NEW YORK: Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties

David Hammons, The Door (Admissions Office), 1969. Wood, acrylic sheet, and pigment construction, 79 x 48 x 15 inches. California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Collection of Friends, the Foundation of the California African American Museum. © David Hammons. Image via brooklynmuseum.org.

Curated by Teresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones

March 7–July 6, 2014

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st Floor

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY

From the Brooklyn Museum web site:

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties offers a focused look at painting, sculpture, graphics, and photography from a decade defined by social protest and American race relations. In observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this exhibition considers how sixty-six of the decade’s artists, including African Americans and some of their white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and Caribbean contemporaries, used wide-ranging aesthetic approaches to address the struggle for racial justice.

The 1960s was a period of dramatic social and cultural upheaval, when artists aligned themselves with the massive campaign to end discrimination and bridged racial borders through creative work and acts of protest. Bringing activism to bear in gestural and geometric abstraction, assemblage, Minimalism, Pop imagery, and photography, these artists produced powerful works informed by the experience of inequality, conflict, and empowerment. In the process, they tested the political viability of their art, and originated subjects that spoke to resistance, self-definition, and blackness.

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties is organized by Teresa A. Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Kellie Jones, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Exhibit Link

Brooklyn Museum Takes On Pop Art and Protest in the Sixties

SYMPOSIUM + BOOK LAUNCH: Black Is, Black Ain’t

Featuring Huey Copeland, Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones, Bennett Simpson, and Hamza Walker

Sunday, December 8, 2013, 2PM

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Kent Hall, Room 107

1020 East 58^th Street

Chicago, IL

Symposium:

On the occasion of publishing the Black Is, Black Ain’t exhibition catalog, the Renaissance Society has organized a symposium revisiting issues raised in the exhibition of the same name, curated by Hamza Walker and shown at the Society in 2008. Given the extent to which race is bound to visual representation, exhibitions have played no small role in instigating discussion. They are where identity has been asserted, critiqued, and dismantled, all in a healthy circular fashion. This symposium’s cast of curators, critics, and scholars will reflect on a series of seminal exhibitions from Black Male (1994) through Blues for Smoke (2012) and the context in which they were mounted, from the riots ensuing in the wake of the Rodney King beating to Obama’s presidential election.

Panelists:

Huey Copeland, moderator, Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University

Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Kellie Jones, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University

Bennett Simpson, Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles

Hamza Walker, Associate Curator and Director of Education at the Renaissance Society

Publication:

Black Is, Black Ain’t is a generously illustrated, 196 page exhibition catalog documenting work by 26 artists and featuring essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy Mooney, Kym Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warren. This group exhibition, curated by Hamza Walker, explored an evolution in the discourse of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a recent shift to racial identity being simultaneously rejected and retained.

Black Is, Black Ain’t was first exhibited at the Renaissance Society, then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2009) and the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute (2009).

Symposium Link

ACQUISITION: John Outterbridge

John Outterbridge. Case in Point, from the Rag Man Series, c. 1970. Mixed media, 12 x 12 x 24 in. (30.5 x 30.5 x 61 cm).
Image  via  hammer.ucla.edu.

The Hammer Museum has acquired a major work by John Outterbridge. Case in Point (c. 1970) is featured in the Hammer’s travelling exhibition Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980. Assembled from leather and other materials and closely resembling a bag of grenades, this work communicates intense feelings about Outterbridge’s experience of being ushered to the back of a bus in 1955 despite his being in full army uniform. With Case in Point, Outterbridge confronts the all-too-common reality of racism that African Americans experienced at home after serving the country abroad in the Korean War.

Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 will be on view at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown Massachusetts (July 20 - December 1, 2013).

YouTube: John Outterbridge Interview 

Source

NEW YORK: NOW DIG THIS! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980

David Hammons. America the Beautiful, 1968. Lithograph and body print. 39 x 29 1⁄2 in. (99.1 x 74.9 cm).
Oakland Museum, Oakland Museum Founders Fund.

NOW DIG THIS! ART AND BLACK LOS ANGELES 1960–1980

CURATED BY DR. KELLIE JONES

October 21, 2012—March 11, 2013

MoMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Ave at the Intersection of 46th Ave

Long Island City, NY

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 chronicles the vital legacy of the African American arts community in Los Angeles, examining a pioneering group of black artists whose work and connections with other artists of varied ethnic backgrounds helped shape the creative output of Southern California. The exhibition presents approximately 140 works by thirty-two artists active during this historical period, exploring the rising strength of the black community in Los Angeles as well as the increasing political, social, and economic power of African Americans across the nation.

Several prominent black artists began their careers in the Los Angeles area, including Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar. Their influence, like that of all of the artists in the exhibition, goes beyond their immediate creative circles and the geography of Los Angeles and is critical to a more complete and dynamic understanding of twentieth-century American Art.

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition is curated by Kellie Jones, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, and organized at MoMA PS1 by Christophe Cherix, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art, and Peter Eleey, Curator, MoMA PS1, in association with Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art.

The presentation at MoMA PS1 is supported by Lawrence B. Benenson, David Teiger, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art.

Additional funding is provided by The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art and by Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi.

The exhibition was made possible by major grants from the Getty Foundation. Generous support was provided by the Henry Luce Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which funded a Curatorial Research Fellowship; and The Broad Art Foundation.

