Frank Bowling and the second wave abstraction

"It seemed that everyone was expecting me to paint some kind of protest art out of postcolonial discussion. For a while I fell for it. I painted a picture called the Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba" - Frank Bowling.

My recent visit to Tate Modern's Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition was quite an eye opener. Not only did it tell the story of the civil rights struggle in 60s/70s America eloquently, passionately, and prismatically through the art of the era, also it introduced me to a long list of artists I'd hitherto been either only vaguely aware of or completely ignorant of.

One of those artists was the Guyanese Frank Bowling. The two works, Middle Passage and Texas Louise, that'd been included in the Tate show took inspiration from abstract expressionism and Robert Rauschenberg but used those as launch pads to explore notions of identity, rootlessness, and the black experience as and of itself and as part of the wider experience of living in a 20th century dominated by US power.

It's surely no coincidence that Shoreditch's Hales Gallery's Frank Bowling:Fishes, Wishes in Summertime Blue had been programmed to overlap with the Tate blockbuster. In fact the practice of the small commercial galleries following the lead of the big organisations just serves to underline how vital it is that the Tate, the Royal Academy, the National Gallery etc; are braver and more diverse with their programming. Of late the Tate has definitely been leading the way on this front with recent shows devoted to female Turkish abstraction, the under rated Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, and the colourful, figurative Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar.

Many of the artists included in the Soul of a Nation show would be worthy of their own large scale retrospective and, hopefully, one day some of them will receive that. For now though, we've a chance to see what Frank Bowling's been doing in the last few years. The Hales show is small, just one room with eight large canvases on the walls, but is worth half an hour of your time.

 

Iona Miriam's Christmas Visit To & From Brighton (2017)

 

Bowling was born in 1936 in the Cuyuni-Mazuruni region of then British Guiana to a police district paymaster father and a seamstress mother. At the age of 15 he moved to England, completed his education, did his National Service with the Royal Air Force, before giving up early ambitions to become a poet or writer to focus on the visual arts.

 

He studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Fellow students included David Hockney, R.B.Kitaj, Allen Jones, and Derek Boshier. On graduation in 1962 Hockney controversially beat Bowling to the gold medal. Bowling had been relegated to silver because he'd married Paddy Kitchen. Kitchen was staff and Bowling was a student and such liaisons were frowned upon if not, clearly, completely verboten.

 

Stuart's Prediction (2016)

 

Pouring Over 2 Morrison Boys & 2 Maps II (2016)

 

Moving to New York in the mid-sixties saw Bowling and his art blossoming. Moving away from his peers and Francis Bacon inspired figurative painting he, with the encouragement of influential critic and essayist Clement Greenberg, drew upon the art of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman but fused their work with his own more personal and political themes, often to great acclaim.

 

Always interested both in the idea of home and the very concept of belonging Bowling's recent work uses generous blues and greens to evoke the imagery of forests and rivers but there's also an element of paint for paint's sake about it. Some of the paint is layered on so thickly that like, for instance Frank Auerbach, it almost demands you touch it. I had a cheeky feel when nobody was looking.

 

Ashton's Swirl I (2016)

 

Little Bird Overhead (2016)

 

The titles of the paintings on show are nothing if not a little abstruse. Many of them refer back to previous work in Bowling's oeuvre (Pouring Over 2 Morrison Boys & 2 Maps II) or even events from his personal life (Iona Miriam's Christmas Visit To & From Brighton) so it's difficult to ascertain any meaning from them. That's less of a problem than you might think as it means you can simply enjoy the work for what it is. Bowling had spoken about the expectations heaped upon him as a black, post-colonial painter and in this exhibition we can see how he's freed himself from the yoke of presumption and allowed his art to reach out in hope to the future.

