A lv in L o v in g Untitled 1973

Mixed media 243.8 x 243.8

I46
 Mark Godfrey Notes On Black Abstraction

The question is how come we can’t be as black as we are and still be universal?
Arthur Jafa, 20161

A l L o v in g 's c risis

In December 1969, only months after arriving in New York from the
University o f Michigan, Al Loving became the first African American
artist to be given a solo show at the Whimey Museum of American Art.
He showed six shaped canvases that were compositions made up of hard-
edged intersecting bands of bright color and that resembled axonometric
projections of open cubic frames. Some were single boxes, others more
complex interlocking forms. The exhibition was well received and the
institution later acquired Rational Irrationalism, a larger work that those
in the show, for its permanent collection. The Whitney’s support for
Cmisraparar,' Black Artists in America,
Whitney Museum of American A rt New York, the artist continued and in May 1971, when Robert Doty mounted
flR Contemporary Black Artists in America, Loving was given pride of place.
Viewers stepped out of the elevator to be confronted by his multi-panel
work WYN...Time Trip 1 1971, a collection of eleven abutting hexagonal
units, each divided into different color planes, extending to over eight
meters wide.
Loving had penned a short text for the 1969 solo show, divided into
sections about Color, Form, Space, light, Time and Reality. The notes are
typical of the discourse around abstract painting at the end of the 1960s.
‘Colors are not always intuitive but are used intuitively. Multiplicities of
color to make one color feeling.’2Nowhere do we find Loving reflecting on
issues relating to ‘color* as they pertained to Black Americans at this time.3
He was concentrating on ways to make complex juxtapositions of different
bright hues and to conceive structures that seemed regular and closed but
that revealed nuance and openness with prolonged attention. For these
reasons, his geometric paintings of 1969-71 have recently been championed
by the art historian Darby English, who suggests that Loving was one of
a few ‘black modernists’ to deliberately resist calls to politicize their work,
but whose ambition was to ‘model a sociality that exceeded structure'.4
Loving’s forms, that is to say, implied and dreamed of a world not divided
into racial or other categories.

147
M .iik 6sXttn»y Not** on Black Ab*tf action

This is all well and good, hut however they arc theorized now, hack in
May 1971, Loving's geometric abstractions were attracting considerable
criticism within the Black American artistic community. By that year,
writers associated with the Black Arts Movement had already published
a series of statements insisting that the role and responsibility of Black
artists was to create empowering images for their people, and to show or
distribute these in places where Black Americans would sec them. Black
artists making abstraction were failing to understand this necessity; worse
still, they were was prostrating themselves before white institutions and
producing work according to established white aesthetic ideals. Loving
might have not read Larry Neal's 'The Black Arts Movement", Emory
Douglas's *On Revolutionary Art’, Jeff Donaldson’s *to in Search o f a
Nation’, or Margaret Burroughs’s ‘Tb Make a Painter Black',5 but he
could not ignore the responses to the Whitney's Contemporary Mack Artists
in America o f 1971 because his work, so visible at its entrance, was being
targeted. In direct response to the exhibition, for instance, the light artist
Tom Lloyd self-published a pamphlet titled "Black Art Notes’ deriding
"non-political "cooperative” Negro artists whose bowing movements are
readily spotted as talent’ . The pamphlet also gave a platform for Amiri
Baraka to argue that “‘Non-political” black artists do not actually exist in
the black world at all. They are within the tradition of white art, blackface or
not. And to try and force them on black people, as examples of what we arc
at our best, is nonsensical and ugly.’6
Loving’s career had seemed to be going very well at this time. Just a
few years out o f art school, he was receiving plenty of invitations to group
shows, was represented by William Zicrler, an Upper East Side commercial
gallery, and was receiving commissions and making sales. But these critical
responses sent him into turmoil. Loving developed what he later called a
"violent hatred of hard-edged painting’ . He began to feel that 'geometric
art conflicted with civil rights’.7A month after Contemporary Itlaclt Artists
in America, he was deeply impressed by another visit to the Whitney, where
he saw Abstract Design in American Quilts.* That summer, he also had
the opportunity to study Romare Bearden’s collages in the older artist’s
retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art - and the experience greatly
impacted upon him.9 One day he went into his studio and cut up his
canvases and began to make a completely new kind of work. The first show
of these was at Zierler’s in the summer o f 1972.10 Untitled 1973 is a great
example of what he produced: hanging loosely oft' a beam, with no stretcher
bars, strips of dyed canvas in muted browns, oranges, purples and yellows
are stitched together in criss-cross diagonal bands in the center of the

14 8
Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

work, in front o f dark brown irregular expanses o f leather, with loose cords
hanging from either side, and a sliver o f leopard skin dangling in between
(p.146). ‘T h e decision to move away from [a] rigid formalist view had to
do with whether there is a black art and what it looks like’, the artist later
explained.11
If Untitled was a response to the question o f ‘whether there is a black art’,
it would seem that for Loving in the early 1970s, ‘black art’ had to do with
improvisation, materiality and color (and not with ‘flatness’ or ‘opticality’,
two tenets o f Clem ent Greenberg’s theory o f ‘modernist painting’ in the
early 1960s and o f Loving’s late 1960s work).12 Loving also connected his
new approach to jazz and African religions: ‘Jazz musicians are people who
make a radical use o f conventional materials’,13 he would say, and here was
a ‘radical’ use o f painted canvas, and a rejection o f stretcher bars. Animism
is ‘the oldest African religion [and] part o f its tenets were that all objects in
nature had a soul and those souls had their own independent integrity’ .14
T h e non-hierarchical treatment o f objects and fabrics in Untided connects
to this thinking too.15
One o f the first published responses to Loving’s torn-canvas collages
dates from 1975, in the catalog o f David Driskell’s Amistad II show. Allan
Gordon, a Professor o f A rt History at Sacramento University, interviewed
himself for the publication:

I think that an African sensibility is manifest more by an attitude, by style,

by a way of perceiving the world than by a particular technique. I think there
are definite African elements in the work of Loving in the improvisatory
quality, the sense of transformation that occurs; the element of chance, the
sense of extemporizing, the deviation and arbitrariness with the hanging
construction... for example.16

Given the attacks on his geometric paintings, one imagines that this
new tone in the writing on Loving’s work would have been encouraging.
He soon began to call these collage works Self-Portraits.
T his story o f Loving’s institutional success, ensuing crisis and resilient
turnaround serves as an introduction to the study o f Black abstraction in
the period covered by Soul o f a Nation for several reasons. First, it show’s
that the dream o f integration into institutions such as the Whitney could
quickly become a nightmare. Second, it indicates that pamphlets and
journal articles by Black artists and writers had a direct impact on studio
practice. Third, it reminds us that there were different kinds o f abstraction
even in a single artist’s output and that different bodies o f work need to

149
Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

be considered in their specificities. When Irvin g began to 'hate' hi* own

work, he did not turn away from abstraction - as had Romarc Bearden, for
instance, when he began in 1963 to create collages of black figure*. Instead
(and with Bearden’s formal innovation very much in mind) Loving collaged
his canvases to create what he saw as a Black abstraction. In front of a work
like Untitled, it becomes impossible to maintain a binary of politici/.cd legible
Black art, as supported by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, and formalist
abstraction, as championed by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.
Instead, there is a third way: a Black abstraction. And this third way was
adopted not just by Loving, but by others before him, around him, and after
him too - and as we shall see, it meant different things to different artists.

