Something To Look Forward To

After years of virtual anonymity, a group of African American abstract expressionists are receiving recognition in a unique exhibit featured at the Morris Museum of Art this month.

by Jim Garvey

You stand there staring. Hanging on the wall in front of you is a swirl of colors melding and separating, the texture of the brush in them, ridges and lumps where the paint is thick, ambiguous shapes, all of it suggesting perhaps a.... But no. Not really. You give up. What does this painting mean anyway? What's it supposed to be?

Abstract artist Jack Whitten has a quick answer to the question he's heard so many times: "Hey, man, it's paint on canvas."
It doesn't mean any more than a snowflake means, than a dandelion means, than a rock means. It simply is.

Whitten is one of 22 artists whose work is being shown at the Morris Museum, March 22 to May 25, in Something To Look Forward To. These artists come from all over the country, working alone in their studios and teaching, most of them, at universities. All in their 60s and 70s now, they have been making their art for 50 years or more.

Two more things they have in common: All of them are abstract expressionists—more about that later—and all of them are African American.

Abstract: "There's nothing there but what you see," according to the late painter, Al Loving. "There are no hidden messages. It's about color, it's about material." Abstract art doesn't try to reproduce objects in our lives. It is not figurative. It doesn't aspire to be anything more than the materials or colors or shapes it is made of. Most people value painting and sculpture that feign external reality. That's just what abstract art doesn't do.

"An abstract painting is as real as a figurative painting," says sculptor Melvin Edwards. "However, its places of reference for a person to connect with it are different. The viewer has to react to what is exactly there in front of him." And what's "exactly there" is not a landscape or a portrait or a bowl of fruit. All there is to react to is an object of textures and mass or a canvas covered with colors and shapes. There are no external references. It's an exercise in being present to the immediate reality.

Abstraction cuts through to underlying realities that unite all human beings. That's what sculptor John Scott believes. "There are universalities of the human spirit beyond language or meaning. You're at a funeral in a black Baptist church and there's a note—high C above middle C—that comes wordlessly from the back of the choir, and the hair stands up on the back of your neck. That's the epitome of abstraction. You can hear that in Iraq by those women lamenting their dead, by African women when they're yelling, by Chinese women...it's a primal human thing that's totally abstract, but we all understand its meaning."

Expressionism: That business about expressing feeling, that's the "expressionist" part of abstract expressionism. The passions of the artist are translated directly into color, shape, material, without passing through the image of recognizable external things. The art is the thing.

"I'm a materialist," Whitten says succinctly. "I work with matter. Matter as a thing."

If they have to liken their art to something else, many of the artists in the show pick music and, specifically, jazz. Instrumental music is just shaped sound. It may move us to tears, but it doesn't "mean" anything. It's just itself.

Whitten loves listening to John Coltrane and other jazz musicians. Abstraction, he says, is a central principle of jazz. Often jazz takes a familiar tune and then transforms it. "We're taking something from a known quantity and we're doing something to it. So I listen to the jazz musicians. They give me a clue on how it's possible to take a subject and then make it into abstraction."

But while jazz is an art form that originated in the black culture, abstract expressionism, popularized in the 1950s by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Paul Klee and their colleagues, is seen as a white phenomenon.

John Scott bristles at the accusation that the work of African Americans in this style is derivative. "Is there any difference between the notes that Stravinski and Thelonius Monk used to notate sound? Same notes. But I'll be damned if the music sounds anything alike. My art comes out of a jazz-blues idiom. I am trying to do with the visual thing that I'm working on what I see friends of mine doing musically every day.

Al Loving agreed. "Now the jazz musicians don't invent their own instruments, but they radicalize the sound of conventional instruments. Well, that's basically what we do. We take ordinary materials and we try to transform them in a manner that you can't tell what it is, where it came from, where it begins or where it ends. All you can do is experience the work."

