Center because some of the 21 artists in the book and exhibition are of comparable quality and stature to Mark Bradford and other highly praised Black artistic luminaries throughout the nation. They deserve equivalent recognition because of their exemplary work over the decades. And all of them deserve as much exposure as possible. Their works reflect powerful creativity and imagination and their efforts address a wide variety of themes, especially issues of racism in many of its multifaceted manifestations in contemporary America.The exhibition is intended, above all, to honor a large group of African American visual artists who have been active for many years. All have exhibited widely both locally and nationally over the years. The Watts Towers Arts Center venue for the “Creative Souls” exhibition is especially appropriate because of its location in one of the major centers of Black Los Angeles and because of its outstanding record of artistic, musical, and educational activities for the surrounding community. Moreover, the Arts Center has been the site of numerous exhibitions of some of the most iconic representatives of African American artists in Southern California. Some of the most renowned figures from this community have been associated with the Center, which enjoys an exemplary reputation through Black Los Angeles and beyond.The artists in “Creative Souls” have produced scores of works for this exhibition; some are selections I chose for the book, others are from their large body of works from the past, and some art is entirely new for the present exhibition. I decided to start the show with a silkscreen print by Phoebe Beasley, Mother to Son (Figure 1), which stands at the entrance to the main gallery. Beasley is an accomplished, longtime artist who is one of the most acclaimed figures in the creative community.Her artwork highlights an African American woman holding a picket sign reading “DON’T BUY WHERE YOU CAN’T WORK.” Well-dressed and carrying her handbag, she shows her fierce determination to demand full equality for her people during the height of the modern civil rights movement. Beasley captures the spirit of ordinary people, including hundreds of thousands of Black women, who collectively changed the racial landscape of America. They were responsible for the progress we made during a momentous time in our national history.For me, however, this opening artwork was especially personal, revealing the deeper sources of my involvement with this African American artistic community. In the early 1960s, I demonstrated on Canal Street in New Orleans against large department stores that refused to employ African Americans in responsible positions; this reflected the blatant Jim Crow racism of the era. I carried a picket sign with an identical message to that in Phoebe Beasley’s silkscreen. But during one of my picketing episodes, two young white thugs approached and proceeded to knock me to the ground, calling me various racial epithets. Pledged to non-violence, I protected myself but did not respond. When I found myself on the pavement, I saw two New Orleans police officers watching and grinning. When I stood up and brushed myself off, the cops approached the thugs and asked if they were hurt and wanted to press charges.This Kafkaesque event was not unusual during the movement. I had several subsequent violent encounters with the police, with some pain and injuries, as well as unpleasant experiences with jails, courts, and probation officers. All of that underscored my will to write the book, organize the exhibition, and start with this artwork. Above all, that enduring political history has informed me in this engaging and soul-enriching work.Beasley, therefore, sets a political tone for this exhibition. Many of the other artists also reflect this broad spirit in multifaceted ways. The present exhibition also features artworks from a former director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, Mark Steven Greenfield, who managed to combine magnificent service as an arts administrator before retiring from that role while producing a truly spectacular body of art over the decades. His thematic scope and stylistic diversity are nothing short of amazing; his range reflects an extraordinary dedication to artistic excellence as he traverses the dazzling variety of his efforts, some of which are represented in both the book and the exhibition.One of his most provocative themes has been the controversial topic of Black stereotypes, which have despoiled American popular culture since the inception of the nation. He has (re)appropriated late 19th and early 20th century racist images of Black people. In his Blackatcha series, he used photographs of minstrel show performances that denigrated African Americans and their culture and transformed them into dramatic visual works of artistic resistance. Greenfield’s visual redirections catalyze instant reactions, encouraging viewers to reflect on the origin and persistence of racist attitudes that may well remain buried even among those who claim to be free of bias and prejudice.Each one in this series is strikingly powerful. An untitled work from that series (Figure 2) makes the point unambiguously. In front of the man in a minstrel costume are letters, which, when audiences spell them out, read “SOME INDIGNITIES PERSIST.” Greenfield skillfully makes a second appropriation here by structuring the front of the composition as a modern eye chart, familiar to almost everyone. This signifies that Americans need to focus closely to discover the deep-seated racism permeating their history and culture. Many of today’s racial indignities are subtle, properly characterized as micro-aggressions. It takes careful vision to discern these daily slights, but African Americans and other minorities are acutely cognizant of them as they occur. Greenfield uses his art to encourage a confrontation that many white Americans would prefer to avoid, especially even when they themselves are so often the unwitting perpetrators of the racist micro-aggressions.