“This is black art. And it matters. And that has been going on for two hundred years. Deal with it.”
So says art historian Maurice Berger at the beginning of “Black Art: In the Absence of Light”, a rich and engaging documentary directed by Sam Pollard (“MLK / FBI”) and premiering on HBO Tuesday night.
The feature film, gathered from interviews with contemporary artists, curators and academics, was inspired by a single 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art”, the first large-scale survey of African American artists. Organized by artist David C. Driskell, then head of the art department at Fisk University, it included nearly 200 works dating from the mid 18th century to the mid 20th century, and advanced a story that few Americans, including art professionals, even they knew they existed.
The press gave this research a mixed reception. Some writers complained that it was more about sociology than art (Driskell himself did not completely disagree). But the show was a popular success. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he originated, and then at the major museums in Dallas, Atlanta and Brooklyn, people lined up to see him.
What they were seeing is that black artists had always done different works in parallel and some within a mainstream dominated by whites who ignored them. And they were seeing that black artists had consistently done, and continue to do, some of the most conceptually exciting and urgent American arts – a reality recently recognized by the art world in general, as reflected in the exhibitions, sales and critical attention.
The HBO documentary presents this story of long neglect and recent correction through the eloquent voices of three people who lived on both sides of it: Driskell, a revered painter and teacher; Mary Schmidt Campbell, president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Berger, an esteemed art historian and curator. (The film is dedicated to the two men, both died of complications related to Covid-19 in 2020, Driskell at 88, Berger at 63.)
They are surrounded by artists, most of them painters, of several generations. Some had careers well underway in 1976 (Betye Saar, for example, and Richard Mayhew, who was in the research). Others were, at that point, just starting out in the field. (Kerry James Marshall remembers being impressed with a visit to the show when he was 21). Still others – Kehinde Wiley (born in 1977) and Jordan Casteel (born in 1989) – were not born when the survey was opened, but are still counted among the beneficiaries.
The question that arises at the beginning of the film – in a 1970s Today Show interview with Driskell by Tom Brokaw – is whether the use of the label “black American art” itself is not in itself a form of imposed isolation. Yes, says Driskell, but in this strategic case. “Isolation is not, and never was, the objective of the black artist. He tried to be an integral part of the mainstream, only to be excluded. If this exhibition had not been organized, many of the artists in it would never have been seen. “
The film refers, in abbreviated form, to past examples of exclusion. There is a reference to the 1969 Metropolitan Museum “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968”, an exhibition that was heralded as an introduction to black creativity for the Met, but which contained little in the way of art. And mention is made of the artists’ protests against the 1971 Whitney Museum research “Contemporary Black Artists in America”, which was left entirely in the hands of a white curator.
A book of essays entitled “Black Art Notes,” printed that year in response to the Whitney exhibition, accused white museums of “art washing” through the symbolic inclusion of African-American works, an accusation that has continued relevance. (The collection was recently reissued, in facsimile edition, by Primary Information, a nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn.) Even before the Met and Whitney concerts, black artists saw a clear need to take control of how and where his art was seen in his own hands. Ethnically specific museums began to emerge – notably, in 1968, the Studio Museum in Harlem.
We are talking about a dense and complex story. No film can hope to achieve all of this, and this one leaves a lot out. (The mention of the Black Power movement is almost absent here.) Still, there are many, summed up in short and skillful comments by academics and curators, including Campbell, Sarah Lewis of Harvard University, Richard J. Powell of Duke University and Thelma Golden, the current director and chief curator of the Studio Museum. (Golden is the consulting producer for the film. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the executive producer.)
With reason and pleasure, most voices are from active artists. Faith Ringgold, now 90, was not at the 1976 show, nor in major museums, because, she says, her work was very political and because she is a woman. (Of the 63 artists in “Two Centuries of American Black Art,” 54 were men.) Her solution? “I just stay out until I get in,” she says. And persisting was worth it: his 1967 monumental painting “American People Series # 20: Die” has a prominent place in the current permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.)
Particularly interesting are the segments that show artists working and talking about what they are doing while doing it. We visit Marshall in his studio while he explains the many, many colors of paint he uses that are “black”. We followed Fred Wilson to the museum’s storage while he excavated objects that will be part of one of his installations that reveal his history. We watched Radcliffe Bailey transform hundreds of discarded piano keys into an ocean of Middle Passage. And we accompany portraitist Jordan Casteel, who recently closed a well-received exhibition at the New Museum, while she searches for models on the streets of Harlem.
There is no doubt that the visibility of African American artists in the mainstream is much greater now than ever. (Thanks, Black Lives Matter.) A big increase in shows is a measure. Notable events such as the 2018 revelation of Obama portraits by Wiley and Amy Sherald are another.
In an interview for the film, Sherald brings up this sudden surge of attention. “Many galleries are now hiring black artists,” she says. “There is this gold rush.” But where some observers would see interest only as the next marketing trend driven by a “blackness” brand, it doesn’t. “I say it is because we are doing some of the best and most relevant work.”
The purpose of Pollard’s film, which was also the goal of Driskell’s 1976 research, is to demonstrate this, and to demonstrate that black artists have done some of the best and most relevant work for decades, centuries. But they have done this mainly on the banks, beyond the spotlight of the white art world.
The artist Theaster Gates, who appears at the end of the film, sees the advantage, even the need, of this positioning.
“Black art means that sometimes I’m doing it when no one is looking,” he says. “Most of the time, that has been the truth of our lives. As long as we don’t have the light, I’m not happy. Until we are in our own houses of exhibitions, discoveries, research, until we have discovered a way to be masters of the world, I prefer to work in the dark. I don’t want to work only when the light comes on. My fear is that we are being trained and conditioned to do it only if there is a light, and that makes us co-dependent on something that we do not control. Are you willing, ”he asks his fellow artists,“ to do in the absence of light? “
Driskell, to whom this film really belongs and with whose presence he concludes, also leaves open the question of the future of black art. Around that, he says, “there was an awakening, an enlightenment through education, a desire to want to know. On the other hand, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr .: We have not reached the promised land. We have a long way to go. “