The irony is that the abstract art movement did, in fact, have its roots in Africa. Picasso and other painters of the early 20th century were profoundly affected by their first encounter with African masks, shields, sculptures and designs. Here abstraction and simplicity of design resulted in power. They wanted some of that in European art, and in Picasso's seminal "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" of 1907, he depicts African masks for the first time. Other European painters shared Picasso's enthusiasm, with the result that African abstract design became a source of inspiration for mainstream artists. Black painters, largely excluded from that mainstream, watched the white world appropriate their own African heritage.

Back here in the States, racial conflict was so strong throughout the 20th century that African Americans didn't have much patience for their own artists dabbling in abstraction anyway. There were battles of inequality to be won and they were not abstract. The black community primarily valued art that was engaged in the struggle, that had a political agenda.

Many of the artists in the Morris show did political art for awhile. In the 1960s, reality was passionately political. Al Loving remembered painting an American flag with black and white dog chewing on each other. Howardena Pindell remembers that, as a child, she and her family were served soft drinks at a drive-in restaurant in glasses that had a red circle on the bottom. The red circle designated the glassware that was to be reserved for customers of color. "I guess I was traumatized by the circle," she says. "Now in my art I'm obsessed by the circle." Mel Edwards has a 16-foot sculpture of a chain with the top link open, inspired by Martin Luther King's call to break the chains of oppression to free the bonds of love.

But most of these artists don't make political art. The choice not to requires an act of will, given some of the cultural pressures at work on them. "An abstract artist has to firmly establish in his mind what he is and what is his objective," Whitten says. "My place is not in the street. It's in the studio. I'm not a politician, I'm not a social worker, I'm a... painter."

For Al Loving, who died in 2005, the aesthetic choice was the moral choice. He didn't want his art to reflect the conflict and violence that dominated the headlines. "I understand the nature of the world and the politics of it. I get up in the morning and read that 500 people have been killed. I'm gonna go out and make a beautiful painting. I'm going to create an experience that is the complete opposite. Because art is about needs that have not been met. I'm taking that information and I'm going to make something really grand and beautiful. I'm going to fight against that by these actions."

The double whammy of being both black and abstract expressionists has exacted its toll on these artists, but they have survived the storm for so long now that they can laugh wryly. "It's been incredibly interesting being invisible," says John Scott (who lost his invisibility—at least temporarily—when he received a MacArthur "Genius" grant in 1992). Al Loving stayed the course because he didn't have a choice. "I think people who end up doing this work do it because they absolutely have to. You'd never put yourself through this as a 'career opportunity.'"

Sometimes when recognition comes, it just comes too late. "You work your whole life and you hardly ever have a dime," says Betty Blayton, "and when you finally get to the point where you can buy a steak, you can't chew it."

Before it gets any later, these artists deserve to be seen and appreciated. That's why painter Bill Hutson of Franklin and Marshall College organized this exhibition. Each of the 22 artists loaned two works created six to 10 years apart. Hutson and his colleagues at Franklin and Marshall have accomplished something remarkable. In addition to the exhibition itself, they and their students have made a fascinating DVD called Persistence of Vision based on the show. It features interviews with nine of the artists; they are charming, smart and eloquent. That DVD and its interviews were the primary source for this story.

Included in the "Extras" on the DVD is a behind-the-scenes piece by Megan Feehan, one of the videographers for Persistence of Vision. At the time of the filming she was a sophomore cross-country runner majoring in government.

"I don't know too much about filmmaking—or art either," she confesses. "When I told my film professor (Dirk Eitzen) I'd never made a film before, he said, 'That's OK. I've never taught an art class, Bill Hutson has never curated an exhibit, the college has never mounted a show like this and nobody has any idea who's going to pay for it all. It's a learning experience.'"

So it is. Hats off to Franklin and Marshall way up in Lancaster, Pa., for the faith and vision it took to assemble this learning experience, and to The Morris for bringing it here for us to learn from.

"We're a country that thinks it's a blanket, when actually it's a quilt," says sculptor John Scott. "There are a whole lot of patches missing because of a lack of respect for what those patches represent."

Thanks to a college in Pennsylvania and a museum in Augusta, we can sew 22 of those patches into our quilt.

The exhibit, Something to Look Forward To: Abstract Art by 22 Distinguished Americans of African Descent, is on view at the Morris Museum of Art March 22—May 25.