In recent years, efforts by curators to reclaim the histories and careers of black artists who practiced in the 1960s and 1970s have indicated an undeniable expansion of the canon of American art – a development that recognizes the still untapped legacy of the black expression that has, consciously or not, escaped these same historicizing modes. Consider the 2021 revival of the “Sapphire Show,” among the first West Coast exhibitions dedicated to Black American women artists, at New York’s Ortuzar Projects, or the recent “Just Above Midtown” presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, in l honor of Linda Goode Bryant and the dynamic list of artists, including David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, who have exhibited at the eponymous gallery. These outings were two new examples of how institutional strengthening of archival research can yield fantastic results.
“Revisiting 5+1” joins the list of successful retrospective efforts that have proven how thorny debates regarding political representation, activism, and aesthetics among Black artists still remain complex and salient. The exhibition took as its starting point “5 + 1”, the 1969 exhibition on black abstraction at Stony Brook University which featured works by Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten and William T. Williams and was curated by British Guyanese painter Frank Bowling, the “+1” of the quintet. The curators of this iteration—Stony Brook Ph.D. candidates Elise Armani, Amy Kahng, and Gabriella Shypula, with consultation from eminent Howard University art professor Pindell and guidance from Karen Levitov and Katy Siegel, deftly surpassed the mimetic redux of the first presentation. The decision was partly practical: many original works have been lost to history or have been reconfigured by the artists themselves.
Showcases filled with press clippings and documentation of protests by student organizations demanding support and guidance for minorities within the US university system showed how public universities such as Stony Brook have failed when they tried to implement more inclusive policies in the 1960s. A number of these schools were models of progress as they tried to attract more black and Latino students. Yet these populations were let down by the institutional (and racist) impulse to monitor and punish when they became more militant and the “war on drugs” began. The Bowling Expo was staged at a time of massive upheaval. His original curatorial conceit was that “5+1” captures the formal, social, and political tensions between mainstream culture and black culture by showcasing the range and depth of black abstraction, suggesting multiple references to historical forms , popular music and everyday life. street aesthetics. The elegant stature of Johnson’s work invites comparison with West African sculpture, for example, and Jack Whitten’s painting from this period bears an energetic, jazz-inspired gesture, often layered beneath thin drips of paint resembling graffiti.
Recognizing abstraction’s entrenchment in the social and the political highlighted a major gap in Bowling’s thinking about the original presentation, namely the absence of black women who worked with abstraction. To rectify this, the curators of “Revisiting” asked Pindell to select a group of six black female artists to be part of the exhibit, while also including something of her own work. Like their male counterparts, these women often took an active part in civil rights demonstrations, but chafed at demands that their art conform to any overt political ideology. Large scale painting by Mary Lovelace O’Neal Jabberwocky, 1976-77, for example, mobilizes the poetic gestures of AbEx. Her faint streaks of neon pink and green against a background of smoke black, collected from the sooty detritus of oil lamps, produce a haze that evokes the atmospheric conditions of the Bay Area, where she had settled after leaving New York in the early 1970s. Betye Saar was represented here by one of her idiosyncratic assemblage sculptures as well as a rare film, Eye-ball, 1971, a quasi-anthropological montage of eyes drawn from pop imagery and spiritual iconography. What emerged through these contributions, and throughout the exhibition as a whole, was a shared sensibility that recognized black culture as multitudinous and resistant to reduction, embodying, as Bowling described in the catalog of the 1969 “5+1” exhibition “a creativity, a self-perpetuating process of anarchist and pro-life zeal that a study of fine art and history alone, though helpful, can never fully define.
