New Scholarship on the Black Arts Movement
Session Coordinator: Matthew Calihman
African and African American Studies Program, Washington University
Campus Box 1109, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130
mscalihm@artsci.wustl.edu
Shared Cultural Spaces: The Black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican Arts Movements in Chicago during the 1960s and 70s
he late 1960s Chicago mural movement inaugurated with the creation of the “Wall of Respect” in 1967 found aesthetic antecedents in both the WPA murals painted by Blacks during the mid-1930s as well as earlier works created by Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralistas. Subsequently, Chicago Latina/o artist collectives, such as MARCH, El Taller and others were not only influenced by the muralistas, but also more immediately from local Black artist collectives such as Afri-Cobra. My paper will trace the evolution of the Black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican Arts Movements in Chicago attempting to illustrate the cultural influences that these movements had on each other. More specifically, I will examine the numerous artists’ and writers’ collectives that Black and Latina/o cultural workers established in the city during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), Kuumba Workshop, Afri-Cobra, MARCH, El Taller, ALBA, and El Teatro del Barrio. Finally, I will spend the remainder of my paper analyzing various works of art that demonstrate the politics of cultural performance, such as poetry, the theatre movement, and visual culture that the artists’ collectives produced, paying close attention to how the respective artists represented their culture and community.
Anthony Ratcliff
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
aratcliff@afroam.umass.edu
“Poets of Action”: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis
From 1968 to 1972, St. Louis was home to the Black Artists’ Group (BAG), a seminal arts collective that nurtured experimentalists involved with theater, dance, poetry, and jazz. Inspired by a reinvigorated cultural nationalism, black artistic collectives had sprung up around the country in the diffuse outgrowth known as the Black Arts Movement. Often evanescent, these organizations left in their wake questions about ethnicity, community, and nation. Although the critics’ gaze has mostly focused on the coasts, the Movement’s tenets thoroughly penetrated the cities of the heartland. These impulses resonated with BAG’s founders, who sought to raise consciousness and explore the far reaches of interdisciplinary performance — all while carving out a place within the context of local history and politics. BAG’s generation of innovative artists created a moment of intense and vibrant cultural life in an abandoned inner-city industrial building, surrounded by the evisceration that typified that decade’s “urban crisis.” The group recast local spaces and institutions, creating new centers, nodes, and landmarks for the black and progressive communities. Members blurred the lines between political involvement and artistic production, as debates over civil rights, black nationalism, and the role of the arts in contemporary struggles all found form in BAG.
Benjamin Looker
Yale University
A History of Drum and Spear Press
This paper examines the views, attitudes, and activities of those African Americans who were involved in the creation of Drum and Spear Press. Founded in 1967 by a group of former southern civil rights activists, this Black nationalist-oriented publishing house based in Washington, D.C. sought to reiterate the need for Black-owned institutions of knowledge production for the purposes of liberation. I approach this form of activism through aegis of such themes as economic self-sufficiency, Black left internationalism and African solidarity. In placing the institution’s origins within the context of the Black Arts Movement, this paper is a glimpse into the ways in which Black activists responded to Black Power and wrestled with its meaning and relevance on both domestic and international terms.
Seth Markle
New York University
smm332@nyu.edu
Literary Critic Stephen Henderson: The Construction of a Cultural Institute at Howard University
In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, major universities created cultural studies centers to address social issues and bridge the academic and public communities. At Howard University, literary critic Stephen Henderson led the Institute for Arts and Humanities (1973-1986) to support scholarship on African American culture. The Institute fulfilled part of the mission of institution building sought by Andrew Billingsley, Howard’s Vice President for Academic Affairs. Henderson supported the documentation and preservation of work by artists, scholars and intellectuals and encouraged new productions, thus anchoring a portion of the inheritance of the Black Arts Movement in Washington, D.C. Among other projects, Henderson organized national conferences for African American writers, giving artists, writers and scholars an opportunity to discuss and articulate their goals and disseminate their work.
Using documents housed at the African American Resource Center, this essay will demonstrate the historical significance of Henderson’s promotion of African American culture, intended to strengthen cultural heritage and black identity within the context of Howard University’s intellectual tradition. It will also theorize about the interactive relationship between key individuals, institutions and the surrounding community, and evaluate its success.
Julia A. Galbus
University of Southern Indiana
jgalbus@usi.edu