LOS ANGELES: Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 / Hammer Museum / October 2, 2011 - January 8, 2012

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980

October 2, 2011 - January 8, 2012

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 chronicles the vital legacy of the city’s African American artists. The work of these practitioners was animated to an extent by the civil rights and Black Power movements, reflecting the changing sense of what constituted African American identity and American culture. The power of the black community strengthened nationwide as racial discrimination began to lessen as a result of new legislation and changing social norms. As there were plentiful opportunities for African Americans to make a livelihood in Southern California, Los Angeles soon had a substantial black population, and social, political, and economic changes drew transplants from around the country. Galvanized by these transformations, black artists worked to form a cultural community that became an important part of the city’s thriving arts scene.Now Dig This! examines a pioneering group of African American artists whose work, connections, and friendships with other artists of varied ethnic backgrounds influenced the creative community and artistic practices that developed in Los Angeles during this historic period. The exhibition presents 140 artworks by these artists and the friends who influenced and supported them during this period and explores and celebrates the significant contributions of African Americans to the canon of Los Angeles–based art.

“The artists that have been included in Now Dig This! represent a vibrant group whose work is critical to a more complete and dynamic understanding of twentieth century American art. Their influence goes beyond their immediate creative circles and their legacy is something we are only now beginning to fully understand,” says exhibition curator Kellie Jones.

During the 1960s and 1970s, artists in Southern California developed an aesthetic language that reflected their West Coast surroundings and explored various approaches to art making, including assemblage, “finish fetish,” California pop, installation, and performance. Several prominent black artists began their careers in the Los Angeles area, including Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar. They were part of a unique support system that involved a confluence of artists, curators, scholars, and gallerists in Southern California. Samella Lewis, Suzanne Jackson, and Dale Brockman Davis and Alonzo Davis opened galleries that became important outlets and gathering places for black artists. Lewis, a noted art historian, also wrote books and articles that established a benchmark for the documentation and analysis of the work of contemporary African American artists.

In the fall of 1966 UCLA’s Dickson Art Center inaugurated its new building with the exhibition The Negro in American Art. Although the exhibition was national in scope, a significant portion of the artists were from Los Angeles and were part of a group working with Noah Purifoy and the Watts Towers Arts Center to reclaim the remains of the Watts uprising, which had taken place just one year earlier, by using them to make art. Seven artists in the current exhibition—Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Ruth G. Waddy, and Charles White—were among the more than forty who participated in the 1966 show. Moreover, three of the works presented in the earlier exhibition—Edwards’s The Lifted X and August the Squared Fire, along with Johnson’s Big Red, all from 1965—are on view here. Now Dig This! expands on this legacy and considers the activities of African American artists in Los Angeles during these pivotal years through a broader lens. —Kellie Jones, Guest CuratorNow Dig This! is presented as part of Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together for six months beginning in October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a new force in the art world. Organized by the Hammer and curated by Columbia University professor Kellie Jones, Now Dig This! will chronicle and celebrate this nuanced and multicultural history of Los Angeles. 

“Pacific Standard Time is a very significant event for the city of Los Angeles. The deep and remarkable history it explores serves as a foundation for the thriving creative community of artists living and working here today,” remarks Hammer director Ann Philbin. “Now Dig This! reveals a specific moment when a group of African American artists, gallerists, writers, and collectors generated a nexus of creativity and influence that is largely unknown to the general public.” 

NOW DIG THIS! FEATURED ARTISTS
John Altoon
Sister Karen Boccalero/Self Help Graphics
Marie Johnson Calloway
George Clack
Dan Concholar
Houston Conwill
Alonzo Davis
Dale Brockman Davis
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Mark di Suvero
Melvin Edwards
Fred Eversley
Charles Gaines
David Hammons
Maren Hassinger
Suzanne Jackson
Virginia Jaramillo
Ulysses Jenkins
Daniel LaRue Johnson
Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor
Samella Lewis
Ron Miyashiro
Senga Nengudi
John Outterbridge
Joe Overstreet
William Pajaud
Noah Purifoy
John T. Riddle Jr.
Betye Saar
Raymond Saunders
Ruth G. Waddy
Gordon Wagner
Charles White
Tyrus Wong
Andrew Zermeño/Mechicano Art Center

Hammer Museum Video: Curator Kellie Jones discusses Now Dig This!

About the Curator

Now Dig This! is curated by Kellie Jones, associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Jones’s writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and publications includingNKA, Artforum, Flash Art, Atlantica, and Third Text. Most recently, she curated Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006). Current book projects include, Eye-Minded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press 2011) and Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (forthcoming from The MIT Press).

About Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 – 1980

Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together for six months beginning in October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world. Each institution will make its own contribution to this grand-scale story of artistic innovation and social change, told through a multitude of simultaneous exhibitions and programs. Exploring and celebrating the significance of the crucial post-World War II years through the tumultuous period of the 1960s and 70s, Pacific Standard Time encompasses developments from L.A. Pop to post-minimalism; from modernist architecture and design to multi-media installations; from the films of the African American L.A. Rebellion to the feminist activities of the Woman’s Building; from ceramics to Chicano performance art; and from Japanese American design to the pioneering work of artists’ collectives. Initiated through $10 million in grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time involves cultural institutions of every size and character across Southern California, from Greater Los Angeles to San Diego and Santa Barbara to Palm Springs.

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 has been made possible by major grants from the Getty Foundation. Generous support has been provided by the Henry Luce Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which funded a Curatorial Research Fellowship; and The Broad Art Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, Ina Coleman and Alan Wilson, and V. Joy Simmons, M.D. In-kind support has been provided by InterfaceFLOR.

Source

Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi discuss being black artists in the 1970s

'If You Don't Know, Now You Know': Life, Art and Now Dig This!