English presentation

Topic: look for the black American artists revolution in the civil
rights movement in the sixties, mention what their art biought in the
American society.

Exhibitor : CAMARA SYGATHA YASSIN

Date :

Teachers : MR. KOUAME

Mark : / 20

Remark :

table of contents
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Introduction

A. SOME ARTISTS
I. Faith Ringgold
II. Norman Rockwell

B. SOME MOVEMENTS TO CREATE

I. Black Arts Movement
II. Spiral
III. Organization of Black American Culture

Conclusion

Introduction

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Art can refer to making of objects images; music … that are beautiful or that
express feeling, whether is be through painting, drawings, sculptures … but also,
to any activity through which people express particular ideas such as drama;
cinema.
The civil rights era of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties was a time in
American history of ferment, change, and sacrifice, as many people fought and
died for racial equality... As the nation celebrates and honors Dr. Martin Luther
King's birthday on the third Monday in January each year, it's a good time to
recognize artists of different races and ethnicities who have responded to what was
happening during of the sixties with a work that still strongly expresses the turmoil
and injustice of this period. These artists created works of beauty and meaning in
their chosen medium and genre that continue to speak compellingly to us today as
the fight for racial equality continues.
In two thousand and fourteen, fifty years after the enactment of the Civil Rights
Act of nineteen sixty-four, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race,
color, religion, sex, or national origin, the Brooklyn Museum of Art hosted an
exhibition called Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties. The exhibit's
political artwork helped promote the civil rights movement.
The exhibition featured work by sixty-six artists, some well-known, such as Faith
Ringgold, Norman Rockwell, Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, and others, and
included painting, graphics, drawing, assemblage, photography and sculpture, as
well as written reflections from the artists. The work can be seen here and here.
According to Dawn Levesque in the article “Artists of the Civil Rights Movement:
A Retrospective,” “Brooklyn Museum curator Dr. well-known studies on the
nineteen sixties. When writers chronicle the civil rights movement, they often
overlook the political art of this period. She says, "it's the intersection of art and
activism." "

A. SOME ARTISTS

I. FAITH RINGGOLD

Faith Ringgold, included in the exhibit, is a particularly inspiring American artist,

author, and teacher who played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement and is
best known for her narrative quilts of the late nineteen hundred and seventies.
however, before that, in the nineteen hundred and sixty years, she made a series of

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important but lesser-known paintings exploring race, gender and class in her
American People and Black Light series. The National Museum of Women in the
Arts exhibited forty-nine paintings by Ringgold Civil Rights in two thousand
thirteen in an exhibition titled America People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold's
Paintings of the 1960s. These works can be seen here. Throughout her career, Faith
Ringgold has used her art to express her views on racism and gender inequality,
creating powerful works that have helped educate many people, young and old,
about racial and gender inequality. . She has written a number of children's books,
including the award-winning beautifully illustrated Tar Beach. You can see more
children's books from Ringgold here.

II. NORMAN ROCKWELL

Even Norman Rockwell, the famous painter of idyllic American scenes, painted a
series of civil rights paintings and were included in the Brooklyn exhibit. As
Angelo Lopez writes in his article, "Norman Rockwell and the Civil Rights
Paintings", Rockwell was influenced by close friends and family to paint some of
the problems of American society rather than simply the soft and wholesome
scenes that he had made for the Saturday Night Post. When Rockwell started
working for Look Magazine he was able to do scenes expressing his views on
social justice. One of the most famous was The Problem We All Live With, which
shows the drama of school integration.
During the sixties, many black American painters oriented their work towards
denouncing the inequalities and violence suffered during the civil rights
movement. They are part of a general movement of protest, where recognized
artists, such as Andy Warhol with Birmingham Race Riot denounce the police
violence of the time. They differ, however, from political activists, who have not
yet involved art in their actions, such as the group "Artists & Writers Protest",
which is satisfied, for example, with an open letter entitled "End of Silence",
published in one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five in the New York Times
advocating disarmament. The group "Artists Protest Committee" organized that
same year, in Los Angeles, demonstrations in front of museums and art galleries to
protest against the American intervention in Vietnam. In 1966, this committee
notably organized, at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard,
the Peace Tower event, with speeches given by art critics such as Susan Sontag.
Born from the association of two artists, Mark di Suvero and Mel Edwards, the
tower was covered with more than four hundred small panels created by artists
from all over the world and bearing a declaration against war. The activism of the