 

Shadowbalding (2014)

 

Horsing Around (2016)

 



Works like Little Bird Overhead, Shadowbalding, and especially my favourite Collaboration with Ms & Damidge show that Bowling, like Pollock, revels in the physicality of paint and painting and at the age of 81 shows no signs yet of relenting. Often as we reach more advanced ages we find joy in the more simple, quotidian aspects of life. I visited my nan recently and her greatest pleasures now seem to be a smile, a touch, or a kiss. My nan's got twelve years on Bowling but he too has moved on to a different plateau. No longer does he need art to tell a political story. He's been there and done that better than most. Now he's earned the right to paint what he likes and call it what he likes. He's earned the right to celebrate colour for colour's sake and to bathe in the warm glow of both his art and his creation. I'd give him a smile and a hug for that.

 

Collaboration with Ms & Damidge (2016)

Made of Stone.

On Saturday me and a group of friends took a lovely, autumnal walk, around the Hart district of Hampshire. We walked from Hook to Rotherwick and back and as I sat in the beer garden of The Coach and Horses in Rotherwick nursing a very agreeable pint of Red Rye I became distracted by the aesthetic possibilities of a random stone and its shadow playing out against the painted wood of the pub bench in the late afternoon sunshine.

My friends joked that I'd probably get a blog out of it, maybe listen to The Stone Roses while I wrote it, but what they didn't seem to be aware of was (a) I've already written a blog about (much bigger) stones and (b) I had a blog all about stone and what you can do with it lined up anyway. Stone me, stone the crows, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and any other relevant idioms that contain the word 'stone'.

I'd recently visited the Design Museum in Holland Park and, while I was there, I'd noticed they were hosting a small exhibition, some indoors, some outdoors, called Set in Stone that aimed to represent 'small moments of monumentality that reflect the solidity and permanence of an elemental material". A material that has "followed Humanity's development since the dawn of time". Capital H the curator's own.

Set in Stone, the project, took place over two years and involved twenty-four international architects and designers, each of whom were given complete artistic freedom to explore the potential of Portuguese marble and limestone by making use of both its colour and its texture. Fifty-one works, in total, were created and the best of them, or perhaps just an arbitrary selection, ended up at the Design Museum.

Mancunian Peter Saville is better known as a founder and art director of Factory Records. Most famously he's created iconic record covers for Joy Division, New Order, OMD, Pulp, and Suede but he's also worked with Roxy Music, Wham!, and Gay Dad (if you remember them). His In Memorium looked like it could've featured on one of those radical sleeve designs. Not least Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. That album's artwork features an image of successive pulses from CP1919 (the first pulsar ever discovered) and In Memorium is a sculptural extrapolation of the same thing. Michael Bracewell has described Saville's work as "the muniments of a crematorium in deep space". I just wanted, like much in this show, to run my hands along its surface. That and look up the word 'muniments' in the dictionary.

 

Peter Saville - In Memorium (2017)

 

Jorge Silva - Pictorama (2017)

 

Two of the exhibits I didn't feel tempted to fondle were Jorge Silva's Pictorama and Sagmeister & Walsh's Don't Look Back. That's because they weren't actually there as such, replaced by an artist's impression of what they would look like. A bit of a swizz really but the exhibition was free.

 

The Alfacinha Silva has been given dozens of awards for the work he's done as Art Director for the Portuguese newspapers Combate and O Independente, he's headed up several magazines (20 Anos, Icon, LER, LX Metropole), and over the last few years he's been teaching Art Direction at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto whilst running a blog, Almanaque Silva, dedicated to Portuguese illustration. He's obviously very successful and highly respected in his field. Which makes it a shame that his Pictorama is rather boring, a set of three pieces based on the visual culture of signage and pictograms, it did nothing for me.

 

Marginally more impressive was the effort from New York based duo Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh. Their CV is even more star studded than Silva's. Past clients have included The Rolling Stones, Jay-Z, Levis, the New York Times, Snapchat, and the Guggenheim Museum and their work has been shown globally from Philadelphia to Prague and from Zurich to Osaka. The six panels of Don't Look Back are intended as a reference to the black screens of the smartphones, televisions, and tablets we spend so much of our life staring into these days. The mention of Charlie Brooker's brilliant Black Mirror in the accompanying leaflet only serves to show just how short, both satirically and aesthetically, Sagmeister & Walsh come up. Shame.    

