Looking back to retrace black artists' forward steps

By Christopher Knight

Jan. 28, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

A year ago, the first of a three-part survey of the postwar history of African American art in Los Angeles opened at Cal State L.A. and the Craft and Folk Art Museum. Titled “Fade (1990-2003),” the selection of work by 50 artists chronicled the emergence of “post-black art.” To oversimplify a bit, the post-black tag refers to an epochal switch: An effort to codify a presumed essence of black art receded into history, and an engagement with the wide-ranging, less circumscribed work of contemporary black artists accelerated.

Last weekend, the second and third parts of the survey opened, completing the show’s reverse chronology. “Pathways (1966-1989),” at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park and the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, charts the development of the idea of black art that began to, well, “fade” after the 1980s.

Part 3, also at Barnsdall, looks back further. The immediate postwar era has been a kind of no-man’s land in the study of African American art, a hazy and almost wholly uncharted territory between the artistic inspiration provided by the legendary Harlem Renaissance in New York and the Watts rebellion of 1965, which both devastated and galvanized L.A.’s black community.

“Reaction (1945-1965),” with just 13 artists, is the survey’s smallest segment. “Pathways,” with 75, is the largest. By itself, this nearly sixfold jump in numbers speaks of an abrupt expansion of cultural consciousness.

The other element of the survey that emerges as potentially significant concerns artistic mediums. Curators Dale Brockman Davis and Leonard Simon have brought together an abundance of works on paper and a lot of assemblage art. In quantity and quality there is a paucity of painting and sculpture, traditionally conceived.

This is provocative. Paper has long been considered the medium in which developing artistic thought unfolds most directly. Assemblage and collage, for their part, are the hallmarks of a distinctively modern sensibility in art.

That drawing and assemblage would take precedence over traditional painting and sculpture, whose long histories are so closely identified with European art, does not seem surprising for African American artists -- across the nation and, especially, in postwar L.A. In the minds of the generation coming home after World War II, Los Angeles was the future.

The pairing of these sections of the larger survey offers some serendipitous moments. Take the late Charles White, whose drawings appear in both, and David Hammons, the internationally celebrated artist, who now lives in New York.

The Chicago-born White traveled to Mexico in 1947, where he learned lithography at the Taller de Grafica Popular, the leading political print shop, and was deeply influenced by the Social Realism of modern Mexican art. He met Diego Rivera and Pablo O’Higgins, and he stayed at the home of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose connections to Los Angeles are now the stuff of legend.

White’s two drawings, in addition to their brilliant draftsmanship, operate on complex levels of association. One is a monumental drawing of a black man, roughly life-size, who has wrapped himself in an American flag. Pointedly, the flag drapes his body like the robe of an Old Testament prophet.

The other is a small pen-and-ink study for a figurative sculpture, in which a man emerges atop a tall pile of randomly stacked wood. Either this fellow has arrived at the mountaintop, or he’s about to be burned at the stake.

These drawings prepare the conceptual ground for two slightly later works on paper by Hammons. Both are body-prints from the early 1970s, in which the artist used his own and other people’s bodies as human printing plates.

Their bodies were “inked” (often with a mixture of tempera and charcoal) and pressed onto the sheet of paper, leaving a figurative imprint that is at once sensuous and claustrophobic, erotic and ghastly. The skin of the body, squeezed and distorted as if in the throes of a sexual encounter or a brutal beating, merges with the “skin” of the picture plane.

Talk about a legacy for the Taller de Grafica idea of political printmaking! The relative absence of black bodies in the history of mainstream American art is bluntly ameliorated.

Other notable works on paper cover diverse territory. Melonee Blocker made charming watercolors of the Santa Monica Pier right after World War II. Yvonne Cole Meo’s very different, contemporaneous watercolor employs familiar Cubist and Expressionist devices to convey the brutality of a slave driver.

