TATE MODERN Soul of a Nation

Toots and the Maytals special

LIFE & STYLE

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The boys of Disney Page 27

Have you read The Friend?

Meet Dorothy Koomson Page 23

Barkley L. Hendricks, (b. 1945) Icon For My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale) 1969 Oil, acrylic and aluminium leaf on linen canvas 1511 x 1219 mm, © Barkley L. Hendricks courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

HISTORY TODAY Soul of a Nation

20 | THE VOICE JULY 6 - 12, 2017

Soul of a Nation

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EXPLORING HISTORY WITH ART As the biggest-ever display of African American artists’ work goes on display at the Tate, we speak to the two curators behind the exhibition

T

HERE IS a genuine pre-emptive excitement surrounding the Soul of a Nation exhibition – which starts at the Tate Modern next week – as it marks the first time such a project has taken place at the London art gallery.

What did it mean to be a black artist in the USA during the Civil Rights Movement and at the birth of Black Power? What was art’s purpose, and who was its audience?

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, is a landmark exhibition exploring how these issues played out among and beyond African American artists from 1963 to 1983.

Talking to Life and Style about bringing this idea to life, curators Zoe Whitley and Mark Godfrey said it was important to help shine a light on the diverse stories of those who told their perspective of that period in time through their art.

“I’ve been working at the Tate for 10 years and one of my responsibilities is growing the American collection,” Mark said.

“Back in the 1970s and 1980s when Tate curators bought American artists’ work, they bought the artists they knew, people like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd.

“In thinking back on how we could grow that collection, I began thinking about African American artists who are really important, but either their work wasn’t being shown in Europe, or the Tate curators weren’t

travelling to the States enough to see it.

“A series of major acquisitions led to the show that we’re talking about.”

The show begins in 1963, with the formation of the Spiral Group, a New York–based collective. They questioned how

“I think it has something that will resonate with everyone” black artists should relate to American society, with key figures like Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis responding to current events in their photomontages and abstract paintings. Artists also considered the locations and audiences for their art – from local murals to nationally circulated posters and newspapers – with many turning away from seeking mainstream gallery approval to show artwork in their own communities through

black-owned galleries and artist-curated shows.

Zoe said: “There was a real opportunity to flesh out something that often gets flattened, this idea that black art is often only one thing, or that even as black people and black artists that there is only one point of view.

“And so, by showing the richness and frankly the really dynamic disagreements, discussions and debates that took place around what the stakes were to be an artists, that becomes the basis for the show but in a way that reveals a lot of things that are incredibly important for institutions to be engaging with.

“Looking at issues to do with systemic racism and institutional exclusion, to look at the very stakes of what it means to be a black artist and how much more challenging that could be in any context than just picking up a paint brush and having talent.

“And certainly, layered upon that, the challenge at the time of gender as well. So being a black female artist, how does one work when you are also tasked with being the primary and even the only provider of childcare for your children, and all of these things.

So through an

Mark Godfrey, Senior Curator, International Art, Tate Olivia Hemingway, (inset) Zoe Whitley, Curator, International Art, Tate ©Tate Photography artists-led story, we are able to look at some timely questions about what it meant to be an artist. In that way, I think it is something that will resonate with everyone, but for the artists in particular, they really appreciated that the starting point in every case was their approach to art, what it is that mattered to them, how they put it forward and which artists they were working with.”

Further themes investigated in the exhibition include the emergence of black feminism through the work of Betye Saar

and Kay Brown, showing how the period marked a revolutionary moment of visibility for black women, and debates over the possibility of a black aesthetic in photography featuring work by Roy DeCarava.

It will also showcase Just Above Midtown gallery, the first commercial gallery in New York to display the work of avantgarde black artists, whose legendary programme spanned innovative approaches to sculpture and performance using materials as unexpected as human hair and tights.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power opens on July 12 and runs until October 22 at the Tate Modern, Level 3, Boiler House. It is supported by Ford Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art and Henry Luce Foundation, with additional support from Tate Patrons and Tate Members.

The exhibition is open daily from 10am to 6pm and until 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Visit tate.org.uk or follow @Tate on Twitter for more information.

Related events for your diary IN CONVERSATION: SPIKE LEE WITH MARIA BALSHAW July 12, 7pm–8.30pm (Starr Cinema) Legendary film director Spike Lee discusses the art that shaped his career.