 

Sagmeister & Walsh - Don't Look Back (2017)

 

Miguel Vieira Baptista - O Peso Da Pedra (2017)

 

Once you get away from the weakly worked through concepts and wall hangings and get to the actual stone itself though everything's rather lovely. Sexy even. Can stone be sexy? Probably not but let's go with it.

 

Miguel Vieira Baptista, born (like Silva) in Lisbon, received his degree from the Glasgow School of Art in 1993. Since then he's been developing projects as a product designer, curating design exhibitions, teaching at ESAD.CR in his native Portugal, and was, in 2013, awarded the Audi Mentorprize in Cologne. O Peso Da Pedra (The Weight of Stone) may look like a top end ashtray but was, apparently, inspired by his research into the construction methods of Roman antiquity.

 

Jasper Morrison's Alpinina looks even more like an ashtray. The Londoner is best known, we're informed, for his work in furniture, lighting, and tableware (like ashtrays perhaps?). He's collaborated with trendy Italian cheese grater, cutlery, and toothpick designers Alessi and had consultancies with South Korean phone/television giants Samsung and Japanese minimalists Muji. It's claimed Alpinina has been designed to give the bowl (or ashtray) the appearance of floating in mid-air even though a three year old child could easily work out it's not. But it looks pleasant. The leaflet provided for the show really goes out on a limb with this work suggesting that "it is a simple piece, meant to be placed on a table, sideboard or kitchen shelf and contain fruit, vegetables or nuts". Gee, thanks guys. It had long been a mystery to me what bowls were used for.





 

Jasper Morrison - Alpinina (2017)

 

Michael Anastassiades - Forbidden Fruit (2017)

 

Cypriot Michael Anastassiades seems to have provided us with the sculptural equivalent of one of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi's still lifes. In relation to his Forbidden Fruit he has said "No matter how many times a day I decide to consume a fruit, I am always fascinated by the moment when I am about to reveal the inside flesh". Steady on, old boy. The various 'vessels' he's created are easy on the eye but they don't look particularly fruit like and neither did they fill this visitor with erotic thoughts.

 

You have to go outside for that - and that's just where this exhibition took me. Last month I wrote, enthusiastically, about my visit to the Frieze Sculpture Park in Regent's Park and the three works displayed on the patio outside the Design Museum brought back fond memories of that. Unlike the works inside they seemed like they could be put to practical use too. In the case of Paulo David and Eduardo Souto de Moura as chairs and in the case of Elemental's A Thing Not An Object as either somewhere to park one's bicycle or even a urinal, a pissoir.

 

Elemental themselves see it as a slide for children (they'd need to be very small children) and something that offers "speed without the need for physical coordination". A member of the Chilean firm, Alejandro Aravena, has been a recent recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize but it has to be said it's the least impressive piece of stone of the three.

 

Paulo David runs his own studio in Funchal, Madeira. It seems likely that the climate there would be more conducive to sitting and relaxing on his Mult, a three piece sculpture that's been designed so that it can be arranged into different formations. The one the curators have gone for seems to suggest two people sitting back to back and not interacting with each other.

 

Which is quite the opposite of Eduardo Souto de Moura's Conversadeira which seems to be made for deeply conversing, possibly even kissing and canoodling, with a friend or lover. You'd get a cold bum sat on that stone surface in the British October weather, and that might dampen your ardour somewhat, but what lovely stone it is. In lieu of having another person there to canoodle with I ran my hands along the smooth and curvaceous surface. I like to think it's what Souto de Moura would've wanted.

 

Conversadeira (Conversation Seat) was the winner for me with Peter Saville and Paulo David taking up podium positions alongside him. I had a fun hour or so looking at stone in new and different ways and, just as my friends had joked, I'm managed to get a blog out of it. Forget blood out of a stone. This is a blog out of a stone and, yes, I did listen to The Stone Roses while I wrote it.



 

Paulo David - Mult (2017)

 

Elemental - A Thing Not An Object (2016)

 

Eduardo Souto de Moura - Conversadeira (2017)

I Know You Got Soul:How Black America Used Art In The Struggle.

