Black art: ‘Do-it-yourself, do-it-right-now’

  • Kariima Ali
Most people would not recall Malcolm X as a self-help guru. He is remembered as a revolutionary, a cultural icon and even, to some, a threat; yet in 1964 X proposed black nationalism as nothing short of urgent, necessary self-actualisation: “We need a self-help program, a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it’s-already-too-late philosophy.”
When I co-curated Tate Modern’s 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the aim was resolutely to focus on black artists and the art they created within (and despite) a turbulent socio-cultural context. Still, a narrative persists where oppression and protest can too easily become the lenses through which to assess the work of black artists, even today. Romare Bearden, the celebrated American collagist, once said, “Black art is the art that Black artists do. If someone would want to know what white art is, you would say the Italian Renaissance . . . there’s English painting, there’s Rembrandt. So it should be equally hard to define.”
In the 1960s, Bearden was part of a short-lived collective of black artists called Spiral. The group offered mutual support and critique, and organised their own art exhibition. They weren’t remotely black nationalists but they did initiate a do-it-now programme of self-discovery.
Artists working today are making statements through self-organising, making space for one another and holding open the proverbial door to institutional exposure for fellow artists. At Frieze Art Fair in New York this week, the artist Hank Willis Thomas will unveil a new work made of starlit banners. Each ¾ inch star represents one of 30,000 individual victims of American gun violence. Willis Thomas also spearheaded the collaborative project Question Bridge: Black Males, a series of interactive filmed dialogues that set about “deconstructing stereotypes about arguably the most opaque and feared demographic in America”, which is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC.
As a strategy to redress institutional racism and systemic exclusion from the mainstream art world, I’m reminded in works such as Willis Thomas’s of Malcolm X’s entreaty to help one another, now. The work of artist Simone Leigh, convener of Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, is rooted in both civic action and genuine care for her community. She has initiated artist-led performances and workshops designed to highlight and disavow through sisterhood the pervasive conditions of racism. These have taken the form of dance, song, yoga and healthcare sessions, collapsing the boundaries between art and everyday life.
Leigh’s commitment to collectivity empowered a young British group called Thick/er Black Lines, currently in residence at Tate Britain as hosts of (un)common space, the museum’s co-working hub and artist development programme. The name Thick/er Black Lines was, in turn, inspired by the 2017 Turner Prize-winner, British artist Lubaina Himid, who ushered in such practices in the 1980s, exhibiting artworks by fellow black and Asian women artists in shows such as The Thin Black Line. Himid, at the time, looked to the Californian artist Betye Saar, who organised exhibitions of artworks by fellow black women at Womanspace, a feminist art centre in Los Angeles, in the 1970s. A number of Saar’s works will be at Frieze New York this week. Today, Himid insists that institutions that exhibit her work also engage meaningfully with local black artists and include them in their future programming. It is through Himid, for instance, that I first learned of Scotland’s Yon Afro Collective.

Black art: ‘Do-it-yourself, do-it-right-now’ by Zoe Whitley originally published in The Financial Times read more here.