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Nineteen sixty-seven -- 43rd and Langley on Chicago's South Side. A handful of
African-American artists laid claim to one wall of a dilapidated building. They
got out their brushes and covered the wall with black pride -- they put Malcolm
X up there, and Thelonius Monk, and W.E.B. DuBois. They painted Muhammad Ali
and Billie Holiday. When the mural was finished, the artists named it The
Wall of Respect.
Some of those artists would go on to form AfriCobra -- the African Commune of
Bad Relevant Artists -- because they wanted to create an aesthetic that tuned
in to African American sensibilities.
"It was art for people," Michael Harris says. "It wasn't necessarily art for
art's sake; it was art for people's sake."
Harris joined AfriCobra in 1979. Now an assistant professor of African and
African- American art, he's writing a book titled Colored Pictures: Issues
of Race and Visual Representation.
AfriCobra, Harris says, is merely one chapter in a long history of resistance
by African-American artists -- a resistance to the way whites have portrayed
African Americans in popular culture and art, a resistance that has allowed
African-American artists to create their own cultural identities, on their own
terms.
Think about how pop culture's deck has been stacked: Blacks have been
negatively stereotyped and caricatured as far back as the late eighteenth
century. Distorted lips, bulging eyes. Sambo. Pickaninnies. Mammies. Blacks
have been portrayed as laughable, grotesque, inferior. These indignities have
appeared in postcards, in advertisements, in film -- in almost every aspect of
popular culture. After-school cartoons depicted blacks either as ill-tempered,
washboard-toting mammies, or as bumbling, bone-through-the-nose savages,
forever wide-eyed as they tried to escape the tiger. Such cartoons were
produced as late as the 1940s -- and were still being aired 40 years later.
Fine art didn't treat blacks much better. For many years, paintings depicted
Africans and African Americans as socially insignificant -- slaves or servants,
performers, people on the periphery. Rarely were blacks shown on their own
terms. "We seldom see them in family situations, for example," Harris says.
Women took the worst of it. The tradition of the female nude in Western art,
Harris says, suggests an assumption that the person consuming the art is male,
probably white, and holds a certain status or power. Women in general were on
display, to be consumed.
But black women were associated with uncontrolled passion and promiscuity and
were to be appropriated as though they were a natural resource of a
colonialized land, Harris says. They became a signifier of sexuality merely by
appearing in a painting.
Consider Manet's Olympia. The subject is a white prostitute reclining on
a bed. An African servant girl kneels to give the prostitute flowers brought by
the viewer, assumed to be an upper-class Parisian. The African girl heightens
the sexual suggestion of the scene, Harris says. "Here within the privileged
space of the white male gaze is a layered black subject who is at once socially
inferior to a naked prostitute for whom she is a servant and simultaneously is
a sexual signifier linked to the white woman within the bounds of male power."
Fighting perception
This history of misrepresentation and appropriation has had a profound
psychological impact on the African-American community, Harris says. "These
images, being some of the only representations of blacks, began to filter
throughout the American consciousness and helped create a momentum of
perception."
Harris relates this perception to the notion of double consciousness conceived
by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903. Double consciousness is an awareness of self in
addition to an awareness of how one is perceived by others. These perceptions,
Harris says, had many African Americans determined to avoid behaving in any way
that would invoke a stereotype.
Worse, many African Americans developed a self-hatred and wanted to join white
society on its terms. "Passing," or being taken for white, became desirable
among some lighter-skinned blacks. Still, Harris reminds us, there was
resistance. The 1893 Chicago Congress on Africa gave rise to the Pan-Africanist
movement, which urged Africans and African Americans to consider their origins
and unite as a common people.
Black artists were listening. It was around this time that Henry Ossawa Tanner,
who had spoken at the Chicago Congress on Africa, painted two well-known works
-- The Banjo Lesson in 1893 and The Thankful Poor a year later.
Tanner was depicting black people with pride and dignity in their everyday
lives. He expatriated to Paris -- Harris says racial issues and
characterizations violently upset Tanner, and perhaps he enjoyed greater
freedom from prejudice in Europe -- but much of his work remained influential
in America.
In the mid-1920s, Archibald Motley addressed color consciousness by painting
portraits of octoroons -- people of one-eighth black ancestry. The subject of
Motley's The Octoroon Girl is light skinned and well dressed. She's
placed in an elegant setting; there's a painting on the wall behind her. The
dark-skinned subject of Motley's Mammy, by contrast, is wearing a head
rag. Her features are masculinized, her clothes are plain, and she stands in
front of a bare wall.
"Status was thought to have increased as black blood decreased," Harris says.
People of multiracial heritage were concerned with what one Motley scholar
called a "fear of contamination by association" with darker-skinned blacks.
Motley, himself of multiracial heritage, visually codified those concerns,
Harris says.