R a c is m a n d R e sista n c e :
N o rm a n L e w is 's ‘B la c k and W h ite ' p a in tin g s

Although Loving cites Bearden as a key figure in his own development of

collaged paintings, the towering artist for most o f Loving's contemporaries
who worked with abstraction was Norman Lewis, who like Bearden had
been involved with the Spiral group between 1963 and 1965. (Loving would
have known Lewis, o f course, and served on the ‘Artistic Committee’ of
the Cinque Gallery, set up by Bearden and Lewis with Ernest Crichlow in
1969.) Lewis was a part o f the abstract expressionist generation and had
attended meetings o f ‘The Subjects o f the Artists School’ alongside Mark
Rothko, Robert Motherwell and others from 1949. By the mid-1960s, he
had been painting abstractions for almost twenty-five years. Lewis had
always found ways to evoke his environment and to celebrate his cultural
passions in his abstract paintings, whether in works such as Tenement 1948
and Harlem Courtyard 1954, which suggest the cramped yet energetic
conditions o f the neighborhood, or in Jazz Musicians 1948, where short
green and red diagonals conjure the fast rhythms o f a bebop band. Yet
Lewis was loath to emphasize these allusions above formal pursuits, and
in a statement around the Spiral show, insisted that ‘Political and social
aspects should not be the primary concern; aesthetic ideas should have
preference.’17 In a few crucial works made during the years o f the Civil
Rights Movement, however, Lewis felt compelled to connect the ‘aesthetic
ideas’ o f black and white Abstract Expressionist painting to the troubled
conditions o f Black life in America.
Before discussing Lewis’s works in black and white such as America the
Beautiful i960 and Processional 1965, it should be noted that painting in

150
 1

N o r m a n L e w is Am erica the Beautiful 1960

O il paint on canvas 127 x 162.6

15 1
 Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

Norman Lewis Processional 1965 these colors had been seen as a testing ground for the NewYork School
O il pamt on canvas 97.5 x 164.4 artists for many years. In 1948, reviewing a D e Kooning show at the Egan
Gallery, Greenberg had written that D e Kooning,

along with Gorky, Gottlieb, Pollock, and several other contemporaries,

has refined himself down to black in an effort to change the composition
and design of post-cubist painting and introduce more open forms ...
By excluding the full range of color, and concentrating on black and white,
the most ambitious members o f this generation hope to solve the problems
involved.18

Two years later, Robert Motherwell organized an exhibition called Black

or White at the Kootz Gallery, and in that catalog described his interest in
the chemistry o f black and white paint, noting that ‘ivory black is made
from charred bones’ .19T h e following year, 1951, M orris Louis painted

15 2
N o to on Black Abstraction

his series Charred Journals^ which he taw as memorials to the Nazi book
burnings,*0but this was a rare moment of abstract expressionist black and
white painting alluding to historical disaster. Certainly none of the white
painters seem to have connected black and white painting to matters of race
in America. Lewis's innovation was to take hold of the formal language of
abstract expressionist black and white painting and force it to confront the
racism he knew so well, and the resistance in which he participated.
America the Beautiful is one of the first o f the black and white paintings.
Lewis drew on his facility, honed since the early 1950s, to populate a
ground with a dense circle of shapes that could appear both as a series
of abstract forms and as a gathering of people. In America the Beautiful,
however, it is more accurate to say that these two readings happen in
sequence: first the painting is read as a striking composition with dramatic
contrasts of light and dark, jagged white shapes and large black expanses,
and then one notices the crosses and the triangular peaks. This does not
turn the painting into an illustration of a KKK ceremony, but once one
registers the Klansmen, the first reading becomes untenable. America the
Beautiful is so effective because of this sequence: the fact that one does not
immediately notice the KKK mirrors the blindness towards it that persisted
in parts of America in the 1960s. When noticed, the illusion to a ‘Beautiful’
America cannot be sustained. Lewis's title plays an important part in the
experience of the painting, and is an early example of the kind of ‘signifyin’
and word play that would later be associated with David Hammons, among
others. Notably, Hammons also used this title for a body print of 1968,
where there is a related irony of a Black American being protected by the
American flag.
In the years after he made America the Beautiful, Lewis's paintings grew
in scale and his confidence with color developed accordingly, especially
in works such as the golden Carnivale del Sol 1962 or the study in pinks
and purples, Carnivale I I 1962. But he was prepared to renounce the
pleasures of color when it came to addressing the efforts of the Civil Rights
campaigns. Lewis had participated in the 1963 March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom, and in the wake of the Selma Marches of March
1965, as his contribution for the Spiral show o f May that year, he painted
Processional. The work has been called a ‘tribute' to those events,*1 but,
like America the Beautiful, it cannot be reduced to an image. ‘I am not
interested in an illustrative statement that merely mirrors some o f the
social conditions, but in my work I am for something o f deeper artistic and
philosophic content', Lewis said.** Processional slowly conveys the energy of
the march through its forms. Lewis created a central widening band across

153
R o y D e C arava Crushed can 1961
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 27.9 x 35.6

154
Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

a black ground, within which there is a series of white strokes, growing

in density from left to right as the band expands. The composition thus
evokes the way in which the Selma marches grew in length and number,
and bears resemblance to one of Moneta Sleet, Jr’s photographs o f the
marchers seen from a distance (p.153).23 Lewis’s strokes in some places
suggest striding legs and raised arms, and rounded forms read as heads, but
once one sees these forms as a procession, one has to reckon with the fact
that Lewis captures the ‘Negro* crowd (this being the term Lewis would
have used at the time) with white paint. Very importantly, he refrained
from using black paint to evoke skin pigment: this would have been too
obvious, too symbolic, too overt for him. But there is a kind of symbolism
to ProcessionaTs widening white band. Recalling a beam of light crossing a
darkened cinema, the shape associates the procession with enlightenment
and increasing visibility; the figures are no longer invisible men.The
darkness in these works is American racism, and it is one (Lewis hopes)
on which the beam/procession of marchers will soon shine.