AFROPUNK x TATE COLLECTIVE: HOW TO START A MOVEMENT July 20 (Starr Cinema, Foyer and Café) Free event for young people co-hosted with AFRPOUNK and featuring Galdem, BBZ and Dreph.

TATE MODERN FILM: HOW IT FEELS TO BE FREE July 22 (Starr Cinema, £8) In dialogue with Soul of a Nation, this two-screening film programme explores experimental approaches to documentary in the films of four African American artists CURATOR’S TOUR July 31, 6pm–8.30pm (£20) Assistant curator Priyesh Mistry gives a tour of Soul of a Nation.

AFTER HOURS: SOUL OF A NATION August 14, 7pm–9pm (free with exhibition ticket) An evening for 15- to 25-year-olds to see Soul of a Nation at an event curated exclusively by Tate Collective London, with music, workshops and discussion.

UNIQLO TATE LATES August 25, 6pm–10pm (admission free, special offers on exhibitions, food and drinks all night) A free programme – held monthly – of evening events, including DJs, performances, screenings and workshops.

BLACK ART, BLACK POWER: RESPONSES TO SOUL OF A NATION October 13, 10.30am–6pm (Starr Cinema, £29) Join artists, academics and curators from the UK and USA for this landmark day-long conference.

JULY 6 - 12, 2017

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Soul of a Nation

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IT’S THE JACK WHITTEN WAY Renowned artist recounts how meeting with the likes of Norman Lewis and Willem de Kooning shaped his path as a painter

I

WAS THE only black student in my class at the Cooper Union Art School in 1960.

Robert Blackburn, who ran the printmaking department at Cooper Union, immediately reached out to me and said: “You must meet Romare Bearden.”

This was my first encounter with a known black artist.

Romy, as everyone called him, was important because he gave me the confidence to pursue being an artist.

It was Romy who insisted that I met Norman Lewis.

Norman, being an abstract painter, provided me with the mental opening I needed to decode the esoteric language of abstraction – which I knew nothing about.

Romy sent me to Jacob Lawrence, who supported and signed my application for a

John Hay Whitney Fellowship.

The 1960s proved to be an extraordinary time for me.

I met Romy Bearden, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Haywood ‘Bill’ Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, the second-generation abstract expressionists, other young black artists, all while still being a student at Cooper Union.

It all contributed to who I am today. This was my foundation; a university within a university.

My older brother, Tommy, was a jazz musician and introduced me to the New York jazz scene.

I always made it a point to speak with John Coltrane whenever the opportunity presented itself.

One night, after asking so many questions that he became angry at me, he shouted: “It’s like a wave!” Writers on Coltrane’s music used the expres-

Jack Whitten (b. 1939) Homage to Malcolm 1970 Acrylic paint on canvas 2552.7 x 3035.3 mm Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth © Jack Whitten

sion ‘sheets of sound’, but Coltrane said: “It’s like a wave.”

The word ‘wave’ stuck in my mind.

My ghost paintings, done right after graduation from Cooper Union, were the beginning of what I called planar light.

Coltrane’s wave is a direct connection to my concept of planar light, but I could not begin to build a cognitive, concrete construct until my second one-man show at Allan Stone Gallery in 1970.

Those paintings were a beautiful example of process. They were done by building large silkscreens attached to a pulley from the ceiling and pressing acrylic paint directly to the canvas.

They were light sheets – unstretched canvas with sewn edges tacked flat to the gallery walls. The concept of planar light became more pronounced when I discovered the slab in 1970.

The slab was a quarter inch-thick layer of wet acrylic paint which was later combed through with my Afro pick.

This process was designed to reveal the light beneath the surface of the slab.

Homage To Malcolm was made using this process. The triangle was a symbolic form taken from Ancient Egypt. All the earlier Martin Luther King’s Garden series were based on gestural abstraction in full colour spectrum signifying a wide

TECHNIQUES: Jack Whitten has experimented with methods throughout his decades-long career range of emotions from the joy of birth to the spectre of death.

The political assassinations changed everything.

Homage To Malcolm was an

“Abstract painting is a distillation of life” attempt to salvage any amount of hope remaining in our increasingly nihilistic society.

It was no longer possible for me to use a full colour spectrum – there was nothing left to celebrate. Only the soul of Malcolm X was worthy of celebration.

The developer evolved through 10 years of research from 1970 to 1980.

The developer for Asa’s Palace used a strip of 3/8 inch neoprene rubber attached to a 12-foot-wide 2x4, which made it into a large squeegee.