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African-American sculptor Mel Edwards against the Vietnam War also indicates
the plurality of political positions taken by artists of the time. As for their aesthetic
choices, they are often determined by the emergence of Pop Art, the use of
salvaged objects or the commercial image, in an iconoclastic will where
performances and happenings will develop.
In the 1960s, this tradition took on a properly political dimension, in reaction to
events as well as a form of alternative to the rejection of established institutions.

B. SOME MOVEMENTS TO CREATE

I. BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
In this context, the singularity of black artists is to seek to organize work and
reflection groups on their artistic contribution to the civil rights movement, and to
set up structures for exhibition and exchange with their community. Thus, was
born the “Black Arts Movement”, which associates all individual or collective
initiatives of artistic participation in the fight against racial segregation and for
equality. The “Black Arts Movement” therefore does not designate any specific
organization but a set of actions carried out by African-American artists from the
mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. The concept of “Black Arts” testifies to this desire
for reconquest, even power. The evolution of the civil rights movement into black
nationalism defended by Malcolm X had given way to a veritable "black revolution
against the injustices of the white world..." (Id., XXX). The notion of Black Power
encourages a form of life endogenous to the community, with its forms of urban
guerrilla warfare but also its social objectives in which art will ensure the
transmission of symbolic values.
4Several groups were therefore created at the start of the 1960s and none of them
really survived, which corresponds to a phase of institutional integration through
the development of African-American museum and artistic institutions.

II. SPIRAL
The Spiral group was created in 1963 in New York by several black artists wishing
to express their support for the civil rights movement while leaving each of its
members their own aesthetic choices. It was originally a discussion group
composed of about fifteen artists who met under the aegis of the painter Hale
Woodruff in the studio of Romare Bearden on Canal Street. Their meetings
focused on the situation of Blacks in the United States and were aimed at finding
material solutions to specific actions, such as busing to Washington to participate
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in the 1963 march. Then the debates took an aesthetic turn around Norman Lewis'
question, "Is there a Negro Image?", a concern that concerned both the image
produced by the black artist and the reception of this image. The answers remained
individual, as the artists Charles Alston testifies: "In spite of their doubts and
different opinions, they still hoped to evoke in their painting the 'signature', the
'personal thumbs print' that they talked so much about" (in Siegel, 1966, 49) or
Norman Lewis: "I feel that Frantz Kline in his paintings with large contrasts of
black against white and Ad Reinhardt in his all-black paintings might represent
something more Negroid than work done by Negro painters" (Id., 50). This
questioning of identity is also situated in a semantic hiatus where different markers
circulate: the term Negro soon gives way to the adjective "Black". It is in fact the
first group since the Harlem Renaissance to federate around a program that is at
once political, aesthetic and social. Far from the idealism of the New Negro
Movement, the artists of Spiral refused to be called "Negro artists" and instead
claimed the status of artist, without any social or racial connotation.
The name Spiral was rightly chosen for its symbol, i.e. the Archimedean spiral,
which unfolds outward in all directions while always moving forward. The group
discussed aesthetics as much as their situation in the art world. After the March on
Washington in August 1963, they decided to think about more concrete actions and
rented a space in Christopher Street to organize exhibitions testifying to their
research. The first takes place in 1964 and was to be titled “Mississippi 64,” in
honor of civil rights activists found murdered in Mississippi. Then a less overtly
political title was chosen, “Black and White”, where the only aesthetic instruction
was to limit oneself to these two symbolic colors, black and white, to produce
engravings.
Romare Bearden had launched the idea of a collective project made up of collages
but this proposal had not been accepted, precisely because each artist wanted to
keep his own style and technique. Finally, Bearden works alone on collages which
will orient his work in a direction completely opposite to the abstract compositions
he has produced until then. His photomontages are indeed recompositions of urban
black life and its symbols, such as the 1970 collage entitled Patchwork Quilt,
which features a black Venus lying on a patchwork blanket, an allusion to the
visual tradition of the South and to his craftsmanship, as well as the method of
fragmentation and recomposition of reality inherited from cubism.
Like Bearden, most of the Spiral artists had lived through the Harlem Renaissance
or the Works Progress Administration (WPA) years, and had been influenced by
social realism and Mexican mural painting. Another member of Spiral, Reginald
Gammon, was also inspired by photographic techniques to produce the painting
entitled Freedom Now (1965), based on a photograph of the March on Washington
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taken by Moneta Sleet Jr. of protest captured by photography, but transposed into a
stylized pictorial aesthetic, favoring graphic design and the social message.
The aesthetic differences of the group remained confused, often confused with the
moral or ideological goals of the time. It is that all the painted blacks, like Spiral,
were not homogeneous, but all found themselves confronted with the racial role
imposed on them by the segregation of American society. Felrath Himes, member
of Spiral, declared: “There are Jewish painters, who, like Chagall, paint Jewish
subjects and others who do not” (in Siegel, 1966, 49). Al Hollingworth, on the
other hand, saw Spiral as group therapy, where a complex economic and political
reality was addressed. The group included only one woman, Emma Amos, who
claimed that entering Bearden's studio was already a political act for a black
woman. Black feminist activism was indeed still in its infancy, and this artistic
universe remained essentially masculine. The Spiral group ceased its activities in
1966.