W ise Light: R o y D e C a ra v a

Darkness plays a very different role in the photographs of Roy DeCarava,

a friend of Norman Lewis who made a beautiful photographic portrait
of the painter in 1969. The two knew each other in the early 1960s and it
is tempting to imagine that they traveled to Washington together - this is
where DeCarava made one of his most famous images, Mississippifreedom
marcher, Washington, D.C. 1963 (p.21). In the words ofTeju Cole, the picture
shows ‘a young woman whose face is at once relaxed and intense. She is
apparently in bright sunshine, but both her face and the rest o f the picture
give off a feeling of modulated darkness; we can see her beautiful features,
but they are underlit somehow.’24 Rather than producing documents of
thousands o f marchers, DeCarava created a monument to the intensity
o f feeling expressed by one of its participants. Given such images, it
might seem perverse to use abstraction as a framework for thinking about
some o f DeCarava’s achievements, but the idea o f abstraction helps us to
understand his contribution in several ways.
DeCarava often referred to abstract paintings. He photographed a
couple in the Museum o f Modern Art in 1950 looking at a wall o f them,
and stood behind Bearden in his studio the next year to photograph him
working on an abstraction. From time to time, he created photographs
recalling abstract expressionist canvases, for example, Crushed can 1961.

155
R o y D e C arava Subway ceiling, New York 1964
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 27.9 x 35.6

156
R o y D e C arava Platform and light 1960
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 35.6 x 27.9

157
 Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

R o y D e C a ra v a
Trash basket flowers c.1958
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
27-9 * 35.6
DeCarava let the can fill the entire photographic frame, so that the actual
size o f the object became irrelevant, enabling the composition to assume
a monumental scale. The image is almost unrecognizable as a can, and
instead the planes and sharp angles o f the twisted metal recall the white
patches and frenetic black lines o f De Kooning’s Attic 1949. Trash basket,
flowers c.1958, is another such example: as with the can, the basket fills
the frame, and the crumpled papers within it recall gestural brushstrokes.
DeCarava’s approach recalls Aaron Siskind’s photographs o f walls, and
Henry Callahan’s pictures of weeds and grasses, and indeed DeCarava
showed Callahan’s work at the gallery he ran in the mid-1950s, but the
main difference in such abstractions is that whereas Siskind and Callahan
(like D e Kooning) made use of dramatic contrasts o f black and white,
DeCarava’s photographs deployed the full tonal range of grays.
Subway ceiling, NewYork is another kind o f abstraction: a study o f
light and shadow playing across an architectural feature that many would
overlook - the bars and recesses in a ceiling o f the underground (p.156).
Many o f DeCarava’s most famous photographs were made on the subway,
including abstractions that came about through a different photographic
procedure, ‘abstracting’ the image by throwing everything out o f focus.
When he took Platform and light DeCarava pulled in the focus so the lights
along the platform edge become a tube o f brightness bisecting the image,
separating the darkened blur above the tracks on the left and the softer
grays of the platform (p.157). For sure, in this image, as in many others,
DeCarava enjoyed composing with soft lines and shapes and printing to
emphasize grain, but it could also be said that he captured the experience
of subway stations, imagining what it might be like to see them from the
point o f view of the people he photographed, such as the exhausted worker
in Man coming up subway stairs 1952, or the drunk he captured in Man
lying down, subway steps 1965. Perhaps DeCarava’s strangest unfocused
abstraction is Face out offocus from i960, where human features almost
dissolve into photographic grain; the body is made strange as all markers o f
class, gender and race are lost.
Studies o f everyday objects made unrecognizable through close
cropping; scenes made unfamiliar through un-focusing: to call these two
groups of images ‘abstract’ is hardly controversial. A less obvious and more
interesting way to think about abstraction in DeCarava’s work is to attend
to pictures o f the built environment that are as much depictions o f his
neighborhood as they are formal compositions in rich tones o f blackness.
As Cole has written, DeCarava’s approach was technically difficult and
unusual in the history of photography: ‘Instead o f trying to brighten

159
 Mark Godfrey Notts on Black Abstraction

blackness, [DeCarava] went against expectation and darkened it further.

What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full o f wise light which,
with patient seeing, can open out into glories.’25
A good example of a photograph o f DeCarava’s environment is Across
the street, night, New York 1978, a frontal view o f a residential building in
Brooklyn with most o f the street and sky cropped out, so that the image
becomes a grid o f walls, windows, shutters and stairways, not too distant
from the grids o f abstract paintings. As in many o f his works, the darkness
o f the print slows down the act o f viewing, as one has to look for a while at
the image to take in and enjoy its different tones, not unlike when seeing a
black painting by Ad Reinhardt. Across the street, night, NewYork contrasts
with widely published photographs o f African American neighborhoods
such as Aaron Siskind’s Facade, Unoccupied Building, Harlem 1937, where
the overall tone is much lighter; and then-recent photographs taken
inside buildings such as Gordon Parks *s study o f the Fontenelle family,
published in Life in March 1968, with dramatic and pitiful high-contrast
depictions o f poverty. Photographing his environment the way he did,
DeCarava rendered architecture as near-abstract planes o f luxurious
grays and velvety blacks. As Kellie Jones has written, this ‘photographic
palette has had important metaphoric implications’ :26 these are that
within this environment there was a Black community o f equal richness.
As early as 1969, it was being claimed by James Hinton that DeCarava
R o y D eCarava
was ‘the first to devote serious attention to the black aesthetic as it relates
Shade cord and window 1961
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper to photography’.271 am arguing that this aesthetic was abstract in that
35.6 x 27.9 DeCarava’s masterful compositions with darkness functioned less as
pictures than as poetic intimations o f Black life. O r as Jim Alinder put
it, ‘His photographs have an interpretation o f a surface reality and an
abstraction o f that reality onto a symbolic level.’28
Black abstraction works in yet another way in DeCarava’s corpus. While
he was justly celebrated for his images o f famous figures from Malcolm X
to John Coltrane, alongside these portraits were many photographs of
everyday people, and what becomes apparent looking at these is how often
DeCarava photographed them from behind or from the side, as in Boy in
print shirt 1978; Couple walking 1979; B ill and son, NewYork 1962 - all o f
which show people’s backs (pp.162,163,165); or the Man in window, New
York 1978, who is shown at some distance framed within a window (p.164).
While he was taking these photographs, William Eggleston, Diane Arbus
and Garry Winogrand were being feted for the sharpness o f their portraits:
indeed, it is impossible to call to mind their work without remembering
the idiosyncratic facial expressions o f the subjects. So why did DeCarava

160
Roy D eCarava A crou tht ttrnt, night, N iw York 1978
Photograph, golatln silver print on papar 27J x 96.6

l6 l
R o y D e C a ra va Boy in print shirt 1978
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 27.9 x 35.6

162
R o y D e C a r a v a Couple walking 1979
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 27.9
 Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

photograph his subjects from behind? Arguably his intention was to eschew
character studies and instead to photograph abstract concepts: community,
resilience, family love and tenderness, romance, dignity, elegance. These
images constitute another kind o f Black abstraction.