“Creative Souls” also highlights the works of Afro-Caribbean artists Bernard Hoyes, Yrneh Brown, and Lili Bernard. These three artists draw strongly on their Caribbean roots to add distinction to the burgeoning community of Black artists in the Los Angeles area. Each has exhibited widely and received strongly positive critical reviews for their work and each has brought the tradition of Afro-Caribbean culture into the public artistic arena in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere.Lili Bernard has contributed a powerful installation to the present exhibition that is inspired by Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks and that reflects her status as a Cubanborn woman with a deep knowledge of Black history and thought that infuses much of her stellar artistic work in general. This three-dimensional installation with its accompanying video, Ain’t Funny Crucifix (Figure 3), combines purple sugar cane, conga drum, watermelon seeds, nails, rope, acrylic paint, video art, and performance. The artist’s objective is to examine Black Consciousness and self-image through her eldest son’s developing Black manhood in a racist society.The most conspicuous feature of the installation is the cross and the watermelon with nails. The cross is actually constructed of sugar cane, a staple crop in Bernard’s native Cuba. The key theme is the fusion of Catholicism and the Afro-Cuban religion known as “Palo,” which resulted from European colonialism. Enslaved Africans brought to Cuba were required to pick sugar cane, an arduous, backbreaking, and debilitating task. But this same sugar cane was also a source of sustenance, like the abundant watermelons that enslaved Black people regularly ate in Cuba.Ain’t Funny Crucifix critiques not only colonialism but also the racist use of watermelon imagery in American popular culture. After Emancipation, free Black people grew, sold, and ate watermelons, just as their Cuban counterparts used them for nourishment. Racist whites, however, made the fruit a symbol of African American dirtiness, laziness, and childishness. Black caricatures with watermelons were ubiquitous in film, postcards, household goods, and other expressive forms.The nails on the watermelon signify the Black determination to destroy this repulsive watermelon stereotype. The accompanying video reflects that resistance message powerfully. Bernard sets the tone dramatically at the start of the video. She dedicates it to two women, Mary Turner and Laura Nelson, who were victims of early 20th-century Southern lynch mobs. Images of these horrific lynchings were widely distributed as souvenir postcards, reminding viewers of both the tragic legacy of American racial history and the continuing need for artworks like this.The artist’s son Rafael is the video’s subject and is shown asserting his Black masculinity, as he combats society’s racism and stereotypes through his strength, diligence, frustration, anger, compassion, vulnerability, and joy, all the emotions that Black men experience regularly in American society. His whitened African warrior’s face reinforces the African roots of Black resistance, a major theme in African American and Afro-Caribbean art generally. The video also shows him stabbing the watermelon, a defiant rejection of American racist stereotypes.In recent years, African American artists have joined millions of other Americans and people throughout the world in condemning the murders of unarmed Black men, usually at the hands of police. The catalyst for the movement known as Black Lives Matter occurred on February 12, 2012, when George Zimmerman fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. That killing led to Zimmerman’s arrest and trial. His acquittal in 2013, in turn, led to nationwide protests against the killings of unarmed Black people and the all too easy way that perpetrators escaped legal liability for their actions.I joined one of those protest demonstrations in Times Square in Manhattan the night of the infamous verdict. That was the personal reason for me to select various artworks that address the current plague of police killings and other forms of misconduct against African Americans. One of the younger artists in “Creative Souls,” Derrick Maddox, exemplifies and underscores that theme by using a stylistically innovative visual approach. He has added to his exemplary record of socially conscious artworks through his imaginative portraits on bread; these works are unique in contemporary art, and the present work, Got It Bad Because I’m Brown (Figure 4), is a chilling commentary about police violence in America. For several years, Maddox has appropriated images and presented them on white bread, an entirely appropriate medium to initiate the much-needed conversation about race in this country.Here, he places the faces of 59 African American men whose lives have been cut short. They did not, for the most part, receive the national and international notoriety of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, and a few others. These men had little or no visibility outside their family and friends. Most, but certainly not all, were young; each one had hopes and dreams that remained unfulfilled. Viewers look at these “bread works” and and a compelling human vision. The nun in the center with her cross adds a satirical note of piety, suggesting that these police killings are a matter of sacred honor in America. Got It Bad Because I’m Brown is an extraordinarily trenchant, poignant, and effective artwork.Like many of their counterparts throughout the country, some of the African American artists in this exhibition use their talents to offer perceptive commentary on themes and topics that transcend conventional American race issues. Dale Davis