PALETTE OF PASSION FROM BLACK ARTISTS

Angry demonstrators weren’t alone as they worked for freedom during the American civil rights movement. They had the help of black artists who vigorously and visually upheld the cause.

“During the ‘60s, black artists used their creativity as a vehicle for social change,” noted Leonard Simon, a professor of black art history at UC Riverside. “Black artists, previously able to show their work in black museums and galleries only, let the cultural Establishment know about their art. They were saying, ‘Our civil rights allow us to be artists too. You have to understand that even if our art is different, even if we’re wearing Afros and corn rows.’ ”

“Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973” puts these ideas on view in an exhibition filled with politically charged art by 43 black American artists, which runs through Feb. 20 at the Lang Gallery of Scripps College in Claremont.

Paintings, prints, assemblages, collages and drawings that make powerful statements are accompanied by documentary photographs chronicling black activism and social events of the troubled decade.

Figureheads captured in black and white include Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and Coretta Scott King in Moneta Sleet Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize-winning view of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow at her slain husband’s funeral. Artists represented include Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, Melvin Edwards, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Raymond Saunders, Richard Yarde, David Hammons and Sam Gilliam.

“This exhibit deals with art of the decade that sprang up simultaneously with a new black identity of social, economic and political pride,” said Simon, a personable man with intense eyes. “In fact, black art took on an identity of its own then too.

“Before the ‘60s,” explained the 49-year-old scholar, “most black American artists were creating figurative paintings that dealt with life in Southern rural towns. But these artists weren’t accepted into mainstream American art--which then revolved around Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and Minimalism. However, as black artists used the same figurative style to show social injustice, people began to think of the work as black art, and gave it a label of social realism or protest art.”

Simon, who was jailed at 18 for demonstrating with Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., earned a master’s degree in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for arts organizations (including the California Arts Council) for more than 20 years and will present a lecture at Scripps College on Feb. 12 in conjunction with the exhibit.

“The (civil rights) revolution not only gained blacks recognition as artists,” Simon continued, “it made them visual spokesmen for the black culture in general. In one example, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art organized an exhibit in 1969 titled ‘Harlem on My Mind,’ but didn’t hire any blacks to organize it. After demonstrations and picket lines, the Met people, and many others, realized that they couldn’t tell black people how to be black anymore.”

“Tradition and Conflict,” running through Feb. 20, is a traveling exhibit first shown last year at Harlem’s Studio Museum. It was organized by Mary Schmidt Campbell, now in her ninth year as executive director at the center for the study of black American art.

Several works in the exhibit are figurative in style, such as Ringgold’s “The Flag Is Bleeding,” which depicts a white couple and a black man bloodied from the latter’s self-inflicted knife wound. “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” by Betye Saar, a Los Angeles artist with an international reputation, shows the stereotypic black figure rebelliously ripping her way out of the labels on four pancake-mix boxes.

“These artists didn’t necessarily change their style,” Simon noted, “though it may seem so because their images were new. They just received greater recognition nationally and were freer than ever before to express their creativity.”