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“It’s black art. And it matters. And this has been going on for two hundred years. Do with it. “
So says art historian Maurice Berger towards the start of “Black Art: In the Absence of Light”, a rich and exciting documentary directed by Sam Pollard (“MLK / FBI”) and debuting on HBO Tuesday night.
The feature film, assembled from interviews with contemporary artists, curators and academics, was inspired by a single 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the first large-scale survey of artists. African-Americans. Organized by artist David C. Driskell, then head of the art department at Fisk University, it featured some 200 works dating from the mid-18th to mid-20th century, and advanced a story few Americans, including art professionals, even knew it existed.
The press gave this investigation a mixed reception. Some writers retorted that it was more about sociology than art (Driskell himself did not disagree entirely). But the show was a popular success. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he hails from, then in the major museums of Dallas, Atlanta and Brooklyn, people lined up to see him.
What they were seeing was that black artists had always done distinctive work alongside, and some within, a white-dominated mainstream that ignored them. And they saw that black artists had consistently created, and continue to make, some of America’s most conceptually exciting and urgent art – a reality that the art world in general has only recently recognized, as This is evidenced by exhibitions, sales and critical attention.
The HBO documentary presents this story of long neglect and recent correction to us through the eloquent voices of three people who lived on both sides of it: Driskell, a revered painter and teacher; Mary Schmidt Campbell, president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Berger, renowned art historian and curator. (The film is dedicated to the two men, both of whom died of complications related to Covid-19 in 2020, Driskell at 88, Berger at 63.)
They are surrounded by artists, mostly painters, from different generations. Some had well-started careers in 1976 (Betye Saar, for example, and Richard Mayhew, who was part of the survey). Others, at that time, were just getting started in the field. (Kerry James Marshall remembers being blown away by a visit to the show when she was 21). Still others – Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) and Jordan Casteel (born 1989) – were not born at the opening of the investigation but are still among its beneficiaries.
The question arises at the start of the film – in a 1970s “Today Show” interview with Driskell by Tom Brokaw – whether the very use of the “Black American art” label is not in itself a form of imposed isolation. Yes, says Driskell, but in this case, a strategic question. “Isolation is not and never has been the goal of the black artist. He tried to become part of the mainstream, only to be excluded. If this exhibition had not been organized, many artists would never have been seen there.
The film refers, in abbreviated form, to past examples of cliché. There is a reference to “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968” by the Metropolitan Museum in 1969, an exhibit which was advertised as showcasing black creativity at the Met, but which contained little art. And there is mention of the artists’ protests against the Whitney Museum’s 1971 inquiry into “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” which was left entirely in the hands of a white curator.
An essay book titled “Black Art Notes,” printed that year in response to Whitney’s exhibit, accused white museums of “washing art” through the symbolic inclusion of African-American works, an accusation that has continued relevance. (The collection was recently reissued, in a facsimile edition, by Primary Information, a Brooklyn nonprofit press.) Even before the Met and Whitney shows, black performers saw the obvious need to take the control over how and where their art is viewed in their own hands. Ethnically specific museums began to emerge – remarkably, in 1968, the Studio Museum in Harlem.
We are talking about a dense and complex story. No movie can hope to get it all, and this one leaves a lot out. (Mention of the Black Power movement is virtually absent here.) Yet there are many, summed up in short, clever commentaries by academics and conservatives, including Campbell, Sarah Lewis of Harvard University, Richard J. Powell from Duke University, and Thelma Golden, the current director and chief curator of the Studio Museum. (Golden is a consulting producer of the film. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is its executive producer.)
Rightly and delightfully, the majority of voices are from active artists. Faith Ringgold, now 90, was not in the 1976 show at all, nor in the big museums, because, she claims, her job was too political and because she is a woman. (Of the 63 artists in “Two Centuries of American Black Art,” 54 were male.) His solution? “I just stay outside until I come in,” she said. And perseverance paid off: his monumental 1967 painting “American People Series # 20: Die” is featured in the renewal of the current permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.)
Particularly interesting are the segments showing artists at work and talking about what they’re doing while they’re doing it. We visit Marshall in his studio as he explains the many paint colors he uses which are “black”. We follow Fred Wilson through the museum’s warehouses as he excavated items that will be part of one of his historic installations. We watch Radcliffe Bailey transform hundreds of abandoned piano keys into an ocean of the Middle Passage. And we accompany portrait painter Jordan Casteel, who recently concluded a well-received exhibition at the New Museum, as she searches the streets of Harlem for guards.
There is no doubt that the visibility of African American artists in the mainstream is much higher than it has ever been. (Thanks, Black Lives Matter.) A big increase in emissions is a measure. Landmark events like the 2018 unveiling of Obama portraits by Wiley and Amy Sherald are another.
In an interview in the film, Sherald talks about this sudden surge of attention. “A lot of galleries are now choosing black artists,” she says. “There is this gold rush.” But where some observers would see the interest as just an upcoming marketing trend, driven by a “Blackness” branding image, it doesn’t. “I say it’s because we do the best job and the most relevant job.”
The purpose of Pollard’s film, which was also the focus of Driskell’s investigation in 1976, is to demonstrate this and demonstrate that black artists have made some of the best and most relevant works for decades, centuries. . But they do it mostly at the margins, beyond the spotlight of the white art world.
Artist Theaster Gates, who appears near the end of the film, sees the benefit, if not the necessity, of this positioning.
“Dark art means that sometimes I do when no one is looking,” he says. “For the most part, this has been the truth of our lives. As long as we don’t have the light, I’m not happy. Until we are in our own houses of exhibitions, of discovery, of research, until we have found a way to be masters of the world, I prefer to work in the dark. I don’t want to work only when the light is on. My fear is that we are trained and conditioned to do only if there is a light, and that makes us co-dependent on something that we do not control. Are you ready, he asks his fellow artists, to do in the absence of light?
Driskell, who really owns this film and with whose presence it concludes, also leaves open the question of the future of noir art. Around him he said: “There has been an awakening, an enlightenment through education, a desire to want to know. On the other hand, as Martin Luther King Jr said: We have not reached the promised land. We have a long way to go. “
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