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SIU

But aesthetic toughness will not result from increased artistic production exclusively. The artist has to critically evaluate what he is doing; he cannot be naive enough to think that all the works he creates are of equal artistic merit. However, the artist cannot be the best critic of his own work; he must solicit criticism from others, both lay and professional. Opinions from such sources, and especially from the ones whom the artist perceives as the most understanding and empathetic, should help the artist refine his creative statement. A viable Black art will develop when technical matters are removed from the foreground and the artist is free to make the kind of visual poetry that can be comparable to the best Black music and dance.

2 The second point is that in light of a residual African attitude toward the creation of art and traditional Afro-American cultural responses, the Afro-American artist would profit considerably from pursuing a serialized approach to his work.

The lesson of traditional African art is one of variation on a theme. One need only recall the generic similarities of the Ibeji figures of the Yoruba and the A'kuba images of the Ashanti to see that there is considerable interpretation and invention in representing the human form, though the traditional subject and mode persist. Within the Afro-American artistic tradition the works of Jacob Lawrence provide a counterpart to what is a general phenomenon in traditional Africa. In the Migration, War, Harlem, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown series of the 1940's, and even more in recent works, Lawrence has elected to work thematically. The serialized approach demands a very disciplined attitude toward one's work. It involves a kind of empathy and participation that would not normally occur if dilletantish practices prevailed.

A serialized approach would also help the Black artist to make the most salient icons of historical and mythical heroes. Black heroic figures are few in the arts, whether historical or mythical. In regard to the latter, Palmer Hayden's John Henry series provides a notable exception. Historic figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and others have not been explored adequately in literary terms to provide the very much needed larger than life heroes.