The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African-American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Famously referred to by Larry Neal as the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power", BAM applied these same political ideas to art and literature. and artists found new inspiration in their African heritage as a way to present the black experience in America. Artists such as Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller pioneered the movement with a distinctly modernist aesthetic. This style influenced the proliferation of African American art during the twentieth century.
The poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is widely recognized as the founder of BAM. In 1965, he established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School (BART/S) in Harlem. Baraka's example inspired many others to create organizations across the United States. While many of these organizations were short-lived, their work has had a lasting influence. Some still exist, including the National Black Theatre, founded by Barbara Ann Teer in Harlem, New York.
Background
African Americans had always made valuable artistic contributions to American culture. However, due to the brutalities of slavery and the systemic racism of Jim Crow, these contributions often went unrecognized. Despite continued oppression, African-American artists continued to create literature and art that would reflect their experiences. A high-point for these artists was the Harlem Renaissance—a literary era that spotlighted black people.
Harlem Renaissance Many parallels can be made between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. The link is so strong that some scholars refer to the Black Arts Movement era as the Second Renaissance. One sees this connection clearly when reading Langston Hughes's The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926). Hughes's seminal essay advocates that black writers resist external attempts to control their art, arguing instead that the "truly great" black artist will be the one who can fully embrace and freely express his blackness.
Yet, the Harlem Renaissance lacked many of the radical political stances that defined BAM. Inevitably, the Renaissance and many of its ideas, failed to survive the Great Depression.
Civil rights movement During the civil rights era, activists paid more and more attention to the political uses of art. The contemporary work of those like James Baldwin and Chester Himes would show the possibility of creating a new "black aesthetic". Several art groups were established during this period, such as the Umbra Poets and the Spiral Arts Alliance, which can be seen as precursors to BAM.
Art was seen as a way to decompress from the upheaval of the civil rights era by, for example, the ceramicist Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly, the maker of "Story Pots".
Civil Rights activists were also interested in creating black-owned media outlets, establishing journals (such as Freedomways, Black Dialogue, The Liberator, The Black Scholar and Soul Book) and publishing houses (such as Dudley Randall's Broadside Press and Third World Press.) It was through these channels that BAM would eventually spread its art, literature, and political messages.
Developments The beginnings of the Black Arts Movement may be traced to 1965, when Amiri Baraka, at that time still known as Leroi Jones, moved uptown to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) following the assassination of Malcolm X. Rooted in the Nation of Islam, the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement grew out of a changing political and cultural climate in which Black artists attempted to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience. Black artists and intellectuals such as Baraka made it their project to reject older political, cultural, and artistic traditions.Smethurst, James E. The Black Arts Movement: Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture), NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Although the success of sit-ins and public demonstrations of the Black student movement in the 1960s may have "inspired black intellectuals, artists, and political activists to form politicized cultural groups", many Black Arts activists rejected the non-militant integrational ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement and instead favored those of the Black Liberation Struggle, which emphasized "self-determination through self-reliance and Black control of significant businesses, organization, agencies, and institutions."Douglas, Robert L. Resistance, Insurgence, and Identity: The Art of Mari Evans, Nelson Stevens, and the Black Arts Movement. NJ: Africa World Press, 2008. According to the Academy of American Poets, "African American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience." The importance that the movement placed on Black autonomy is apparent through the creation of institutions such as the Black Arts Repertoire Theatre School (BARTS), created in the spring of 1964 by Baraka and other Black artists. The opening of BARTS in New York City often overshadows the growth of other radical Black Arts groups and institutions all over the United States. In fact, transgressional and international networks, those of various Left and nationalist (and Left nationalist) groups and their supports, existed far before the movement gained popularity. Although the creation of BARTS did indeed catalyze the spread of other Black Arts institutions and the Black Arts movement across the nation, it was not solely responsible for the growth of the movement.
Although the Black Arts Movement was a time filled with black success and artistic progress, the movement also faced social and racial ridicule. The leaders and artists involved called for Black Art to define itself and speak for itself from the security of its own institutions. For many of the contemporaries the idea that somehow black people could express themselves through institutions of their own creation and with ideas whose validity was confirmed by their own interests and measures was absurd.
While it is easy to assume that the movement began solely in the Northeast, it actually started out as "separate and distinct local initiatives across a wide geographic area", eventually coming together to form the broader national movement. New York City is often referred to as the "birthplace" of the Black Arts Movement, because it was home to many revolutionary Black artists and activists. However, the geographical diversity of the movement opposes the misconception that New York (and Harlem, especially) was the primary site of the movement.
In its beginning states, the movement came together largely through printed media. Journals such as Liberator, The Crusader, and Freedomways created "a national community in which ideology and aesthetics were debated and a wide range of approaches to African-American artistic style and subject displayed." These publications tied communities outside of large Black Arts centers to the movement and gave the general black public access to these sometimes exclusive circles.
As a literary movement, Black Arts had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon,"A Gathering of the Tribes" (includes biography of Steve Cannon). (Place Matters, January 2012). Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lennox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism", directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.
Umbra, which produced Umbra Magazine, was the first post-civil rights Black literary group to make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover, Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: in 1960 a Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side by Calvin Hicks. Its members included Nannie and Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse (who was then working on The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967), Tom Dent, Rosa Guy, Joe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, and Sarah E. Wright, and others. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. From On Guard, Dent, Johnson, and Walcott along with Hernton, Henderson, and Touré established Umbra.
In 1967, the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture, composed of several artists such as Jeff Donaldson, William Walker, and more, painted the Wall of Respect which was a mural that represented the Black Arts Movement; what it stood for and who it was celebrating. The mural commemorated several important black figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, along with artists such as Aretha Franklin and Gwendolyn Brooks, etc. It was a renowned symbol of the movement, placed in Chicago, that represented black culture and creativity, and was met with a lot of attention, support, and respect from the black community. It was a symbolic and important representation of the Black Arts Movement, as it directly celebrated and acknowledged the iconic figures of the Black community through art, emphasizing the importance of art for the community. Furthermore, it left a legacy and served as a beacon for the Black community, promoting Black consciousness and helping many Black people to learn and recognize their worth. In the eight years following the installation of the mural, over 1,500 murals were painted in black neighborhoods across the country, and by 1975, over 200 were painted in Chicago. It brought the community together symbolically, and literally, as rival gangs even declared the location of the mural to be neutral ground, supporting the artists and the movement.
In 1968, renowned Black theorist Barbara Ann Teer founded the National Black Theatre, located in Harlem, New York. Teer was an American writer, producer, teacher, actress and social visionary. Teer was an important black female intellectual, artist, and activist who contributed to the Black Arts Movement. Her theater was one of the first revenue generating Black theaters in the US. Teer's art was politically and socially conscious and like many other contributors to the BAM, embraced African aesthetics, and rejected traditional theatrical notions of time and space. Teer's revolutionary and ritualistic dramas and plays blurred the lines between performers and audience, "encouraging all to use the performance event itself as an opportunity to bring about social change."
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