S.D. African-American Museum’s 1st Show : Art: Printmaking technique overshadows personal expression in new outlet for neglected artists.

The questions persist--sometimes leading to enlightening answers but more often just staining an experience with their nagging presence: What is American about American art? What are the particular qualities of art made by women? And now, what characterizes African-American art?

In the late 1960s, the question of a “black aesthetic” was broached with revolutionary fervor, as an offshoot of the issue of black nationalism.

“We do not need pictures of oranges in a bowl or trees standing innocently in the midst of a wasteland,” activist Ron Karenga wrote in 1968. “If we must paint oranges and trees, let our guerrillas be eating those oranges for strength and using those trees for cover.”

Few black nationalists would tolerate art of pure form. Patience was also short for those artists who identified more with American art and culture than with that of Africa.

“The black artist in the American society who creates without interjecting a note of anger is creating not as a black man, but as an American,” critic Addison Gayle Jr. wrote in 1971.

Such ardent separatism no longer dominates cultural thought among African-Americans, but neither have black artists been absorbed, much less embraced, by the art Establishment of this country. Black artists are shamefully under-represented in galleries, museums and art publications nationwide.

The nascent African-American Museum of Fine Arts in San Diego has established itself as a corrective. Under the leadership of Shirley Williams, it aims to “preserve, promote and stimulate the art and culture of African-Americans from a historical and contemporary perspective,” by organizing shows and eventually presenting them in a permanent downtown facility.

The museum’s inaugural show, “African-American Abstraction in Printmaking,” in the Lyceum Theatre lobby through Feb. 28, dispels the notion of a single black aesthetic as thoroughly as it dismisses the 1960s radical call for anger in art. Tame decorative schemes prevail here, burying any sense of anger in an affirmative barrage of color and pattern. Personal and cultural references surface only sporadically, but, when they do, they add depth and a sense of focus to the show, which otherwise suffers from empty exuberance.

John Scott’s figurative collages, both titled “Blues for the Middle Passage II,” evoke the forced anonymity and physical vulnerability imposed on Africans transported to this country as slaves. Cut-out silhouettes of men and women, some bound, others fallen, are clustered together or aligned in rows across a red, raft-like panel atop a dark sea. The casually scripted phrase, “No Homeland,” appears on each print, echoing the plight of these uprooted men and women. Their legs cut at the calf, they stand immobile, adrift between two worlds.

Cultural history mates more surreptitiously with form in Phyllis Thompson’s serigraph of magenta, blue and gold dots hovering in slightly compromised rows, overlapping to yield edges of green and violet. The print’s title, “Carrot Cakewalk,” suggests a clever genesis for the buoyant design--the rhythmic stamping of a cut carrot--but Thompson’s sense of humor is sharp. The cakewalk, based on an African song and shuffling dance, became a dance of subtle defiance among black slaves, in which they publicly mocked their unsuspecting owners’ movements.

Of the 25 artists in the show, few invest their formal musings with as weighty a theme as Scott or as much schizophrenic charm as Thompson.

Among the show’s other enduring visions is Howardena Pindell’s “Autobiography: Past and Present,” which lays out fragments of the cross-cultural mosaic shaping the artist’s sensibility.

John Dowell Jr.’s skittish marks, whether the residue of dreams or notations in a private musical language, bespeak a searching and spirituality, as do the smoky triptychs of Quentin Morris.

Keith Morrison’s “Dance in America” series pulsates with energy and Margo Humphrey’s “Sunday Afternoon” tingles with the romantic tension of a young couple’s weekend rendezvous.

All of the artists in the show participated during the last decade in the Brandywine Workshop’s artist-in-residence program. The workshop, which organized this show, was established in Philadelphia in 1972 to promote both the art of minority artists and the medium of printmaking.

Though approaches here range from crisply defined geometries to organic, spontaneous gestures, all of the artists are immersed in printmaking techniques--many at the expense of substantial content. They float, layer and weave colors and forms, but for all of this texture, the show is unsettlingly smooth. Where are the enigmas, the subtleties of perception, the episodes of curious or painful beauty?

These, perhaps, will come in future shows by the African-American Museum of Fine Arts. Though this first effort is understated, the museum’s mandate is not. It promises support and a sense of legitimacy for black artists, two things this city’s and this country’s “mainstream” arts institutions have proved unwilling to give.