The Black Arts Movement, framed at the Getty

Through a lens, darkly

“Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985”

by Bondo Wyszpolski

The ‘50s, the ‘60s! Turbulent times in America, especially for the African American community still repressed and largely segregated. But people had cameras, and they were taking pictures.
In this wide-ranging show at the Getty Center, through June 14, there are over 150 works created by more than 100 artists, and the era sharpens into focus.

The Black Arts Movement, a term which links those who were central figures with those on the periphery, was born “in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling,” in the words of Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where this exhibition began, a show curated by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis.

However, as Brookman writes, “The constitutional crisis precipitated by the desegregation ruling went unenforced in many communities ten years on, giving artists and activists more reason to speak out.”

Therefore, the art on display is implicitly political as it brings together, Feldman notes, “connections between photographs, the civil rights movement, and landmark civil rights legislation that helped build the foundation of who we are today.”

Standing up for equality

There’s a visual narrative here that primarily served to elevate and unify the Black community, promoting dignity, hope, and freedom. This was accomplished by way of protests and marches and speeches by such seminal figures as Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and of course Martin Luther King, Jr. What often incentivized them, and which both underlines and bolster the narrative, were such atrocities as the torture and murder of Emmett Till, the Birmingham 16th St. Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls, and the kidnapping and execution of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Despite its size and scope the show has an immediacy whereas the catalogue allows us to pause and reflect at length. Perhaps the most affecting image is that of Sarah Jean Collins, the only survivor among the five girls who were in the bathroom basement of the Birmingham church when the bomb exploded. In the photo by Frank Dandridge, Sarah Jean is in a hospital bed with both eyes bandaged. She eventually lost one eye. Three members of the KKK were convicted.

Another potent image, photographed c.1960 by Calvert McCann, is titled “Women at a lunch counter sit-in, Lexington, Kentucky,” in which one of the women, with a concerned look, has turned to face the camera. It’s an image reminiscent of those large historical canvases where many people have gathered, in which the painter has posed one or two of the individuals to gaze out of the picture and at us — which, naturally, invites or pulls us into the picture.

With so many artists represented, the viewer is bound to recognize a few: Bettye Saar has been a long-time fixture in Los Angeles, and others remembered locally include Ulysses Jenkins and Willie Middlebrook. On a wider, national level, there’s Romare Bearden, famous for his collages, as well as James Van der Zee and Gordon Parks. Van der Zee, who was born in 1886 and was a studio portraitist during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ‘30s, photographed Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982, the young artist leaning forward, head in hand, with a Siamese cat in his lap. This remarkable photo feels timeless, as if lifting Basquiat out of one era and placing him in another.

There’s also James E. Hinton’s “Two Women Sitting on a New York Subway” (1966), with both women shoulder to shoulder, the Black woman reading “Ebony” and the white woman reading the “New York Times.” Imagine if they’d traded publications: What would we make of the image then?

Many of these pictures are historical documents of a sort, especially those taken at a political rally or march. But just as photographs can reveal, they can also conceal or offer a misleading narrative. One of the pictures I like best is of Amiri Baraka sitting intently in front of a typewriter. One sees an astute, thoughtful man (and I remember him as the poet LeRoi Jones), but he also wrote pieces that were anti-gay, anti-white, and antisemitic.

That in itself makes a point about the show: It’s tempered in that we don’t see overt Black anger, and we don’t see Black aggressiveness in any form (unless its passive aggressiveness). And, yes, there was plenty of anger and frustration during those years, in the riots that rocked L.A. in 1965, Detroit and Newark in ‘67, and so on.

More than its parts

An exhibition of this range needs to be well organized, and so it’s divided into eight sections, with headings like “Representing the Community,” “Activism,” “Transformation in Art and Culture,” and (presumably just for this leg of the tour) “California Connections.” In my opinion, they overlap, the whole greater than the parts. It should be emphasized that not all of the photographers here are or were Black (Leonard Freed, for example, and Tamio Wakayama), and a few were born outside the continental U.S., in Puerto Rico, Ghana, Mali, and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, the majority of the artists are male, but there are various women represented as well, such as Elaine Tomlin, Doris A Derby, and Barbara DuMetz.

One connection that unites different races comes by way of music, and here we have images of, among others, singers and musicians from Mahalia Jackson and Nina Simone to Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane. In a sense, cultural ambassadors. Interestingly, I can’t recall any sports icons — Hank Aaron? Willie Mays? — in this show. I know that, as a youngster in L.A., we admired Jim Gilliam, Maury Wills, and Tommy Davis no less than Don Drysdale or Sandy Koufax.

Quite a number of these photographers were associated with the Kamoinge Workshop, a Harlem-based collective of Black photographers founded in 1963. In 2022, when many of us were still reluctant to mingle in public spaces, the Getty hosted “Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop.” The show is long gone, but the volume that accompanied it is a treasure and quite relevant to the one now on view.

This might lead one to ask, What makes a good photo? Well, one that’s instantly compelling, or one depicting a familiar individual or place (or, in Andy Warhol’s words, “one that’s in focus and of a famous person”). But that’s rather subjective. Composition and tonality also weigh in heavily, and in the realm of pure aesthetics (where politics or sociology isn’t in the front row), there’s “Genie” (1971), by Ray Francis, depicting a woman in shadow sitting behind a white round table. The gradations are so subtle that I dare not try and have it reproduced here.

This tangentially relates to Margo Natalie Crawford’s essay, “The Art of Black Light,” in which she points out, and yes, this is obvious, that black skin photographs differently than white. Who doesn’t recall old newspapers in which Black people’s faces were little more than smudges?

Another essayist, another Crawford, Romi Crawford, raises this question: “Are those photographic images that deviate away from representations of Black people equally valid and effective representations of BAM [Black Arts Movement] aesthetics?” That is, while one might earn high-fives for taking pictures of Huey Newton or Bobby Seale, would one be snubbed for photographing something with zero African American content, let’s say a day in Yosemite?

On the other hand, Crawford adds, “Broadening the range of subjects introduces balance to the aesthetic narrowness and imperative to represent Black people in their work.”

While some of the insightful essays in the catalogue veer a bit heavily from art to politics, it’s the art — photographs mostly, but collage, paintings, posters, record jackets — that sticks with us. This is a profound exhibition, regardless of one’s opinions or biases about the struggles for racial equality and respect in our recent history, and there are lessons here about tolerance and acceptance, and stepping up for what’s right, that should never go out of style or be forgotten.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 is on view through June 14 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. PEN