The squeegee allowed me to spread great quantities of watery acrylic paint over a large surface to create a transparent layer of planar light.

This process taught me that planar light could exist in a variety of densities.

My 1974 solo show at the Whitney Museum was a major endorsement from an important element of power in the New York art world. It solidified my place within the dialogue of abstract painting. The establishment could no longer deny the

presence of an African American abstract painter.

That show proved to be a major influence on abstract painters both here and abroad.

Abstract painting is a distillation of life. Essence is produced through distillation, and essence is what gives soul meaning. Without essence, there is no soul, and without soul, there are no people, and without people, there is no nation.

Jack Whitten is an artist who lives and works in New York City. His work features in Soul of a Nation.

His exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, London, runs from September 20 to November 18.

Originally featured in Tate Etc. magazine issue 40, summer 2017

Betye Saar: ‘I felt such rage and helplessness’ Life & Style: One of your best-known and most controversial works, which raises many potent and continuing questions about gender and race, is 1972’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. How did it come about?

Betye Saar: When Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968, I felt such rage and helplessness. I was a mother with three young children and wasn’t able to march in protest.

I chose to express my anger by creating The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.

L&S: You were part of an enclave of artists centred around the Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32 in Los Angeles. You also curated some ground-

breaking exhibitions, including The Sapphire Show and Black Mirror. How important were these environments to you as an artist?

Betye Saar: I remember the Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32 fondly.

Very few galleries back then were interested in exhibiting black artists – we were invisible to them – but they both offered us an opportunity.

In the late 1960s, the Brockman was the main art scene for black artists.

Meanwhile, Gallery 32 had mostly exhibited male artists.

I proposed an exhibition of all women artists, The Sapphire Show: (You’ve Come a Long Way Baby), including Gloria Bohannon, Suzanne Jackson, Sue Irons (now Senga), Yvonne Cole

Eye of the beholder: Betye Saar collaborated with other black female artists in the 1960s and 1970s Portrait of Betye Saar in her Laurel (far left) Canyon studio, Los Angeles; courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; Photo: Ashley Walker Meo and Eileen Abdul-Rashid.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the feminist art movement was beginning, and Womenspace, a nonprofit organisation aimed at preventing domestic violence, was created.

One of the founders asked me to be on the board. I then proposed an exhibition of black women artists, Black Mirror, which was a show of art, but also featuring black lifestyle, food, music and dance. The artists includ-

ed were Gloria Bohannon, Suzanne Jackson, Marie Johnson, Samella Lewis and me.

L&S: Which artists have influenced you over the years?

Betye Saar: I consider myself an object-maker. I combine objects, materials, media and ideas to invent a new object. I am attracted to other assemblage artists.

My earliest influence was Joseph Cornell, when I first saw his work in 1967 at the Pasadena Museum.

I knew I wanted to make art like that.

Additionally, I admire Martin Puryear’s sculpture and the work of Nick Cave.

Betye Saar lives and works in Los Angeles.

Originally featured in Tate Etc. magazine issue 40, summer 2017

22 | THE VOICE JULY 6 - 12, 2017

Soul Of A Nation

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IMAGES OF INSPIRATION Dawoud Bey looks at the photographers whose work taught him to view life through a lens, and tell the story of a generation

A

S A black artist coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the discussion about a ‘black aesthetic’ was inescapable, and artists and photographers were not exempt from that social and political conversation.

One question was, “What the role or function of art could be in a time of profound upheaval?”, as the integrationist civil rights movement was transitioning into the Black Power movement with its emphasis on self-empowerment and self-definition.

Fortunately, because Roy DeCarava was at the centre of the New York black photography community, the notion of a black aesthetic that those of us under his influence came to embrace was a complex one that encompassed not only the centrality of the black subject, but also the ability to visualise that subject through a rigorous engagement with both the formal and material language of picture-making.

There was nothing didactic about Roy’s work – it was clearly steeped in the history of photography, yet proposed a radical intervention into that history by describing the subjects in a way that attempted to find a material equivalent, in the photographic print, for the experience being described.

It was not merely a transcription of that experience but a highly subjective and

evocative interpretation of it.

The main difference, for me, between DeCarava and Gordon Parks was that DeCarava operated as an artist, free of any constraining editorial hand.

Parks, as a journalist, worked pretty much exclusively on assignment, whether for the Farm Security Administration or Life magazine, with his editors having the final say over how and where his images appeared.

