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u 51 CHAPTER 3 BRIdgINg PAST ANd PRESENT: AFRICA ANd AFTER, 1957–1974 The journey to Africa was the most significant of my life’s experiences. Living intimately with the African and understanding something of his problems enabled me to better understand my own. Thus strengthened, I gained a new confidence for the future. —John Biggers, Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa u u u west africa, July 1957–December 1957 In July of 1957, John Biggers left America with his wife, Hazel, for six months of study in West Africa, funded by a UNESCO grant. The artist kept a careful record of his trip in words,drawings,and photographs,which he later incorporated into a book, Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa, first published in 1962. In Ananse, he wrote of his thoughts in flight, as his plane approached the coast of Africa: “As an American Negro, my lifelong desire had been to bridge the gap between African and American culture. When I was an art student …Viktor Lowenfeld taught us something about the noble meaning of African sculpture.” He continued: “But African art—in fact African culture generally—remained devoid of significance in our lives.I felt cut off from my heritage,which I suspected was estimable and something to be embraced, not an ignobility to be scorned. I believed that many of my American brothers, in their flight from the stereotyped concepts of our race, had also flown from their real selves and had created a grotesque, unattainable image based on Caucasian attributes, a development that must surely prove a hindrance in the struggle to attain dignity and self-respect in contemporary society … I remembered the self-conscious questions asked me and my students by other members of our race, ‘But why do you paint Negroes?’ Our answers—‘Whom should we portray? Whom do we know best? Are we not Negroes?’—failed to satisfy.”1 In Africa, John and Hazel Biggers traveled through Ghana, Togo, Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin), and Nigeria, where they experienced the heady atmosphere of independence as country after country became free from colonial rule. walls that speak 52 u While in Ghana, the couple stayed in the home of a university art instructor, Patrick Hulede, whose portrait, along with that of Hulede’s mother, appears in Two People in Ghana. (fig. 3.1) John and Hazel were given an extraordinary opportunity to learn about the cultural and spiritual heritage of their ancestors. Africa provided the artist with a wealth of images—both from his direct observations and from his study of African culture. (fig. 3.2) He studied African myths and legends, naming his book for Ananse, the mythical African spider, an all-knowing fixer, trickster , and teacher. He was particularly drawn to the creation stories of a matriarchal deistic system. In African tribal legend, God has both male and female properties. The queen mother is the moon—the source of all creation—who gives birth to the sun,the king of heaven,and to the stars,the children.(This African fable will reappear in many forms in Biggers’s later murals.) In Ananse, Biggers wrote: “The African woman, in her divine creative capacity, motivated within me a desire to paint murals on creation from a matriarchal point of view; whereas the European artist had been motivated to paint creation from a patriarchal view.”2 Biggers’s African trip was a turning point in his life, leading him to embark on a long artistic struggle to integrate into his work the heritage of Africa, Europe, and the American South. He has said that the early years following his visit were the most difficult, having an almost paralyzing effect on him. He wondered at times if he could ever assimilate such an experience. 3 u u u houston, 1958–1974 Upon his return to Houston, Biggers resumed work on Web of Life, a mural to be located in a new science building at Texas Southern University. He took several more years to complete the work, which Houston art critic Mimi Crossley called “a mural that ranks with national treasures.”4 Web of Life depicted a marked change in Biggers’s style. In this mural, he moved from his earlier figurative,narrative approach—one that evoked the experience of the Negro in the Western world—to incorporate an Afrocentric point of view as well.In the early 1960s, however, Biggers again found that he was ahead in his thinking: at Fig...

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