"I mean to tell it like it is. I ain't subtle and I don't intend to become subtle as long as America remains the great white destroyer" - Dana Chandler.

In the seventeen plus years that Tate Modern has been open I don't think I've ever visited an exhibition as well attended as their recent Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power. I visited, with my friends Mark and Natalie, the Friday before the exhibition closed and every single room was full of people, often passionately discussing both the art and the issues addressed by the art. When we finally left just before 8pm there was still a queue of a couple of hundred people waiting to go in.

The fact many of those people were 'of colour' was important too. Art galleries can be pretty white places (as observed on a recent visit to the Royal Academy), hardly in keeping with the make-up of a truly multicultural city like London, and anything that's been done to widen both the appeal and the demographic can only be applauded. What with the advent of Trump, and the rise of the far right in America, and elsewhere, this exhibition, very clearly, arrived just when it was needed.

Which was great for the gallery, and great for us visitors, if very worrying for the future of the world. Assuming we're not all annihilated in a nuclear war (Trump seems like the sort of man that if he was to go down would take us all with him) the great success of this exhibition should ensure braver curatorship and more diversity, at least in the art world, in the coming years.

Reginald Gammon - Freedom Now (1963)

One of the many terrifying things about Trump's America is the fact that the KKK now seem to be less marginal figures than they've been in decades. The first painting to catch your eye as you walk into the first room of the exhibition is Norman Lewis's America the Beautiful. From a distance it looks like an abstract expressionist work worthy of Clyfford Still or Robert Motherwell. It's only on closer inspection that the grim reality comes into view. These aren't daubs open to interpretation but klansmen marching in their hoods, burning crosses in hands, off to do something both unspeakably inhuman and unspeakably inhumane. The blood of African Americans runs through this exhibition as freely as the paint leaves the brush. This is not a sanitised look at black American history.

Lewis, as befits his work, was for the most part a maker of beautiful, colourful abstract work but, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement (and horrified by the racism that movement brought out in others), he took time out to paint this quietly powerful, sinister indictment of what lies beneath in the land of the free. Painted in 1960, five years later it was shown (along with works by Reginald Gammon and Romare Bearden) as part of the New York based Spiral group's only show.

Spiral had been formed in the Big Apple in 1963 just before the March on Washington which saw Martin Luther King Jr deliver his I Have A Dream speech to a quarter of a million civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. They may have mounted only one single, purely black'n'white, exhibition but, in their determination to take control of the way their works were exhibited, exhibit together fraternally, and to boldly explore different methods to provoke and ask questions, they inspired many other black artists across the country to put their minds, and their media, behind the struggle for equal rights.

Norman Lewis - America the Beautiful (1960)

Romare Bearden - The Dove (1964)

Their hand had been forced. Many Black artists were excluded from nearly all mainstream museums at the time. The Organisation of Black American Culture (OBAC) formed in Chicago in 1967 and their solution was to create The Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural, in the city's South Side. The Wall featured images of iconic black figures from sports stars and musicians to writers and civil rights leaders. There's a slide show of some of the fabulous work that was created for it and, alongside it, a vitrine featuring copies of the Black Panther newspaper which was founded (also in 1967) by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale.

The Black Panthers themselves had formed a year earlier in Oakland, California with a ten point platform that demanded, amongst other things, improved housing and education, an end to police brutality, and black male exemption from all military service. They launched a free breakfast programme and a health clinic for needy locals and their paper was launched with Emory Douglas, the party's Minister of Culture, its chief designer.



Jeff Donaldson - Study for the Wall of Respect (Miles Davis) (1967)

Cliff Joseph - Blackboard (1969)

In 1965 Harlem the poet, playwright, and cultural commentator Amiri Baraka (who'd changed his name from LeRoi Jones following the assassination of Malcolm X earlier that year) founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School and, with writer Larry Neal, outlined the aims of the Black Arts Movement, declaring that black writers, musicians, and artists should make art that 'speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America'. Baraka's poem SOS was painted on the side of The Wall of Respect.