“Seeing a reflection of yourself very seldom happens as a black person” For those of us who aspired to careers as artists, DeCarava’s path was clearly the more resonant and relevant.

Although, having said that, Gordon was one of my earliest heroes in that as the first black photographer for Life, he gave his fellow practitioners a public visibility they had been lacking.

The first time I ever saw a considerable number of pictures made by black photographers was in the Black Photographers Annual.

Its influence was profound. I realised there was a community of African Americans who made

photographs, often as artists, and began to seek them out.

I came to know many of them well, as friends and early mentors.

The annual was beautifully designed and printed, and featured the work in a way I hadn’t seen before – with a high degree of care and respect.

The fact that it was produced and published by a group of black photographers was in itself inspiring.

Linda Goode Bryant founded the Just Above Midtown Gallery in 1976.

By then I had become friends with several of the artists she was showing, so I spent time there until it closed in the late 1980s.

Initially exhibiting mainly abstract work by a range of black painters, she later included conceptual work, which was not being widely shown, especially by black artists.

I had not encountered this previously, so my ideas about conceptual art practice began to be stretched.

Many of these friends also congregated at Studio Museum in Harlem, which was important as a space where a wide range of black creative practice took place: exhibitions, music performances and poetry reading. It became the centre of my creative community.

I started working on the pho-

Dawoud Bey (above) (b. 1953), Deas McNeil (left), the Barber 1976, printed by 1979, Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 155 x 230 mm The Art Institute of Chicago, Restricted gift of Anita Blanchard M.D. and Martin Nesbitt. tographs that became Harlem, USA in 1975. In 1978, when I felt I had made good progress on the project, I approached the Studio Museum about possibly showing the work.

I spent another year in residence there, completing it as a participant in the Cultural Council Foundation CETA Artist Project, on the understanding that it would be exhibited, which it duly was.

It was important to me that the first showing of those photographs be in the community

in which they had been made.

I wanted people who were the subjects of the work to be able to see themselves on the walls of a museum – I wanted them to see it before it went out into the larger world.

I thought it would be deeply meaningful if members of the community could come to the museum and see photographs of their neighbours, people who looked like them, since going into a museum and seeing a reflection of yourself very seldom happens as a black person.

One of the most gratifying experiences for me, with that initial exhibition of Harlem, New York City, was seeing the number of people from the community who did in fact attend the show.

I wanted to make the museum space a more directly engaging one.

Dawoud Bey lives and works in Chicago.

Originally featured in Tate Etc. magazine issue 40, summer 2017

‘It remains relevant – history repeats itself’

BY FAITH RINGGOLD

AT THE time I made American People Series #20: Die, all hell was breaking loose across parts of the United States.

There were riots as people fought for their civil rights.

Not much of this was being recorded in the press or on the TV news, but I saw the violence myself, and felt I had to say something about it.

Artists were interpreting it – but not in a direct way.

In fact, the art of that time in the 1960s was beautiful – abstractions – but it was ignoring the hell that was raging in African American people.

There was a lot of objection to art that

was expressive or emotional. During the long, hot summer of 1967, I was given a space in the Spectrum Gallery in New York to paint the work, which was where I would have my first one-person show.

There is a lot of blood in the picture, which some people found scary: one woman who came in and saw it gasped and ran downstairs because she was so terrified.

It was a very emotional picture to make.

Painting blood was horrible.

I felt like I was bleeding when I made it.

There were other sources of inspiration for the painting, too.

I had been going to the Museum of Modern Art with my two daughters because I wanted them to see Picasso’s Guernica, which was on loan before being returned to Spain after Franco died.

And in terms of its composition, I was inspired by Kuba textile designs (unique to the Democratic Republic of Congo), which use shapes of divided blocks.

I was also imitating the pavement Faith Ringgold (b.1930) (top left) blocks of the New York sidewalks.

American People Series #20: Die 1967 Oil on canI am very excited to see that my vas 1828 x 3657 mm painting now hangs in the Museum The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase; and gift of the Modern Women’s Fund of Modern Art, like Guernica once © Faith Ringgold did, some 50 years after it was made.

Faith Ringgold (b.1930) (top right) Unfortunately, it also remains a United States of Attica relevant painting.

It is sad to say, but history re- 1971-2 Offset lithograph on paper 552.4 x 698.5 mm ACA Galleries, New York © Faith Ringgold peats itself.