Viewing page 3 of 40

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Black Art
1967, following the example of the initial Chicago "Wall of Respect", "guerilla" murals depicting heroic figures began to appear on the exterior walls of the commandeered slumlord property throughout inner-city America. By 1975, before the "Wall" Movement surrendered its independent spirit and revolutionary fervor to the comfortable bosom of the municipal patronage, nearly 900 "Walls" had been dedicated nationwide. To a profound degree, the "Wall of Respect" and print/poster movements (taking art to the streets and making is accessible to the millions) raised serious questions relative to the role of art in the "Struggle" and of the appropriateness of the western aesthetics in Afrocentric expression. Cross-cultural debates and confrontations ensued, innumerable conferences were convened, strident manifestoes were issued and the political dimension of the artistic expression attained new significance throughout the African world. 
For earlier generations of artists, Africa has been a dream continent darkly perceived through the few confusing reference books available, fanciful folklore and distorted, demeaning images produced by propagandistic print and film media. But beginning in the 1950's many artists, like Elton Fax and John Biggers, visited the continent and returned to share their first-hand experiences. Elizabeth Catlett immigrated to Mexico. Later, others like Herman (Kofi X) Bailey and Tom Feelings, New Poster Movement pioneers, and Earl Sweeting, a 1930's protégé of the Garveyite bibliophile Dr. Charles Seyfert, would travel to Africa and work for the newly independent nations. At the same time, artists from Africa and the Caribbean, such as Papas Ibra Taal (Senegal), Vanjah Richards (Liberia), Twins Seven-Seven (Nigeria), Amir Nour (Sudan), Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia), LeRoy Clarke (Trinidad) and a host of others, came to study and work in the United States.
However, by 1970 the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counter-revolutionary program (COINTELPRO), under the guise of "law and order" and the U.S government program of "benign neglect", combined to brutally repress and economically suffocate African-American progress. In the process, the Afrocentric impetus in art was effectively dulled, and to a large extent, the development of all vanguard artistic expression in the United States was retarded. 
But, the first phase of the development of the distinct coherent Afrocentric art style was already well established. It had crystallized in the mid-60's, appearing in the work of the nationalist individuals and groups throughout the country as unqualified assimilation of African symbols. Later, an expanded symbolism and pure design ideas drawn from intense study of African, Pre-Columbian and Oriental sources became the visua franca in a new vocabulary of form. Still later, as the Frantz Fanon--the widely-read revolutionary culture analyst and aesthetician--has predicted, many artists and groups would realize "that national consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give (art) and international