Elsewhere in Harlem, Melvin Edwards, William T Williams, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose had formed the Smokehouse Associates. They were taking a more indirect approach to improving life in the poorer areas of New York. They hoped that by filling Harlem with abstract wall paintings and sculptures that they could bring about 'actual change'. That if people saw their environment differently they'd behave differently within it.

Clifford Joseph had the sense to see that if children didn't have any black role models they'd be in real danger of growing up in a country that seemed to have no role for them. He invented a 'black ABC' which referenced black American figures like Malcolm X and Nat Turner (a slave rebellion leader in 1830s Virginia) as well as prominent world stars like Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. As well as showing in galleries he took his painting round schools in the New York area getting kids to engage with it.

But for the white establishment it was a slow, and still ongoing, process of change. In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum in New York opened its Harlem on my Mind exhibition which claimed to represent the neighbourhood whilst, remarkably, not inviting a single African American artist living there to show their work. In response to this Cliff Joseph and Benny Andrews formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) that campaigned, in much the same way the Guerrilla Girls do now for female artists, for better representation of black artists in American museum collections and exhibition programmes. Judging by the fact that the two most well known artists in this entire exhibition, Andy Warhol and Alice Neel, are both white it seems, sadly, that they still have much work to do.

Archibald Motley - The First One Hundred Years:He Amongst You Who is Without Sin Shall Cast the First Stone:Forgive Them Father For They Know Now What They Do (c.1963-1972)



One of the most shocking pieces in the whole exhibition is Archibald Motley's The First One Hundred Years. It took Motley nearly ten years to 'perfect' his nightmarish vision of a dystopian America featuring Confederate flags, a hooded Klansman, and some very strange fruit indeed hanging from the denuded branches of an almost post-nuclear winter tree. Satan fraternises with the dove of peace, the faces of JFK and Martin Luther King (both gunned down during the making of the painting) stare blankly from the tree, as all the while burning crosses illuminate the whole sorry scene. It's Hieronymus Bosch at the home of the brave, Guernica over Gettysburg, if the American Dream could become a nightmare then Motley was the man who had painted it. Motley lived until 1981 but he never painted again in his entire life.

If his work was done, Stokely Carmichael's was just beginning. In 1966 the future 'honorary prime minister' of the Black Panther Movement made the 'Black Power' rallying cry (co-opting author Richard Wright's term for political usage for what's believed to be the first time) during a speech at the Mississippi March Against Fear. It was a refusal to be cowed by the racist violence that sought to curb the advances demanded by the civil rights movement. Soon the raised fist became the emblem of 'Black Power' and two years later at the medal ceremony for the 200 metres at the Mexico Olympics Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously raised their fists to show their support for the struggle. White Australian silver medallist Peter Norman wore a badge to show solidarity with Smith and Carlos.

Faith Ringgold - American People Series ~20:Die (1967)

Dana C. Chandler - Fred Hampton's Door 2 (1975)

The message was clear. Yet the murder continued. Fred Hampton was a revolutionary leader and community activist in Chicago. Despite his youth he served as the Deputy Chairman of the Black Panther Party but in 1969, when he was still only 21, a murderous police raid ended his life. His funeral attracted 5,000 mourners and his death caused predictable, and righteous, outrage. It also inspired Dana Chandler, who'd been attracted to the Black Power movement after he'd seen police use violence to bust up a peaceful Civil Rights protest in Boston two years earlier, to make his chilling tribute to Hampton. Initially Chandler had made a painting of a door but when that was stolen he remade the work using an actual door. The bullet holes tell their own chilling story.

Benny Andrews - Did the Bear Sit Under the Tree? (1969)

Melvin Andrews - Lynch Fragments:Some Bright Morning (1963)

Melvin Andrews - Lynch Fragments:Afro-Phoenix #2 (1963)

Melvin Andrews - Lynch Fragments:Mamba (1965)

As do Melvin Andrews' grisly looking Lynch Fragments. They were begun a year after the murder of Nation of Islam member Ronald Stokes by the LAPD and although, on one hand, they evoke the shameful history of lynching they also, conversely, relate to the strength and the fighting back. Afro-Phoenix, for example, draws from the myth of that famous bird's rebirth.