Motley would become best known for his vibrant scenes of African-American
nightlife. "These works depicted blacks of many hues and shades interacting in
the same social space," Harris says.
Artists like Tanner and Motley were, in a sense, liberating African Americans
from the peripheral status that American and European art assigned them.
Through portraiture, Tanner and Motley humanized African Americans on their own
terms, Harris says. "They were trying to use culture to undermine
misperceptions and to also suggest that African Americans had the same
middle-class aspirations -- and the same cultural productions -- as anyone
else."
Into their own
The Pan-African identity that had taken root at the 1893 Chicago
Conference began to fully overtake derogatory representations of blacks by the
1960s, Harris says.
Several things were happening: the Negritude movement was beginning to explore
what was common -- what was African -- among people of African descent. Once
the notion of an "African" was established by whites, Harris says, African
descendants began reinventing that construct until it represented who they felt
they were.
African-American artists increasingly were beginning to visit Africa. "You had
the Liberation movement in West Africa," Harris says. "West African nations
were coming loose from colonial domination." Many postcolonial leaders had
studied in the West and had connected with people of African descent in Paris,
London, and the U.S.
"These global connections began to bear fruit in that people felt that they
could go back and visit Africa," Harris says. "Once the artists started going
there, instead of Europe, for validation, things changed in the artistic
expression of the United States."
John Biggers was one of the first African- American artists to visit Africa.
Biggers, originally from Gastonia, traveled to Ghana and several other African
nations in 1957.
Biggers had a career-long concern with the role and contributions of black
women, Harris says, and his paintings transformed black women and their work
into iconography. That transformation -- along with an evocation of traditional
African motifs -- can be seen in Biggers' Shotguns series of paintings,
which depict southern black women standing in front of their homes.
These are shotgun houses -- simple, inexpensive dwellings built such that the
rooms are laid out in a direct line, usually front to back -- supposedly so
named because a shotgun fired through the front door would pass straight
through the house and out the back door.
Railroad tracks run across the foreground of each painting in the Shotguns
series, suggesting that these women live "on the other side of the tracks." The
repeating patterns formed by the gables of the houses are reminiscent of those
found in both African-American quilt making and in central African Kuba cloth,
Harris says. The women in Shotguns, Fourth Ward remind Harris of
sculptural veranda posts carved by the Yoruba of West Africa. Beside each woman
sits a washboard, kettle, or cooking pot, which suggest a value and
appreciation for the work these women have done.
"Biggers, in visual praise poems, lauds and celebrates these women and their
world of meager means and suggests a status transcending circumstance," Harris
says. "Here is a reclassification of black women, bent but not broken by racial
and sexual abuse and poverty, into something akin to the Yoruba notion of iya
wa (our mothers) -- women of spiritual and social force."
The old and new
By the 1970s many African-American artists were becoming less concerned
with reacting to ways African Americans had been depicted and perceived.
Instead, artists like Nelson Stevens were more interested in what Harris calls
a proactive mode of creativity -- Stevens was celebrating a black aesthetic
centered
on black skin, black hair, and black style,
Harris says.
More recently, African-American women have begun to directly address their own
portrayals in art. The subject of Lorna Simpson's You're Fine is a
reclining, fully clothed black woman with her back to the viewer.
Harris says the woman in You're Fine subverts assumptions about male
perspectives and prerogatives -- she's not accessible for consumption.
In his own art, Harris has tried to explore who African Americans are as a
people. He became interested in Caribbean and South American cultural forms
during graduate school. Later, while on a trip to Brazil, he saw firsthand how
elements of Yoruba culture had crept into New World art. Likewise, both Old and
New world elements often exist side by side in Harris' art -- some of his most
recent work, such as Emergency Box, examines the influence of African
religions on religions practiced in America.
"The realm of images, both popular and artistic, is a political field where
high-stakes struggles are played out," Harris says. "It's important to
recognize that there's been African-American resistance in art at every level
and during every period -- from early Abolitionist efforts through the Civil
Rights and Black Power movements.
"Too often we tell the story of how whites perceive blacks, and we don't tell
the story about how African Americans have felt about how they were perceived
and what they've done about it."
Michael Harris is a winner of the 2000 Hettleman Prize for Artistic and
Scholarly Achievement.
Editor's note: This story is reprinted from the Winter 2001 issue of
Endeavors, a magazine highlighting research at Carolina. It is published
three times a year by the Office of Graduate Studies and Research. Neil Caudle
serves as editor, and Angela Spivey is associate editor. Jason Smith wrote this
piece. Employees who would like a free subscription to Endeavors should
send their name, job title, department and campus address to the
Endeavors office via campus mail ( Endeavors, CB 4106), e-mail
endeavors@unc.edu or the subscription form at the magazine's web site
http://research.unc.edu/endeavors
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