The topic of race in the United States, a country that claims to embrace the values of freedom and equality, has never been straightforward. Black is the Color illuminates this complicated reality through the lens of African American art from the Civil War emancipation of Black Americans in the nineteenth century through 2016. Key figures, numerous interviews, and archival materials allow viewers to comprehend that Black Americans in the United States are simultaneously a part of American history and have often been excluded from it. In terms of art, as this film thoughtfully explains, on the one hand, we meet the artists who reached beyond the popular culture stereotypes and social exclusion to speak about humanity, dignity, and beauty. On the other hand, we see that even after freedom was granted, popular culture was awash with negative depictions that characterized Blacks as lazy, childish, violent, or irresponsible. These cultural artifacts, many shown in the film, promulgated negative and stereotypical ideas within mainstream culture through representation on broadsides, toys, and other items. Even after the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s the social inconsistencies remained.

This doubled-sided reality, the back story for the Black is the Color survey, was distinctly articulated when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, (referred to colloquially as “the Met”) organized a 1969 exhibition titled Harlem on my Mind. Launched within the timeframe of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the organizers intended it as a social history that would show how much Black citizens had achieved by the end of the 1960s. Instead, and unfortunately, the exhibition exposed the two sides of Black experience. Mounting the exhibition without input from the African American community, the design concept diminished the degree to which Black citizens continued to remain socially excluded from the mainstream even as it appeared they were making strides in some ways. The most obvious omission was that the show did not include any paintings or sculptures by Black artists. People asked how could an institution that said in its mission statement that it was committed to showing art, completely exclude Black artists in a show about this cohort?

Black is the Color powerfully uses commentary and archival footage of the protests that took place in reaction to this divisive event to show how fully this controversial exhibition missed its mark. These demonstrations were among the many indications that Black art was ignored at that time, even as it was thriving and dynamic in Harlem and other places. Today many see the Harlem on my Mind fiasco as emblematic of the barriers Black artists have faced throughout the country’s history in having their work exhibited and collected. Although the Black artists of that period had a range of styles and worked in many media, they nonetheless remained segregated. They were disregarded by the mainstream art world, generally not represented in galleries, and largely omitted from major exhibitions, as the Met’s Harlem on my Mind underscored. The film also shows that over the last few decades this has begun to change.

There have also been key pivotal points that advanced exposure. One centered around the work of Romare Bearden (1911-1988). He reacted to the controversial Harlem on My Mind exhibition by creating a huge living fresco of Harlem and its inhabitants called The Block that was included in a 1971 retrospective of Bearden’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and is now a part of the Met’s collection. In one segment of the film the art historian Robert O’Meally walks us through the work while standing at the window of Bearden’s studio. He talks about how the painter, looking through this window, saw a block that struck him as emblematic of the whole neighborhood. Bearden then transformed it into a work that evokes a whole way of life in Harlem and shows it as a place to celebrate. Looking through the window with O’Meally, we can almost see it through Bearden’s eyes. The professor also explains how Bearden communicates the layered meanings of Black experience through his layering of papers and drawings placed over one another.

Commentary by contemporary African American artists on historical Black art is a feature that enhances the 100-year survey. For example, the first artist the film focuses on in detail is Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907). She gave form to her work after emancipation, a period when Black artists began to reclaim ownership of their image, a goal that continues today. Contemporary artist Ellen Gallagher explains that when she was studying at Oberlin College in the 1980s, Lewis’ life and art was still hidden. Gallagher first learned about her while rummaging through the archives and was immediately intrigued to find an artist outside of all the canons and trajectories of African American history that she knew at that time. Although Lewis’ father was African American, she grew up on an Indian reservation because her mother was Native American (Ojibwe).

Gallagher was also struck by the fact that Lewis worked in a classical style. Forever Free, the piece discussed at length in the Lewis section, was crafted in 1867. It is a white marble sculpture of a freed man and woman breaking their chains. Upon seeing it, Gallagher thought about how this woman with brown hands not only sculpted this unusual white marble representation of an African American subject but also presented the figure as if she was telling a classical story. This approach effectively placed slavery alongside the stories of Greek Gods. Now a part of the collection of Howard University, an historically Black college in Washington DC, it is striking that this sculpture conveying freedom was crafted while Lewis was in self-imposed exile in Rome. On the base we see this. The artist wrote Forever Free on one side, with “Edmonia Lewis, Roma 1867” inscribed on the other.