E x p e rim e n ta tio n a n d A llu s io n :

C la rk , E d w a rd s , G illia m , O verstree t, Pindell, W hitten, W illia m s

R . DeCarava In 1969, the year o f his Whitney show, A 1 Loving was also part o f an
e ison. New York 1962
exhibition called 5+1 at a university gallery outside New York. He was
Z c,graph, gelatin silver print on paper
375x 35.6 joined b y Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Jack Whitten, William
T . Williams, and the non-American ‘+1*, Frank Bowling, who had come to
N ew York from London after growing up in what was until 1966, British
Guiana. T h e show followed on the heels o f X to the 4th Power at the newly
founded Studio Museum in Harlem, where Williams and Edwards showed
alongside Sam Gilliam. This loose grouping o f abstract artists included
Joe Overstreet (who also showed at the Studio Museum in 1969) and
Howardena Pindell. Ed Clark was a little older but showed with Gilliam,
Johnson, Loving and Williams in The DeLuxe Show in Houston in 1971.
We can think o f these artists not just as a community of colleagues (and
occasional close friends), but as a generational group who shared a similar
situation. T h ey all respected and benefited from the achievements o f older
figures such as Lewis and Bearden; they wanted their work to be part o f a
discussion o f modernist art in America alongside that o f their peers such
as Robert Ryman, Marcia Hafif and Brice Marden; they all faced censure
from Black nationalists accusing them o f selling out or adopting a white
aesthetic (as discussed earlier), and they all insisted that a ‘black sensibility*
(Whitten’s term) ran through their work (Sam Gilliam: ‘Figurative art
doesn’t represent blackness any more than a non-narrative media-oriented
kind o f painting, like what I do’29). Tom U oyd, who made sculptures
with flashing lights (p.78) and who was given the first show at the Studio
Museum, was a kind o f outlier, in that he was overtly drawn to the politics
o f Black nationalism. Hoping for a ‘separate Black community’, Lloyd
claimed that he was creating a ‘Black art’ that would have special appeal to
Black viewers,30but he never explained exactly what this meant in relation
to his light sculptures. T he other artists were never militant in this way, and
wanted to address all kinds o f audiences.
From time to time as they exhibited, cases were put forward for the
relation o f their work to identity: Irving Sandler, reviewing Williams’s

165
 Mark Godfrey
Melvin Edwards looking at Curtain (for
William and Peter), installed in the 5+7
exhibition, Stony Brook University, New York
1969
Notes on Black Abstraction
paintings, likened the slanting forms to the architecture o f an ‘urban
ghetto environment’ even though Williams, whose studio was downtown,
had never lived in Harlem or the Bronx.31 Avoiding such problematic
projections, there are still arguments that can be made about a Black
abstraction.
First, we might think about the experimentation evident in their work,
not just as an expression o f what it meant to seek and find freedom in the
wake o f the Civil Rights Movement, but as a kind o f Black aesthetic.32
Many o f these artists took the conventions o f painting and loosened them,
committed to formal and material improvisation. As seen already, Loving
cut up canvases and collaged them together. In Carousel Change 1970,
Gilliam dyed canvas with vivid colors and, abandoning stretcher bars
completely, bunched it at five points from which it hung like drapes (pp.4-
5).T he hanging points could be changed from one installation to the next
so that the overall breadth o f the piece as well as the way it drooped could
be improvised in accordance with what looked best in each room. Clark
created Yenom (#9) 1970 on a large oval surface and applied the paint with
an everyday broom while the canvas was on the floor (p.86). In this and
other paintings, he accepted broom hairs and sometimes studio dirt, as well
as the occasional footprint, to be part o f the surface as well as the strands of
color. Whitten began to use rubber and then metal squeegees that he called
‘developers* to create paintings such as A sa’s Palace 1973, trailing them
across the surface to reveal lower levels o f paint and sometimes to record
the traces of objects left underneath the canvas (p.145). Having at the
beginning o f the decade painted through hole-punched stencils to produce
atmospheric yet flat surfaces that teemed with small dots, in the mid-1970s
Pindell began to cut up the canvas and sew it back together in a grid, and
then to embed thousands o f hole-punched dots in the surface along with
glitter and paint to create a more haptic work (Untitled 1978; p.132). Pindell
saw this materiality as typical of a Black aesthetic. ‘Afro-American artists
are very often involved in the extended surface’, she said.
‘I think of Sam Gilliam. We get involved in crossover surfaces into sculpture-
painting, painting-sculpture ... A very rich surface empowers [the works].
I find that often Afro-American art has this aspect.’33
William T. Williams did not move away from the stretched flat canvas
in this way, but believed that his compositions formally expressed his
situation. Most o f his works made during 1968-74 feature diamond­
like forms pushing against the rectangular perimeter o f the canvas. This
remained the case even when Williams began to make exquisitely subtle
paintings in very similar tonalities by altering the direction o f feathered
166
M elvin Edw ards Curtain (for William and Pater) 1968
Barbed wire and chain, dimensions variable

