Histories get lost. That's how life is. Then, when the time is right, they get found. Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, is about such a history, which went something like this.
During one of the most radical periods in 20th-century American politics, the black power era, a group of African-American artists was working with what was, and still is, one of the most radical forms of 20th-century art, abstraction. Radicalism is relative, though, and in this case politics and culture were on different tracks.
At a time of impassioned gestures and hot visions -- raised fists, "the fire next time" -- abstract art appeared cool and noncommittal. It had been conceived as a revolutionary language of color, line, shape. But the 1960s revolution was about bodies and beliefs. Also, abstraction raised authenticity issues. It was widely seen as white art, academic art. Whites viewed black practitioners as copycats; blacks dismissed them as sellouts.
So, while a few figures like Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam and Al Loving (1935-2005) gained visibility, abstraction by African-Americans as a phenomenon faded from view, and its invisibility has persisted. The Guggen-heim Museum's 1996 survey, Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, included no artists of color.
But now the relationship between aesthetics and politics is changing. Many young artists see racially defined art as limiting: a problem, not a solution. A return to the story of earlier artists who struggled with that same view is in order, and that's what the Studio Museum exhibition does.
It is not alone. Two years ago, at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, the painter Bill Hutson organized Something to Look Forward To, a survey of African-American abstract painters whose careers began in the 1960s. He included nearly two dozen artists, but much of the work was recent, so the show was really about a past continuing in the present. A full-scale historical survey was still needed.
Energy/Experimentation is not that survey. It has only 15 artists. Much of the art is large, and the Studio Museum galleries are fairly small. A multi-venue show, done in partnership with, say, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, or one of the City University of New York campus galleries, might have been a solution.
Although it is by no means complete, the present show, organized by Kellie Jones, an art and cultural historian at Yale University, does many things right. All but one piece dates from the 1960s and 1970s, when a number of black artists -- too few to be a movement, too many to be a circle -- were turning contemporary styles (Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism), new materials (acrylic paint, plastics, light) and varying degrees of multicultural content to abstract ends.
The artists spanned generations. When Alma Thomas (1891-1978) first started painting her abstract images of gardens in Washington in the 1960s, she was almost 70. When Gilliam had his first career retrospective in that city in 1967, he was in his 30s.
Cosmopolitanism ruled. Frank Bowling was born in Guyana, trained in London and settled in New York. The Americans Ed Clark and Barbara Chase-Riboud emigrated from New York to Paris. Chase-Riboud, who has a splendid 1972 aluminum floor piece in the show -- it's like a Carl Andre spouting green silk creepers -- lives in France still.
RSS