Mexican Influence on African American Art

In recent years, much art has focused on social issues. This has dismayed quite a few who think art ought to be about art. A compelling exhibition at the California African-American Museum reminds that today is not the first time art has addressed the condition of those society kicks out and steps on.

“In the Spirit of Resistance: African American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School” carries us back to the late 1920s, when the hottest and most influential new art was the explosive and literally revolutionary work of Mexican artists Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and--to a lesser extent--Rufino Tamayo. They painted architecturally scaled polemics--bloody satires against the privileged inheritors of the conquistadors, fervent celebration of indigenous folk culture. The art was more than political, it was a demand for racial amelioration.

Their passion impressed many, including American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton and his student Jackson Pollock. Pollock and others later recontextualized the scale and intensity of the Mexicans into an abstract art. Overtly it had no social or political agenda. It was an art for museums and collectors, not for the people at large. It set a tone that lingers to this day.

Another group of Americans embraced the Mexicans more wholeheartedly. Certain black artists felt a profound affinity for everything the muralists expressed, from the need for equality to the longing for cultural completeness. “In the Spirit of Resistance” focuses on eight of them: Charles Alston, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Sargent Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, John Wilson and Hale Woodruff.

Each visited Mexico, variously meeting the muralists, acting as their assistants or just generally hanging out. Catlett’s personal life was the most profoundly changed by the experience. She went to Mexico in 1946, joined a legendary print workshop, the Taller Graphica Popular, and married Mexican artist Francisco Mora. They had three children, and she taught at the National University for 16 years. Along the way she ran afoul of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee and was barred from returning home for a decade. Perforce, she became a Mexican citizen.

Yet she, like the others, forged her Mexican experience into an African American art that gains in translation. Graphic works like “In Harriet Tubman I Helped Hundreds to Freedom” bear some resemblance to the bold attack of her husband. But the quality of her sympathy brings Kathe Kollwitz to mind. Her sculpture “Pensive” has some of the restrained classicism of a Benin bronze. In the end, however, Catlett, like the others, comes across as an American artist of a very special sort.

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None of them shows the slightest interest in making salon art that allows one to cop out merely talking about its calligraphic plasticity. Johnson, however, does show that a combination of cosmopolitan form and inner urgency can combine brilliantly in his “The Mask.” Several, such as Woodruff and Alston, actually painted heroic murals like their 1949 collaboration, “The Negro in California History,” in L.A.’s Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building. (Alas, logistics only allow the exhibition small photographic reproductions.)

Others, like Wilson, picked up an edge from American social realists like Ben Shahn and Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias. Wilson’s “The Trial” shows a black man standing accused before three white judges and a white female witness. We know he’s in big trouble.

If Wilson’s message stays up front, however, it’s not for lack of aesthetic concerns. After all, it’s the look of the work that makes people pay attention. His painting “The Worker” has a marvelous sense of abstract pattern. His drawing “Mother and Child” may be directly influenced by Rivera, but it has a sense of volume the Mexican would have admired.

Charles White became a respected artistic patriarch in Los Angeles. Earlier work shown here is full of brine and vinegar. His “Our War” translates Siqueiros’ dramatic space into a cheeky reminder of black Americans’ contribution to World War II.

At a glance, Biggers’ “Preacher Man” bears a startling resemblance to work of a German Expressionist like Otto Dix. But Biggers paints so funky the issue of influence becomes a nonstarter. Ditto for Lawrence. Compositions like “Going Home” work so well you don’t care if they are the result of canny planning or folksy intuition.

If this art makes any general statement, it has to do with the virtual inability of Americans to hide who they are.

The traveling exhibition’s guest curator was Lizzetta LeFall Collins. She collaborated on the catalog with Shifra Goldman. The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of Arts in association with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco.

* California African-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park; through Aug. 17, closed Mondays, (213) 744-7432.