167
W illia m T. W il l ia m s N u Nile 1973
A c ry lic paint on c a n v a s 213.4 x 152.4

168
 Mark Godfray
Sam Gilliam
Three Panels for Mr. Robeson 1975
Installation view of the 34th Biennial
Exhibition of Contemporary American
Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC, 1975
Notes on Black Abstraction
brush strokes in different diagonal sections, such as Nu N ile 1973.
Williams’s diamond-like compositions implied resistance to all kinds o f
confinement (the disenfranchisement experienced by Black Americans, but
equally the confinement o f a young Black abstract painter unfairly expected
to represent an ‘urban ghetto environment*). Williams said he ‘wanted a
picture that was confrontational’,34and he titled one o f his greatest works
Trane 1969 (p.79).This reference to the saxophonist John Coltrane takes us
to another argument about Black abstraction. As he faced criticism from
friends that there was no history o f abstraction in Black culture, Williams
retorted that ‘Jazz is the most abstract o f all music.’ This is unsurprising:
jazz musicians had been using the term ‘abstract* - Oliver Nelson called
his 1961 album The Blues and the Abstract Truth and Baraka in an article
from 1963 described Coltrane through the metaphor o f a painter.33Yet it
is a strange anomaly o f this time that while Black Arts Movement writers
celebrated Coltrane, they had almost no words for abstraction in visual
art. Nonetheless, Whitten had spoken to the saxophonist after watching
several concerts and later saw his own achievement o f bringing waves of
light out o f the surface of a painted canvas as akin to the ‘waves o f sound*
in Trane’s music.36 M ary Schmidt Campbell, the third Director o f the
Studio Museum, claimed that ‘Gilliams’s cascades o f color are not unlike
Coltrane’s sheets o f sound’37 and Edwards devoted a suite o f drawings to
him. These artists may well have sensed that Coltrane’s ability to take apart
the conventions o f melody and rhythm found a parallel in their own interest
in abandoning stretcher bars, flat surfaces and brushes. To put it another
way, what Coltrane did to ‘M y Favorite Things’ and ‘Chim Chim Cheree’
equals what Gilliam and Loving did to Morris Louis and Frank Stella.
Another parallel with Coltrane is economic: just as Coltrane’s extended
solos in the last three years o f his life upset the commercial structures o f the
jazz club (owners used to selling drinks between short songs and sets were
flummoxed by free jazz), so Gilliam’s installations, such as Three Panels for
Mr. Robeson 1975, could not be sold - and were destroyed after exhibition.
Perhaps with Norman Lewis’s example in mind, these artists saw no
problem with the idea that abstract work could be dedicated to a cultural
figures like Robeson or could allude to the troubled politics o f the period.
O f course, in making such allusions, Black artists were not alone. Stella,
who around 1969 was the most institutionally celebrated young artist in
N ew York, had titled some o f his 1959 ‘Black Paintings’ after N azi slogans.
But at this moment, modernist critics did not want to explore what Stella’s
allusions could amount to because they were very reluctant to address
content in abstraction beyond form. In trying times, Black artists and critics
 se w *

S a m Gilliam April4 1969

Acrylic paint on canvas 279.4 x 456.6

170
J a c k W hitten Homage to Malcolm
Acrylic paint on canvas 255.3 x 303.5
 Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

were not so reticent. There are many examples o f complex references to

political leaders and assassinations, but alongside these invocations, Black
abstraction of this moment was also characterized by a kind o f resilience.
Gilliam’s April 4, made in 1969 to honor the anniversary o f Martin Luther
King’s assassination, has red circles suggestive o f gunshots and blood, but
these are set in a beguiling stained purple held (p.170). Whitten had also
made a series o f works in dedication to King, characterized by polychromy.
But with Homage to Malcolm 1970, he created a near-black monochrome,
using an afro-comb to rake across its surface, revealing slight hints o f red
and green (p.171).The mournful palette is tempered by the imposing
strength of the triangular form that recalls the pyramids Malcolm X had
visited on one o f his trips to Africa in 1964.
Sorrow is married in such works to a kind o f resistant beauty; in others,
Joe Overstreet
Strange Fruit 1965
the acknowledgment of historical oppression goes hand in hand with a
Oil paint on canvas 116.8 x 101.6 celebration of present-day community. In the mid-1960s, Joe Overstreet
painted Strange Fruity a relatively conventional and definitely sombre
gestural painting o f a lynching on a stretched rectangular canvas. By 1970,
materially and chromatically, Overstreet was working in a more radical way,
using rope and grommets to hoist up brightly hued canvases in the center
of the gallery, and he saw this arrangement as reminiscent o f lynchings.
The canvases were divided into grids and though it was impossible to see
them once they were strung up, among the patches o f color there were also
outlines o f strong bodies in gestures o f celebration rather than submission.
Overstreet’s titles indicated a movement away from oppression: We Came
From There to Get Here, and For Happiness. A similar dynamic operated in
Melvin Edwards’s Curtain (for William and Peter) 1969, made from strands
o f barbed wire joined by chains (p.167). T h e work was first presented in
S+ i and subsequently in Edwards’s solo show in the lobby gallery at the
Whitney in 1970. David Hammons saw it there and later said it was ‘the
first abstract piece o f art that I saw that had cultural value in it for Black
people’.38 He was probably alluding to the way in which Edwards used
materials connected to incarceration and slavery, but surely he also admired
the delicacy and grace o f the curtain form. Edwards had titled it in honor of
the painters with whom he shared a studio - William T. Williams and Peter
Bradley - wanting this, like his other barbed-wire sculptures, which were
named after Jayne Cortez’s poems, to pay homage to the community o f
Black artists who supported and inspired his work.

Joe Overstreet We Came from There to Get

Here, laid flat before installation

172
J o e O ve rstre e t Mandate 1970, We Cam e from There to Get Here 1970;
For H appiness 1970 (installation view, left to right)
Acrylic paint on canvas and rope 237 x 228; 146 x 148; 228 x 238

173
Frank B o w lin g Middle Passage 1970
Oil paint on canvas 310.5 x 310.5

174
Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

R e -ro u tin g s : F ra n k B o w lin g

In 1971, Frank Bowling wrote the earliest sustained review o f Edwards’s

barbed-wire works.39A t the time, Bowling was publishing a number of
articles defending the work o f Overstreet, Williams, Whitten and Loving
and so on against the positions o f figures including Dana C . Chandler,
Jr and Benny Andrews, who were calling for a legible and activist Black
art. Bowling did not use the term ‘abstraction*, but instead located non-
figurative work in a Black aesthetic tradition that involved the ability ‘time
and time again, despite inflicted degradations, to rearrange found things,
redirecting the “ things** o f whatever environments in which Blacks are
thrown, placed, or trapped.*40 In the review o f Edwards, predicting the
language o f Henry Louis Gates, Jr*s classic study The Signifying Monkey
(1988), he introduced the term ‘signify*:41 an artist could make a work
that creates two meanings at once, or which twists (Bowling uses the term
‘reroute*) a dominant meaning to create a subversive one. This applied
to Edwards, in so far as he took the formal language o f Eva Hesse’s
and Richard Serra’s postminimalist sculpture and rerouted it so that it
contained allusions to ‘agony*. His work involved ‘signifying* in the sense
that while to some viewers the work may seem to be simply a delicate
sculpture, others would see how he was introducing certain references into
an art museum where they would seldom be found.
These ideas o f rerouting and signifying are highly relevant to Bowling’s
own work o f the time. Middle Passage 1970 was first shown in Some
American History, an exhibition curated by Larry Rivers for the Menil
Foundation at Rice University in 1971; the project centered on Rivers’s
large sculpture A Slave Ship with Slaves 1970, and included a handful o f
works by younger Black artists. At the left center o f Middle Passage, a white
monochrome rectangle is flanked by a thin strip with descending bands o f
red, white and blue recalling color charts or a slice o f a Dutch flag. Bowling
has said that he was thinking about Piet Mondrian here, and the white
monochrome suggests Kazimir Malevich too. He rerouted this tradition o f
European abstraction, or rather shunted it to one side, exchanging white
and the primaries for luminous and unruly bands o f orange, yellow, red
and green - a tropical color scheme where, without geometric borders,
hues bleed together.42Within these zones appear silkscreened images o f
Bowling’s family, contours o f Latin America, stenciled lettering spelling
out Guyana’s newly independent name, and an image o f the shop his
mother ran. Bowling was also trying to reroute the expectations that his title
‘M iddle Passage’ created - expectations that were more literally fulfilled by