Similarly, we see the historical and contemporary joined together in the words and work of the contemporary African American artist Whitfield Lovell. Early in the film Lovell comments on the self-taught artist Horace Pippin (1888-1946) who was among the Blacks who had gone to fight in Europe during the first world war. He tells us that Pippin’s painting The End of Waroffers insight into the Black experience and their contributions to the first world war effort. Looking at Pippin’s work we see that he constructed the Black soldiers so that they are virtually invisible; they seamlessly fade into the background of the painting, although they are on the winning side. Lovell explains that his own work is about restoring visibility to these soldiers and other unknown figures. He wants to make the black soldiers visible, to bring out their character and to acknowledge them as human beings who were more than just fading off into the background.

Lovell is known for drawing charcoal portraits of historical African Americans, often derived from photographs. Or, as he puts it, reclaiming their identities. Describing the moving quality and elegance of his work is beyond my capacity. In his words:

“I do believe that the impact of the drawing, an artwork, is very different from a photograph. Somehow it makes people look at them longer. It makes people contemplate them more deeply.…Charcoal is really burnt wood. And I like the fact that I’m rubbing and pushing scraping and blending this burnt wood back into the panels. It feels like a very natural kind of choice. I’m particularly interested in that act of humanizing those people and giving them a certain kind of dignity. Now I’ve heard people say things like ‘Well, what does that mean when you put these people in a museum?’ I never quite know what to make of that question. I feel like why shouldn’t they be in a museum? That’s probably part of the problem. They were ignored and overlooked when they were here and so I really like the fact that some of these people’s images might be in museum’s one day. I don’t think there are any white artists that I’ve encountered who felt compelled to make work or talk about being white. They have the luxury of just making art. As an African American artist, just making the work becomes a political statement. 

Another compelling figure in the film is Walter Evans, a collector. He began collecting Black artists in the mid 1970s so that his daughters could see and experience work by African Americans when it was rarely available in museum and galleries. We also meet Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), a student of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art who lived most of his life in Paris. Leading thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Alain Locke (1885-1954) are also integrated into the survey. While Du Bois gave art a social function and political dimension, Locke attempted to define The New Negro in a book by that name.

Many luminaries of Black art are included as well. Among the twentieth century artists are Harlem Renaissance figures like Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence. We meet Elizabeth Catlett whose woodcut of a woman sitting on a bus was prescient of Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the blacks only part of the bus in 1955. Norman Lewis’ Evening Rendezvous (1962) is an impressive and thought-provoking painting. At first it appears totally abstract. Looking closely reveals a subliminal form of the American flag, the whitish presence of the Ku Klux Klan, the reddish glow of burning black churches, and the blue smoke of departing black souls. The tragic life of Jean-Paul Basquiet (1960-1988) is also woven into this sweeping survey.

Toward the end of the survey the film introduces “Black Lives Matter,” which became a part of American discourse in July 2013.  The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter showed up on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African American teen Trayvon Martin seventeen months earlier in February 2012. This section makes the point that while there is a growing acceptance of African American art within the mainstream art world, this measure of success parallels the racial suffering within American society that results from ongoing police violence among other things. While unmentioned, it was also in 2013 that Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote a dissent in a 2013 Supreme Court case, generally referred to as the Shelby case [1], about whether the provisions in the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1964 during the Civil Rights movement, should continue to protect the right to vote for certain populations. Ginsberg wrote that throwing away the relevant sections that worked to stop discrimination — and were continuing to work to stop discrimination —was like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. The Justices who voted to undo the legal protections that had been put in place to ensure equality understood they were dissolving the safeguards. Sadly, for them, that was the point; they didn’t want to keep the umbrella up.

Released in 2017, just as Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States, was leaving office, Black is the Color doesn’t include the degree to which America’s racial landscape changed under the Trump administration, even as segments of society continue to try to address earlier oversights. As has always been the case in American history, the Black experience continues to evolve on several tracks. As I write, a groundbreaking exhibition at the Met, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, includes 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera from the 1920s–40s. This corrective to the 1969 Harlem on my Mind exhibition presents the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.

Reference:

1. Shelby County. v. Holder, 570 US, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013)