Other Los Angeles artists were creating by recycling and mixing assorted items. The city, not for the last time, was experiencing great racial tension. In 1962 police had shot a Nation of Islam member in a mosque. Two years later further police violence triggered the Watts Rebellion which ended with shops and houses in ruins and thirty four people dead.

Artists like John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar sought to address this with their art, their assemblage. Purifoy had said "West Coast Black art stands in direct opposition to art for art's sake. It insists that if art is not for the sake of something it is not art". Outterbridge made a tribute to Martin Luther King by mixing together a suit reminiscent of the style King preferred, banners naming the sites of the most famous marches he'd led, and a cropped photograph of Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral.

Betye Saar co-opted gaudy novelty items featuring racial stereotyping and turned them into art. Sambo's Banjo case opens up to reveal the scene of a violent double lynching taking place in front of a group of calm white onlookers. Aunt Jemima was the nation's most recognised 'Southern mammy' at the time and used to advertise pancake mix. In many ways she was an icon of docile servitude but by placing her amongst the radical imagery of weapons, raised fists, and African textiles Saar elevated her from a position of drudgery to that of power. It was as subtle a subversion as Motley's message was blatant but it was no less powerful. This was a war that needed to be waged on many fronts.

John Outterbridge - About Martin (1975)

Betye Saar - Sambo's Banjo (1971-1972)

Betye Saar - The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)

Noah Purifoy - Watts Riot (1966)

In pure artistic terms my very favourite things in the show were the works of the AfriCOBRA group, and particularly Wadsworth Jarrell, in Chicago. The question they asked was could they 'sacrifice the wants of self and ego to create the needed positive visual images of our people?' and the answer they gave was "Yes. We can". Words that were echoed later by a community organiser from the Windy City who went on to become the first black president of the United States.

Jarrell's portraits of Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale look back to Gustav Klimt (and seem to have served as something of an inspiration to the brilliant Chris Ofili). Excerpts of X's speeches hang round his neck in the bright colour of Kool-Aid drinks. Jeff Donaldson bestows dignity and class upon the black experience, Gerald Williams considers the building of a black nation, and Carolyn Lawrence's work is, quite simply, groovy as fuck. The AfriCOBRA room alone, like many at the Tate, would make a fine standalone exhibition.

Wadsworth Jarrell - Black Prince (1971)

Wadsworth Jarrell - Liberation Soldiers (1972)

Jeff Donaldson - Wives of Sango (1971)

Carolyn Lawrence - Black Children Keep Your Spirits Free (1972)

Gerald Williams - Nation Time (1970)



Charles White and David Hammons may've lacked the colour of the AfriCOBRA artists but the very different path they'd taken proved no less fruitful. Hammons, in 1968, had started making body prints, coating himself in vegetable fat and pressing his body onto printing paper before applying pigment to reveal the image saturated into the surface. His Injustice Case refers to Bobby Seale's trial for conspiracy to incite violence, alongside Yippie Abbie Hoffman, at the Chicago Democratic Convention. During the case Seale was prevented from having the lawyer of his choice present and was bound and gagged in the courtroom on the order of Judge Julius Hoffman (presumably no relation).

Charles White adapted the style of Civil War era Wanted posters to show how the value of black lives had, historically in America, been tied to labour and productivity. How the black man had become a thing to be owned and operated or, indeed, bound and gagged.

Charles White - Wanted Poster No.5 (1969)

David Hammons - Injustice Case (1970)

Sam Gilliam felt his 'non-narrative media-oriented kind of painting' represented blackness just as well as the figurative works of Hammons and White. On the East Coast, in New York and Washington DC, a group of ex-Yale students had become aware of, and influenced by, both the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and the jazz music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. They took some stick from some of the more politicised black artists but their work has stood the test of time and to show a true picture of the era their inclusion here feels important.