175
F ra n k B o w lin g Texas Louise 1971
A c ry lic paint on ca n va s 282 x 665

176
M.nk Gv\Hmy N o t e s o n B la c k A b s t r a c t io n

Rivers'S works, Instead o f shucklcd slaves, Howling populated the work with
strong characters and with Black enterprise.'llus strategy relates to the works
I have discussed by Edwards and Overstreet in that a history o f oppression
is acknowledged while the work becomes a monument to the strength o f
those whose ancestors lived through M iddle Passage and survived.
Tkxas Louise comes from Bowling's next major series o f ‘M ap Paintings’
(pp.176-7), and was included in his 1971 show at the Whitney, held in the
same lobby gallery as Loving’s in 1969 and Edwards’s in 1970. In this series
Bowling rerouted the conventions o f color-field abstraction by pouring
waves o f acrylic around stencils that left ghostly outlines o f continents.
H e also upset the conventions o f cartography, since the continents were
enveloped in liquid color. Yet these works were also ‘signifying* insofar
as they also contained a message directed at particular groups within
Black America at the time romanticizing Africa. Bowling did not take this
position. Although Europe and Asia often disappear in his map paintings,
so, sometimes, does Africa. Mostly the faint outlines o f all the continents
dissolve into watery fields o f intense color. Islands, rivers and deltas appear
on the canvases that are the outcome o f random passages o f paint - liquid
geographies not determined by the stencils. T h e M ap Paintings evoke
what is possible when fixed geographies, and the attachments to them,
melt. There is loss and longing in displacement, but an excitement that
arises when the nation-state - or indeed mother continent - as a point o f
identification falls away. Bowling’s M ap Paintings announce a moment
when constant exile becomes a new way o f belonging to the world.**

T o te m s and S p irit C a tc h e rs: N o a h P u rif o y a n d B e t y e S a a r

Like Bowling and Loving, the Los Angeles artist N oah Purifoy had been
included in the Whitney's Contemporary Black Artists in America in 1971, and
he returned to N ew York the following year for Eleven Artists from California
at the Studio Museum in Harlem, an exhibition co-organized by Dale and
Alonzo Davis o f the Brockman Gallery, where Purifoy, John Outterbridge,
David Hammons and Tim othy Washington all showed. A t fifty-five (that is,
belonging to the generation o f Norman Lewis and Roy DeCarava), Purifoy
was the elder statesman o f the Brockman group and was tasked with
penning the main pamphlet text. Outlining his position, he wrote:
‘T h e symbols o f west coast Black art stands in direct opposition to art
for art sake [sic]. It insists that if art is not for the sake o f something it is
not art.’4*We can’t know if Purifoy had in his targets the experimental

178
N o a h P u r if o y Watts R io t 1966
M ixed media 154.9 x 116.8

179
Mark Godfrey Notes on Black Abstraction

painting practices I have described when h e w rote about art for art’s sake,
but what we can say is that at this tim e he was totally unconcerned with
taking painting apart, and was instead developing another kind o f Black
abstraction that was very different in m ateriality and in purpose.
Purifoy had been based in L os Angeles since 1950 and after a career
as a designer, betw een 1964 and 1966 ran the Watts Towers A rts Center,
protecting the landm ark built by the Italian im m igrant Sim on Rodia; this
was a work that w ould have a m onum ental im pact on him and his friends.
In 1965, sparked by an incident o f police discrim ination, six days o f riots
broke out jh Watts resulting in thirty-four deaths and widespread damage
to shops and other buildings. A s Yael Lipschutz has argued, Purifoy saw’ the
Watts rebellion not just as an insurrection against discrimination but also
as a rejection o f materialism.45 In burning and looting, protesters laid bare
the false promise that, by buying new things, B lack Am ericans could take
part in a postwar society as equal A m erican citizen-consum ers. It was with
this understanding o f the Rebellion that Purifoy’s art practice began: he
started to gather the debris o f form er consum ables and create a new use for
them in abstract assemblage sculptures. T h ese were soon gathered for an
exhibition, 66 Signs o f Neon, w hich toured various venues in Am erica and
Europe from 1966. Purifoy saw his works as functional: they would change
the way people related to products, to their environment and to each other.
Materialism would be replaced b y a kind o f creativity:

T h e ultimate purpose o f this effort, as we conceived it then, w’as to

demonstrate to the community ofWatts, to Los Angeles, and to the wrorid
at large, that education through creativity is the only w’ay left for a person
to find himself in this materialistic world ... A rt o f itself is o f little or no
value if in its relatedness it does not effect change.46

It is worth noting that Purifoy’s ambitions for art to ‘effect change*

paralleled the aspirations o f other B lack artists w ho felt this could only be
done through legible imagery. Purifoy’s principles were consistent, but we
should still attend to the different tenors o f different works. Watts Riot 1965,
a relief assembled from panels o f charred w ood and other street-found
detritus, was as close as Purifoy cam e to m aking a painting (p.179): in the
tradition o f Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, he m ight have added bright
orange brushwork and different paint drips at its edges. Both abstract and
real, with its central charred area, the work seems sombre. A s has been
suggested, Purifoy would have been m ourning the victims o f violence, but
equally the loss (after the Watts rebellion) o f his own conviction that being