III. ORGANIZATION OF BLACK AMERICAN CULTURE

Another group was formed in 1962 in Chicago around artists Jeff Donaldon,
Wadsworth Jarrell and Barbara Jones-Hogu. It is a collective workshop that
receives the name of "Organization of Black American
Culture", that is to say O.B.A.C - to pronounce Obasi, which means "chief" in
Yoruba. OBAC included painters, writers, poets and actors divided into three
workshops: literature, plastic arts and “community”. The aim of the group was to
create a place where artists could work without inhibitions, free from segregation
or racist prejudices, also free from the tyranny of the art market or the
Establishment. In 1967, these artists decided to create a mural together on the wall
of an abandoned building, at the corner of 43rd Street in Chicago, in order to
represent black heroes, musicians, writers and leaders. Their purpose is not to
create an aesthetic event but to give visual reality to African-American history.
This street mural, entitled WaII of Respect, also allows artists to work in symbiosis
with their community. They feel invested with a communication mission to
develop self-respect and pride in being black, as evidenced by the inscription on
the wall: "The wall was created to Honor our Black heroes and to beautify our
community». The style is inspired by Mexican mural painting, favoring realism
with stylized lines, bright colors and a visibly narrative purpose.
The building was demolished in 1971, but this first mural was the start of a
powerful movement that saw the creation of more than 1,500 mural compositions,

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between 1967 and 1972, on the exterior walls of various communities in major
American cities.

CONCLUSION

During the 1960s, a number of groups of African-American artists came into

existence. Following the tradition of protest developed by black painters in the
1930s and 1940s, these groups were overtly political and offered an alternative
space in a segregated society. Born in the wake of the Black Arts Movement,
Spiral, OBAC, AFRICOBRA, and “Where we at” Black Women Artists attempted
to provide aesthetic and ideological structures to the artists of the African-
American community while fulfilling an educational role in the community at
large. Although most had ceased to exist by the following decade, these groups
opened the way for the creation of institutions and galleries dedicated to African-
American artists, and they encouraged their integration into mainstream art

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