William T Willams even named his work for the recently deceased hard bop saxophonist. He aimed to capture the cascades of sounds in Trane's performances in visual form. Gilliam named his gauzy acrylic after the date that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Alabama born Jack Whitten used an Afro-comb to manipulate layers of black paint in his triangular tribute to Malcolm X (it was triangular because triangles are strong (like X) and because Malcolm had visited the pyramids), and Ed Clark, part of the second generation of abstract expressionists, was the first American artist to experiment with irregularly shaped canvases.

William T. Williams - Trane (1969)

Virginia Jaramillo - Untitled (1971)

Sam Gilliam - April 4 (1969)

Ed Clark - Yenom (#9) - 1970

Jack Whitten - Homage to Malcolm (1970)

Frank Bowling - Middle Passage (1970)

Frank Bowling was born in the former colony of British Guiana. His beautifully coloured collage tells a not so beautiful story. Middle Passage refers to the, often lethal, journey across the Atlantic from Africa taken by those who'd been forced into slavery. As well as including photos of his family, his mother's store, and newly independent, and renamed, Guyana he took from the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian.

More straightforward, but no less impressive, portraiture came from the likes of Emma Amos, Alice Neel, and Beauford Delaney. OBAC had said that 'a Black Hero is any person who honestly reflects the beauty of Black life and genius in his or her style, does not forget his Black brothers and sisters who are less fortunate, does what he does in such an outstanding manner that he or she cannot be imitated or replaced' and it'd be a very brave man to suggest that Muhammad Ali does not fit that criteria.

With Warhol's portrait of Ali, Raymond Saunders' of Jack Johnson, and Alice Neel's of Faith Ringgold prominent black people were finally being afforded the same status as prominent white people. Emma Amos, admirably, painted her babysitter with the exact same dignity as Ali or Ringgold and if Delaney's portrait of the gay writer James Baldwin is said to actually be of someone else it doesn't matter that much, it's a nice painting!

Emma Amos - Eva the Babysitter (1973)

Beauford Delaney - Portrait of James Baldwin? (1971)

Andy Warhol - Muhammad Ali (1978)

Raymond Saunders - Jack Johnson (1971)

Barkley Hendricks went one step further and made himself the star of his paintings. In Icon for My Man Superman he aligns himself with Bobby Seale who said 'Superman never saved any black people' while at the same time showing that the black artist can't wait to be invited into the insular art world but must break into it like a superhero.

In What's Going On Hendricks riffs on Marvin Gaye's ground breaking album of three years earlier although it looks more like a cross between a Chic album cover and Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe. If the female nudity seems somewhat gratuitous Hendricks provides what special interest magazines used to headline 'one for the ladies' too. In Icon for My Man Superman he's got no strides on but in Brilliantly Endowed he's gone one further, proudly displaying his penis and athletic torso for all to admire. The title's not as boastful as it first appears though. Hendricks was taking a swipe at New York Times critic Hilton Kramer who'd described him, somewhat problematically, as 'a brilliantly endowed painter'. In some ways Hendricks gets to have his cake and eat it. "How dare you say I have a large penis? Although I do, as it happens, have a reasonably impressive penis".

Barkley Hendricks - Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved any Black People - Bobby Seale) (1969)

Barkley Hendricks - What's Going On (1974)

Barkley Hendricks - Brilliantly Endowed (Self-Portrait) (1977)

Alice Neel - Faith Ringgold (1977)



As black figurative artists were getting bolder with their portraiture the abstract artists, too, were pushing boundaries again. Sam Gilliam (in Carousel Change) removed the canvas from its stretcher and knotted it so that it would hang differently depending on the gallery it was in, Jack Whitten used a rake to move the paint around, Joe Overstreet painted backdrops for eccentric jazz genius and pioneer of Afrofuturism Sun Ra, Alvin Loving cut up and collaged old paintings (that he felt were no longer relevant to the struggle) and then introduced leather and fur to them, and Melvin Edwards used barbed wire and chains to evoke the days of slavery gone by as much as the days of mass incarceration still, both then and now, very much part of the black American experience.

