Hiding Local Black Art

Make no mistake about it: America has a world-crass talent for hiding its diverse heritages. Take Emily Dickinson. It took 70 years before we got the proper text for her poems. And her peer, Walt Whitman, is still read mainly only by his fellow poets. As fine a novella as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening took three generations before the feminist critics could shoehorn it into the canon.

And that’s just the mainstream lit. The new immigrants fled as fast as they could from their different values in a mad dash for Americanization, until affluence tempted them to recover their heritages.

When it comes to reds and blacks, there were worse things than cultural amnesia. For the most part, the Indians were reduced to airport-art production—although there is now at the Renwick Gallery in Washington a remarkable exhibition of the leading edge of Amerind art of the past two decades. To me, it was one of the most exhilarating shows of the year.

Black heritages were forced underground. When cotton cultivation became mechanized, Southern Negroes swarmed north to cities in search of work, and a kind of cultural apartheid emerged, symbolized by so-called “race” recordings. A few well-off whites slummed uptown at the segregated Cotton Club in Harlem, but for the most part, the richness of black culture remained invisible to mainstream America. So, sure, in these United States of Amnesia, we’re always anxious to find our buried ones.

Hence my eagerness to discover fresh riches at “Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art 1800-1950” at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I was disappointed. True, I’m delighted to learn about Joshua Johnston, an early 19th-Century folk portraitist. And the luminist landscapes of Robert S. Duncanson are a pleasure to savor.

But hidden black heritage? No way. Henry O. Tanner? I’ve never been able to see what all the excitement about him was—and in any case, he’s never been hidden, especially in Philadelphia.

And Horace Pippin? He’s one of the most esteemed folk painters of our time. (I wish some historically hip curator in this region would do a full-dress retrospective of him in 1988, his centennial year.) I keep gravitating to his canvases at the Brandywine and Philadelphia Museum of Art whenever I visit there.

He deserves the kind of long look that the National Museum of American Art gave William H. Johnson several years back. Now there’s a hidden talent it was a joy to rediscover at PAFA. And the exhibition does a service to displaying regionally recognized sculptors like Sargent Johnson, whose work has always pleased me at the Oakland Museum and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And I’ll bet West Coasters are equally grateful to take a good look at Selma Burke’s work, that glory of Bucks Country.

And I’m genuinely excited by Archibald Motley, Jr., a black Precisionist with a funky day-glo palette. And Palmer Hayden’s evocation of John Henry is relishable. But for the most part, this show only goes to underline how much greater Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence are than their black precursors. There’s a great Lawrence and a so-so Bearden in the show, a kind of two-man coda that eclipses the main symphony.

That Renwick Amerind show comes to mind. Better to nurture current creativity among living artists than to pretend that there’s more hidden than there really is. Let me take one local example. Because I went to interview Max Roach at the Afro American Museum during the Mellon Jazz Festival, I killed time waiting for him to arrive by scanning the walls of their Aud.

It was my great luck that Max was late, because on the walls were the luminous hyperreal drawings and geometric abstracts (they grew out of border decorations) of 31-year-old Blaine elementary school art teacher Jimmy Mance. The lushness of jungle foliage also energizes his muse, and his lovingly detailed pen and pencil sketches communicate that piety.

It turns out that Mance won Mayor Goode’s first annual Arts Award in April. (It’s always reassuring to know you are not alone in your enthusiasm.)

Now PAFA went to LA to pick up on Betye Saar, whose black gimlet eye turns souvenir kitsch into memorable assemblages. And I’m glad they did. But how about some PAFA exposure soon for Mance? He’s a crossover talent who needs some patrons.

In a gallery / museum complex that buries budding artists under bushels of inattention, let’s do some affirmative action exhibiting that lets talents like Jimmy’s shine. I’m not telling you not to go to PAFA. I’m urging you to think, after going, about the special problems of minority artists.
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, October 14, 1987