An untitled 1961 pen-and-ink wash by Herman Kofi Bailey Jr. depicts an anonymous man staggering beneath the weight of a generic box, which he has hoisted onto his shoulder. A 1967 poster designed by Eugene Hawkins mixes fragments of political tracts with heroic images of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and a pair of black panthers. The tangled, woven, linear marks used to draw the hair and shade the skin in Ramsess’ 1983 portrait of jazz legend John Coltrane is embedded with written notations -- names, love notes, etc. -- like lost messages in a bottle.

The shows also feature assemblages and collages by such well-known artists as Houston Conwill, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, John Riddle, Bettye Saar and LaMonte Westmoreland. Sometimes, both familiar and unfamiliar works are included.

Saar’s 1971 “Nine Mojo Secrets” is a window (made from a washboard) whose glass panes are covered in leather adorned with suns, moons, stars, skulls, feathers and woven or braided talismans. This fresh window -- through which you see in an unexpected way -- is shamanistic in two senses: It conjures a magical amulet, and it evokes the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, the Dada father of assemblage art. The work is further illuminated by the inclusion of early etchings by Saar, from 1964, that show animals as magical creatures.

One disappointment is the absence of Purifoy’s remarkable 1965 assemblage, “Watts Riot.” Purifoy, who died last March at 86, is well represented in the show, but “Watts Riot” is a pivotal work -- especially for an exhibition that uses 1965 as an appropriate cultural dividing line.

Made from fragments of charred wood scavenged from a conflagration in which dozens died, thousands were arrested and millions of dollars in damages accrued, the work is itself something of a talisman. Its blackened surface conjures a historical moment that saw the inauguration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the assassination of Malcolm X, the Alabama civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, student demonstrations in Washington against the Vietnam War and -- not least of all -- the emergence of a profound shift in African American art. Realist and expressionist depictions of black humanity, a central aesthetic since the Harlem Renaissance, are replaced by spiritual, metaphysical and metaphoric conceptions of “blackness.”

If the pivotal 1965 Purifoy assemblage is missed, the show does include an eye-opening selection of early works by Daniel Larue Johnson, dating from 1962 and 1963. Johnson is perhaps most widely known for “Peace Form One” (1980), a monumental stainless steel sculpture opposite the United Nations in New York, erected as a memorial to Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche. Part ancient obelisk, part Modernist wedge, “Peace Form One” couldn’t be more different from Johnson’s early work in this show.

On small, square canvases painted black, as well as on a small wooden box stained dark, Johnson affixed assorted items. They include a torn newspaper account of a lynching, a matchbox from Mohammad’s Mosque, a sprung mousetrap and a pair of black baby doll’s hands, poised midway between a yearning gesture from the grave and Durer’s praying hands.

The use of blackened castoff materials to embody the experiences of castoff human beings is powerful and poignant. It appears in assorted guises in the show -- sometimes in conversation with other traditions.

Melvin Edwards’ 1963 welded-steel tabletop sculpture, “Standing Relief, Solid Spring,” hits many bases at once. A flat square plane of steel stands upright on a steel base, its top edge torn away and steel fragments welded to its face. An assemblage made from scrap metal, it builds on the sculptural technique of “drawing in space” that was prominent in the 1950s.

The show also features a significant number of technically clumsy or simplistic narrative works -- an Afrocentric depiction of the biblical Eve, a black man removing a white-face mask, a colorful abstraction of a phallus and so forth. It would have benefited from tighter editing and more rigorous selection of specific objects.

Still, as a first pass through a transformative half-century about which too little has been recorded, this three-part survey is an admirable achievement. Unfortunately there is no publication to accompany the survey (one is planned for a later date), but this ambitious assemblage has drawn a provocative sketch.

‘Pathways’ and ‘Reactions’

Where: California African American Museum, Exposition Park

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Wednesdays through Sundays

Ends: April 2

Price: Free.

Contact: (213) 744-7432, www.caamuseum.org

And

Where: Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd.

When: Noon to 5 p.m.

Fridays through Sundays

Ends: April 10