Alma Thomas was in 1972, at the age of 80, the first African American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Lower Manhattan. She'd become as fascinated with NASA and the space age as she had once been with the Civil Rights movement. Frank Bowling, as we saw earlier, had looked at the forced expatriation of Africans into slavery and was now imagining the whole world as a fluid, almost spectral, place. At a time when many African Americans were looking to Africa as the mother continent, Bowling was beginning to see everyone, simply, as citizens of the world free to travel, live, and love wherever they like. In Texas Louise the borders are, almost literally, evaporating.

Alma Thomas - Mars Dust (1972)

Jack Whitten - Asa's Palace (1973)

Frank Bowling - Texas Louise (1971)

Sam Gilliam - Carousel Change (1970)

Melvin Edwards - Curtain (for William and Peter) (1969)

Alvin Loving - Untitled (1973)

Joe Overstreet - We Came from There to Get Here (1970)

Betye Saar is the only artist to be given a room completely to herself. Her early reimagining of racist stereotypes as totems of power had given way to a more conceptual approach. After attending the National Conference of Artists, an annual gathering of African American artists, in Chicago in 1970 she visited that city's Field Museum of National History and the African and Oceanic collections there awakened in her, and her friend David Hammons, an interest in the interconnectedness of everything, ritual objects, and the supposed spiritual power they're believed to hold. She later travelled to Haiti and Nigeria to study religious practices and belief systems.

The work she created in this era is intriguing, earthy, mystical, feminine, and evoked ancient methods for retaining information. The wood, paper, glass, feathers, beads, plastic, fur, poker chips, plastic skulls, and leather used to make them are mundane in the extreme but combined, and curated by Saar's hand, they make eerie, potentially prescient, art. They seem to belong in a different time, a different place, possibly even on a different sphere.

Betye Saar - Nine Mojo Secrets (1971)

Betye Saar - Ten Mojo Secrets (1972)

Howardena Pindell - Untitled (1978)

By 1974, fed up of the limited opportunities available for black artists to show their work, Linda Goode-Bryant opened the JAM (Just Above Midtown) gallery in New York. Such was its popularity that, similar to the Tate's show, on its opening night the queues spiralled out onto the street.

JAM was committed to showing new, inventive, and adventurous work. Senga Nengudi used nylon stockings to create her sculptures, Hammons was now using greasy bags, hair, and bbq bones, and Howardena Pindell embedded thousands of hole punched dots into the surface of her sequinned canvas. In many ways it must've felt like the struggle had almost been won. Black artists had for the most part moved away from politicising and were free to be as experimental, or pretentious, as white artists had always been. But, as we all know, that's not the end of the story. Riots, shootings, gang violence, and mass incarcerations continued throughout the last three decades and if the pendulum eventually swung so far that the United States could finally elect, in Barack Obama, its first black president it has now swung so far back the other way that an openly racist, lying, abusive, sex-pest sits behind the desk of the Oval Office (when he's not at the golf course). I can only reiterate that no amount of great art will ever make up for the damage that this man will do to America and the world.

I must also reiterate just how timely, and how brilliant, this exhibition was. If my only gripe is that the photography room was too small to negotiate with such huge numbers in attendance then that's saying something. It was hugely important that the curators pitched this show correctly and that's exactly what they did. As we walked out of the last room into a shop blasting out skronking jazz worthy of Albert Ayler and enthused visitors browsing books and, hopefully, planning their next cultural expeditions I felt confident that the Tate will one day look back at this show as a landmark event in its programming and that many more adventurous shows will follow in its wake. One day, perhaps, one of the numerous children in attendance will host a retrospective here and say that their visit to Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power was the day they decided to devote their life both to art and to making the world a fairer, better, more beautiful place for people of all colours everywhere. We can all raise a fist to that.



David Hammons - Untitled (c.1980s)

David Hammons - Flight Fantasy (c.1980s)

Senga Nengudi - R.S.V.P. XI (1977/2004)