180
 M a rk G o d fre y
N oa h Purifoy w ith Totem , s t a n d i n g n e a r t h e
W a tts Towers, c.19 66-6
N oah P u rifo y w ith t h e c o m p le t e Totem ,
C h ica g o S u n - Tim es, T u e sd a y m a g a z in e c o ve r,
A u g u s t 1968
Notes on Black Abstraction
a designer of elegant furniture was a worthy life pursuit,*7 Totem 1966-8
(which has lost a central section since it was made; p.182) is a joyous
contrast to Watts Riot, and Purifoy posed with it playfully, using the Watts
Towers as a backdrop. Totem connects to his statements in the sense that it
is a clear example o f how an artist put everyday objects, either whole or in
parts, to new creative uses, in such a clear way that others might be inspired
to do the same.
Purifoy appears to have said little about the way he referred in these
abstract assemblages to African traditions. T he thin wooden sticks poking
out o f the crown o f the totem recall nails driven into Nkisi power figures
from Kongo cultures; the Untitled 1970 work shown at the Whitney
resembles Ashanti Akuaba or fertility figures (p.34), and Zulu 4, also from
this time, evokes Zulu shields. Purifoy’s interest in African traditions was
shared by many o f the artists discussed so far: in 1969, Bowling defined
one o f the virtues o f ‘Black art* as ‘an awareness o f the solid canons of
traditional African artistic expression and thought’,4* and in 1971, in ‘Notes
on Black A rt’, Edwards described what he called the ‘survivals’ from Africa
that informed all areas o f contemporary African American culture.’**
Purifoy was particularly explicit in his references, but his real purpose does
not seem to have been to evoke particular traditions in their specificity
because o f an intensely felt connection to them; indeed, his eclecticism
reflects the fact that African Americans had no way o f knowing which part
o f Africa their ancestors had come from. Rather (to use Bowling’s word)
it was his aim to reroute the functions o f modern American consumables
- pots and sneakers in Zulu, wooden spoons in Untitled, and in Totem,
tambourines, pipes, shoe-stretchers and trolley wheels - and at the same
time, to evoke an ideal Africa as a place where objects could be created,
used and enjoyed outside o f the logic of capitalism.
It is hard to say whether Purifoy was interested in the ritualistic function
o f the African objects to which he referred - for instance, in the belief that
by driving nails into Nkisi, the user could release spirits to protect the
community against threats - nor whether he was aware o f Robert Farris
Thompson’s 1969 article about African art traditions being carried over
the Middle Passage.50 However, this idea o f the artwork being a container
o f powerful spirits or a tool to deflect evil ones does inform some Black
abstraction o f the time, notably Spirit Catcher, a work produced by another
Los Angelean, Betye Saar (p.183). By the time she made this in 1977,
Saar had been celebrated for three bodies o f work: small assemblages that
incorporated derogatory objects and violent imagery to decry racism, such
as The Liberation o fAunt Jemima 1972 (p.112); boxes and cabinets including
181
B e ty e S a a r Spirit Catcher 1977 x 45.7 X 45.7
mirror, bones, feathers, rope and shells 114.3
Rattan, wood, leather, acrylic paint,

I8 3
Mark Godfrey N otes on Black Abstraction

old photographs and m em entos, form ally inspired b y Joseph Cornell;

and sculptures com ing out o f her interests in m ysticism . T h e latter works
form ed the basis o f an installation at C alifornia State U niversity in
1973 and m ost pieces incorporated celestial im agery as w ell as animal
faces and eyes.
Saar m ade Spirit Catcher after returning from h er first visit to Africa in
1977 and it was both the sum m ation and the m ost abstract o f these works.
It reveals her fascination w ith T ib etan spirit traps, N igerian materials
and the structures o f R odia’s Watts Tow ers, and is testam ent to her wish
to incorporate A frican elem ents alongside evocations o f other traditions.
A s she explained: ‘From m y involvem ent w ith the b lack m ovem ent I
moved into a concern w ith b lack history go in g b ack to A frica and other
darker civilizations such as E gypt or O ceania. I w as interested in the kinds
o f mystical things that are part o f non-E uropean religion o r culture.*51
Spirit Catcher is m ade from wooden poles, w oven reeds, a circular mirror,
feathers, bones, teeth and bird skulls, bu t m ost o f these objects are hand
painted with d ot patterns so that they are n ot im m ediately recognizable as
individual items and are integrated into the abstract structure as a whole.
T h e construction is open and transparent, b u t at its heart there is a core
that cannot be seen into.
Was Spirit Catcher an escape into the otherworldly, a total departure
from the politics o f The Liberation o f A u n t Jem im a} O r, taking its cue
from African and other non-European cultures, w as the glinting mirror
em bedded in its crown m eant to deflect the bad spirits o f racist oppression,
and its secret cham ber created to harness pow erful spirits that could be
released to com bat them? In 1975, Saar was interview ed abou t her work,
and explained that it was her tactics, b u t n ot her aim s, that had changed. ‘In
m y previous work*, she said:

my message was very clear, especially when I used the Black derogatory
images. Now my messages are more subtle. T here is more secretiveness
about them because I think this represents the way Black people feel about
the movement today. T h ey’ve got over the violent part and have become
more introspective and are doing more thinking and plotting. Blacks are
dealing with their enemy on a secret level. T h e political messages are still in
my work, but one has to think harder to find them.52

T hese words give yet another sense o f w hat B lack abstraction could be.

18 4

Bruce Talamon
Divid Hammons making body prints,
Slauson Avenue studio, Los Angeles 1974
C Bruce W.Talamon 1977 A ll rights
reserved
Notes on Black Abstraction
F lig h t F a n t a s ie s : D a v id H a m m o n s
In 1975, L inda G oo d e Bryant invited D avid Ham m ons to show at Just
A bove M idtow n, her new gallery in N ew York, hoping to give him a
platform to display his body prints. M ade b y greasing up bodies and
pressing them onto paper before coating the paper with pigment, some i
had referenced works b y Pieter Breughel and G ustav Klim t; others dealt
w ith the politics o f the Black Power movement, such as Injustice Case 1970,
prom pted b y the restraining o f the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale
(p.104). A t the time o f Bryant’s invite, the body prints were becom ing
m ore textured, with collaged wallpaper, corrugated card and sheets o f flat
colored paper. Ham m ons had also begun to make sculptures with spades
and chains, triggered b y Edwards’s installation at the Whitney. But still his
show in N ew York cam e as a great surprise. H e turned up with Greasy Bags
and Barbecue Bones - the exhibition’s title - a series o f delicate abstract
constructions made out o f these materials, also incorporating glitter and
areas o f stuck-on Black hair. Bag Lady in Flight 1975 (reconstructed 1990)
seems to be the only remaining work from the series (p.186). Hammons
carefully opened up a num ber o f identical shopping bags and stuck them
together in two wings, each sheet m osdy overlapping the one below,
alternating between lighter and darker grease-covered brown paper to
achieve a pattern reminiscent o f striped feathers. Black hair was stuck on to
the outer edges in a series o f small triangles - visible in the front o f the work
at the lower right, and concealed under folds in the upper left. A t the center
o f this delicate construction, more clumps o f Black hair formed a kind o f
spine. For all the careful planning, in areas o f the work grease escaped the
geom etries and leeched out in irregular darkened blotches.
H am m ons’s 1975 show, and work that followed, such as his Nap Tapestry
series and the 1977 ‘hair gardens’, created a new m odel o f Black art (pp.134,
191), and it is one that still seems exceptional in several respects. In terms o f
materials, H am m ons was turning to everyday Black culture, drawing from
his surroundings. ‘A t the studio I used to have’, he explained,
there was a greasy hotdog [place and] a hamburger joint next to it and
across the street there was a barbecue place. I'd look out my window and see
everyone coming out with their bags with their food in them and grease was
all over them. It kind o f looked like Pollock paintings ... so I said: Wow!
T hat is part o f our culture, eating greasy foods and [the] like.53
185
D a v id H a m m o n s B a g Lady in Flight 1975, reconstructed 1990
Shopping bags, grease and hair 108 x 295.9 x 8.9
 Mark Godfrey Not** on Block A bit faction

