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  • Remembering the Black Arts Movement
  • Salah M. Hassan

The Black Art Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.

—Larry Neal, 1968

In theory and practice, artists of the Black Arts movement have been a major driving force in the growth of a remarkable, rich, and diverse array of aesthetics and styles, driven by a concern of uniting people of African descent all over the world. They have produced a range of voices and a rich body of artwork that is truly trans-African, but also transnational. These special issues (numbers 29 and 30) do not claim to be comprehensive or representative of all the groups, movements, and artists who worked in different cities across North America and other parts of the African Diaspora. Rather, they focus selectively on works by artists who formed or joined in forming collectives such as AfriCOBRA, “Where We At” Black Women Artists, Spiral, and Weusi, as well as others who operated independently within the same aesthetic impulses and ideological framework. Some of the contributions to these special issues highlight pioneers, independent masters whose impressive body of work exerted a tremendous influence on the Black Arts movement, in addition to others who have shared similar concerns without belonging to a specific group or collective. Some of the essays engage the thematic, aesthetic, and ideological concerns that dominated the works of these artists. These have ranged from responding to the visual tropes of racist and stereotypical representation, to confronting the legacy of absence in the work of artists associated with the Black Arts movement, as well as the neglected legacy of Black Abstraction. All have shared the concern of a creation of a new art and aesthetics that are modernist in essence but rooted in the black experience. They also include essays by younger artists whose works are concerned with the representations of blackness as it is informed by emerging discourses in the fields of black art and visual culture from gender, sexuality, and feminist perspectives. They also provide insights into how such discourses are evoked in mapping absence and presence within postmodernist and conceptualist frameworks.

The Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s grew out of the achievements of artists of the Harlem Renaissance. These artists found a new source of inspiration in their African ancestral heritage and imbued their work with their experience as blacks in America. The works of pioneers like Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller formed the genesis of a modernist style and aesthetic that influenced the development of African American art throughout the twentieth century. By the 1950s and early 1960s, masters such as John Biggers, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Loïs Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White were fully exploring the African American experience and its rich African heritage, ultimately impacting the Black Arts movement profoundly.

Newly independent African countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the global decolonization movement inspired a tremendous solidarity among artists of African descent in the United States and other parts of the African Diaspora. The rise of a modern postcolonial African art, which encompasses a new visual vocabulary and symbols rooted in the African experience, has its cross-influences among artists of the Black Arts movement. The African continent became a home and a place of pilgrimage to which several African American artists embarked on a journey to study and reclaim their rich African heritage. Participation in major pan-African forums such as First World Art Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar 1966 and FESTAC ’77 in Lagos, Nigeria, exposed African American artists to African masters such as Skunder Boghossian, Malangatana, Papa Ibra Tall, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Another influential artist of the time was the Cuban Wifredo Lam, whose work [End Page 4] creatively synthesizes African and Western imagery within a modernist and Caribbean perspective. All of these pan-African artists have impacted the style and aesthetic of the Black Arts movement.

For the benefit of our readers who are less familiar with the visual manifestations of the Black Arts movement, it...

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