is another highly venerated African American artist in Southern California whose thematic range and visual excellence are legendary in this community and beyond. His stellar reputation as a gallery owner with his brother Alonzo Davis from 1967 to 1989 at the famed Brockman Gallery and his long record as a teacher complement his prolific efforts as a practicing artist in several genres.For many years, I have had the privilege of viewing and writing about Davis’s assemblages, especially those in which he uses actual musical instruments to pay tribute to the richness and vibrancy of the Black musical heritage in America. These are truly remarkable artworks and the “Creative Souls” exhibition features Horn Section, one of the most striking in this feature of Davis’s Jazz Series. Those works enable him to join some of the iconic figures of African American art for whom Black music is a key source for their enduring contributions to American art history.Another of Dale Davis’s remarkable series of artworks is his Soul and Coal Cars, which focuses on some of the serious environmental issues that plague our planet. That series draws upon a long tradition of African American artistic production where railroads have played a huge role. Many Black artists have used trains as a signifier of freedom, drawing on the metaphor of the Underground Railroad in the heroic attempts to assist slaves fleeing bondage in the South. In the early to mid-20th century, trains were the actual physical vehicles of transportation for African Americans during the “Great Migration,” when millions fled the oppression of the Jim Crow South to the major urban centers of the North and to the West.Davis is well aware of the historical power of trains to African Americans and their significance as artistic symbols when used for social and political commentary and criticism. In his assemblage Coal Car (Figure 5), he uses the train more ironically as a symbol of oppression by addressing the problem of aggressive mining of rare minerals and metals occurring in South Africa and in other newly liberated African nations. Davis fills the train with mesquite charcoal and adds a few pieces of zircon in the corner.Many of the leaders of these countries, like American corporations, are seduced by the lure of quick development and economic return, without consideration for the human consequences for their often-struggling populations. The glittering zircon invites viewers to reflect on what the leaders are really seeking—riches for themselves or for their populations? Dale Davis issues a troubling artistic warning that too few Americans understand, but that they should seriously confront in an era of major global interconnectedness.Joe Sims is another longtime assemblage artist who stands in the proud tradition of using discarded materials to create powerful works that address trenchant issues of racial and social injustice. Like such distinguished predecessors and contemporaries as Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John Riddle, John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Charles Dickson, and Dominique Moody, Sims has an imaginative ability to transform debris and trash into powerful and enduring works of art.Many of his pieces, understandably, address issues specifically relevant to his fellow African Americans. Like Davis and others, he also reveals a broader commitment to social class and gender justice. Secretary’s Day (Figure 6) is an assemblage based on his wife’s unpleasant experiences with the daily aggravations of clerical work with an insensitive supervisor, Sims constructed a critical artwork that captures the despair of millions of secretaries and other “pink collar” workers whose daily lives are (unnecessarily) made insufferable because their bosses view them as little more than replaceable extensions of their computers and other business technologies. Throughout the United States and much of the world, these oppressed, poorly paid workers often serve as objects of hostility when their supervisors are frustrated at events far beyond the control of their subordinates. Indeed, it is far from uncommon for some bosses to blame their secretaries for the personal failings, deficiencies, and insecurities for which they should really acknowledge personal responsibility.Joe Sims captures their alienation most dramatically with the anguished expression of the silhouette figure. Her scream reflects the feelings of those clerical workers who are unable to express their legitimate rage at their unfair treatment and the lack of recognition of their basic humanity—conditions that are all too ubiquitous in the modern workplace. The discarded computer keyboards and other office equipment signify the deeper phenomenon of discarded human dignity, another expression of Sims’s lifetime identification with marginalized populations. Key details of the work include the dangling wires, reflecting the precarious work lives of the secretarial class. Secretary’s Day joins a distinguished tradition of artwork that highlights the plight of working women and men and that offers viewers a vivid perspective on the urgent need for a humane transformation of the workplace, especially in the contemporary information age.Twelve other accomplished contemporary Black artists have contributed paintings, sculptures, assemblages, prints, and other works to this exhibition. Like their talented colleagues whose works are represented in this essay, many also address similar themes and all do so with consummate skill and dedication to their craft. Some in their lifetimes may achieve the kinds of recognition and rewards of their white counterparts of comparable talent. But that is not why they do what they do. They are artists who are also Black. They know well the profound personal fulfillment of creative accomplishments that add immeasurably to the cultural life of their vibrant community.