This m ow was significantly different from Purifoy’s reclaiming of the

fragments of old consumer goods. Hammons was not trying to repurpose
commodities and replace their old functions, but to ground art in the
material culture o f his neighborhood, and, as he later explained to Kellie
Jones, 'making sure the black viewer had a reflection o f himself in the
work1.**
It was also about a new kind o f pride. ‘Old dirty bags, grease, bones,
hair ... It's about me ... It isn't negative ... we should look at these images
and see how positive they are, how strong, how powerful.’55Yet however
much these words seem at one with the sentiments o f other Black artists,
Hammons's materials were controversial. Dirty bags and grease to many
looked ugly, and an affront to their own efforts to create beautiful abstract
art. Hammons admired Joe Overstreet greatly, for instance, but just to
compare the materials and colors of U5£ Came from There to Get Here with
Bag Lady in Flight is to realize what Hammons was turning away from -

David H im m o n i UntitM 1977

Hair and wire, Vanica Baach, Los Angolas
Photograph by Bruct W. Talamon © 1977 All rights reserved

188
 and what he made seem conventional. He also knew very well that the
paper bag pieces were not commercial and indeed making ‘an abstract art
that wasn’t salable’ became a kind o f principle.56
In Greasy Bags and Barbecue Bones Hammons rejected collector-friendly
paint-on-canvas abstraction, but that is not to say that he ignored the
traditions from which he was departing. Pollock was on his mind as he
created his grease spills, and with Bag Lady in Flight's cascading diagonals,
Marcel D ucham p’s Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 1912 was another clear
reference. This engagement with the ‘mainstream’ continued. T he year after
the show, Hammons began to string clumps o f Black hair onto wires and
install the lengths on museum walls, to create ‘hair gardens’ in his studio,
in snowy fields, and on the beach. He said that he began to use wire while
considering the ‘wiry’ nature o f Black hair57 and was drawn to the material
because “ Black hair was the only thing then that was not o f the oppressor’s
culture,’58but Richard Tuttle’s postminimal wire works seem also to have
been very present in his thoughts.
As he began to create these wire-and-hair installations, Hammons’s
abstraction became more improvisatory, in line with the experimental
processes I have outlined already. With his earlier shows o f body prints,
he had worked in a somewhat conventional manner, bringing completed
pieces from the studio to the exhibition space. After Greasy Bags and
Barbecue Bones, he began instead to bring materials to a gallery or outdoor
location, and improvise with them as he installed each new piece. He was
able to work in a way that was closer to jazz musicians, practicing in the
studio but then responding to the conditions where he exhibited. So it was
that when he installed a hair environment in Just Above Midtown in 1977,
as well as attaching the wires to walls, he also fastened them to heat pipes
and rafters. He called it Gray Skies Over Harlem, but with its feathers, egg
BruceTalamon
DevidHammons in La Salle studio shared
shells, teabags, colored wire and Black hair, it was anything but.
with SengaNengudi, Los Angeles 1977 Pictures taken that same year in the Los Angeles studio that Hammons
A leaflet showing B etye S a a r 's Spirit C atch e r
is on the table.
shared with Senga Nengudi show him surrounded by chicken feet, a
0 BruceW.Telamon 1977 A l l r ig h t s r e s e r v e d saxophone and a sieve for preparing the hair he collected from barbershops.
Also lying on his table is a pamphlet turned open to an illustration of
Spirit Catcher. Hammons shared Saar’s mysticism, but his emphasis was
slightly different, because while she used animal bones and feathers, he was
handling actual bodily remnants. Indeed it was thanks to a trip with Saar
to the Field Museum in Chicago that he did so: together they had seen an
African garment decorated with hair during a visit some years previously.
As for what it meant to use hair: ‘You’ve got tons o f people’s spirits in your
hands when you work with that stuff*,59 he later said. Within a couple of

89
M a r k G o d fr e y Notes on Black Abstraction

years, Hammons began to work with empty bottles, creating a bottle tree in
an abandoned Harlem lot. ‘T here is a lot o f spirit in these bottles’, he said,
'E very one has had a black man’s lips on it.*60A s he later remarked to Jones,
this means 'you have to be very very careful*.61
It was around 1978 that Hammons began to create the Flight Fantasy
sculptures. Like Bag Lady in Flighty these were structured with long wing­
like forms emerging from a central spine. Here the spine was made from
halved 45rpm records. T h e ‘wings* were reeds, wrapped in colored cotton,
threaded with little balls o f hair, and festooned with melted shards o f other
records. So what was the fantasy, and what was the direction o f the flight?
T h e vinyl in these works might point us to musicians for the answers - and
the word ‘flight* could take us to Sun Ra, with whom Hammons would
collaborate in the early 1980s. Sun Ra’s response to a world o f racism
was to reject the conditions around him and claim he came from Saturn,
inviting his audience to ‘travel the spaceways together*. Maybe Hammons’s
art should be considered in the same vein. As appealing as this seems,
however, it ignores how much Hammons insisted on the stuff o f the street,
and on the language o f everyday speech. I would like to read the flight of
Flight Fantasy as a journey towards rather than away: towards a new art
where hair, broken records, reeds, spirits and word play could all belong
together. Towards a new Black abstraction. ‘Black artistic confidence means
a willingness to transform blackness into a higher level o f abstraction’,
Manthia Diawara would write o f Hammons years later.62 Hammons’s flight
reached magnificent heights.

190
D a v id H a m m o n i Flight Fantasy early 1980s
Records, reeds, string and hair 48.3 * 124.5 * 25.4

191