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Their deliberate imagistic poster-prints--and they want everybody to have some-are invested with definite grasps (truths) brought home in style(s) for the life-vision of the feeler-listener. Intermediary pro/positions they are. Cadences bracketing a specific kind of being/experience, i.e., metaphysical american; geographically in america and metapolitical here too. Black experiencing Black and giving it back--jet-like.

In and thru their various media, the Africobra creators attempt to scourge through the catacombs of our instance, pushing out the dead and the dying, resurrecting spineless souls; they want to expunge the components of our dollar-mache masters held together by the juices of our servitude; they want to provide the symbols to break our entrenched logomachy and push us generations ahead. Each of their image-rhythms, the pace of it, its heat/beat, verges on the future. Is kinetic like that. The idea is that action follows thot by design. Their intent is always beyond the present.  Each piece futurebound.

They see "art" as a movement in-the-round--completing and complementing our bas-relief existence. Africobra's image/rhythms are about busting open the moseleum-western-art-idea that exist in the plastic landscape of our minds. The "zombie" in us they want to be released. We who are colonized still by hypocritical dream-creeds they want released! The inner shaving of our lives, Africobra wants to spread upon earth surface and sky. They want to replenish our mind/soul/vision/generations. Africobra. Intermediarily. The African Commune Of Bad Relevant Artists. We dig their spirit as a family of image makers making diversity in their unity. And they say, still more is possible. And they want you to have some.  

by Edward S. Spriggs - Executive Director
Nov. 1971

AFRICOBRA 1
"10 in Search of a Nation"
*Africian Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

by Jeff Donaldson

The whole thing started slow, real slow...suffering through an outdoor art fair in a wealthier Chicago suburb one hot July day in 1962, I asked Wadsworth Jarrell if he though it would be possible to start a "negro" art movement based on a common aesthetic creed. And having little else to do - the wealthy anglos were not buying that day - we rapped about the hip aesthetic things that a "negro" group could do. When the sun went down, we packed up our jive, drove home to Chicago and the lake breeze cooled the idea from our minds. But that was cool, it was only a daydream balloon ethered by ennui and the hot sun - we let it float. They were bouyant times. The "negro" sky was pregnant with optimistic fantasy bubbles in those days. Education. Integration. Accomodation. Assimilation. Overcomation. Mainstreamation. THE PROMISE OF AMERICA. We would be freed.

But this was before the Washington picnic, its eloquent dream and its dynamite reality at the church in Birmingham. This was before the very real physical end of Malcolm. And the end of the "negro" in many of us. And it was before James Chaney. Afro-American. Before Lumumba. Before Jimmie Lee Jackson. Before Selma. Black. Before the Meredith March. Black Power. Before Luthuli. Sammy Young, Jr. and the others. Before Watts and Detroit, Chicago, Harlem and Newark. Black Nationalism. More Balloons. Separation. Self-determination. We would be free.

And the atmosphere of America became more electrically charged, the balloons jarringly shaken, many destroyed by the thunder and by the lightning of the real Amerika. And we (Jarrell, Barbara Jones, Carolyn Lawrence, me and other artists) bestirred ourselves, formed the OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) artists workshop and following Bill Walker's lead, painted the Wall of Respect in Chicago. Black History. And thinking that we had done a revolutionary thing we rested and nodded anew, among the few remaining balloons. And then the dreamer's dreamer had his balloon busted on a Memphis motel balcony. And that was the last balloon. And it was Chicago again and Harlem again, and San Francisco and D.C. and Cleveland and everywhere. And COBRA was born.* Law and Order. And off the