Existing comment:
1970-1979
In the sixties, many in my generation "dropped out" rather than take their politics to its logical conclusion: the streets. The counterculture had intervened, with its free love and self- medication. Hayden argues that the drug-fueled counterculture "overtook, competed with, and weakened the idea of radical political reform." His argument helps explain why there was so little socially- or politically-engaged painting in the sixties and early seventies by mainstream White male artists, and little political reform of any sort.
In the seventies, the more successful mainstream artists continued to ignore current events, but there were more exciting abstractions then being made by African American artists. Alma Thomas, Carroll Sockwell, and Kenneth Victor Young each took from the Color School what they wanted and moved in their own direction. Perhaps guided by the Color School's first generation, all three avoided race, gender, and politics in their art.
Young said he argued frequently with Jeff Donaldson, one of the pioneers of the Black Arts Movement and chair of the Howard University Art Department. Donaldson founded a groundbreaking group called AfriCOBRA (the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), but Young wanted nothing to do with the group. It is revealing that no works by Donaldson or other AfriCOBRA artists like Frank Anthony Smith made their way into AU's collections over the past forty years. In the end, I borrowed three works by AfriCOBRA and Howard University-related artists. Without them, this exhibition would have presented an even more skewed art history of Washington.
Two of the African American artists producing figurative, ostensibly non-political art did see their paintings make their way into museum collections. Allen "Big Al" Carter did some graduate work at American University while Franklin White received his BFA and MFA at Howard University and taught at the Corcoran School of Art for thirty years. The Corcoran gave us White's immense, bold, vibrant, beautiful still life, Ashtray, depicting the mundane familiar in a most dramatic, transcendent and ultimately political fashion.
The lack of self-declared feminist artists in The Long Sixties is partly a function of my decision to limit the exhibition to paintings. Most feminist artists preferred the newer, then-unorthodox methods of performance art, conceptual art, and body art, as well as working in what art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard note as "such previously subordinated genres as film and photography, or the collaborative arts and crafts." The lack is also a function of what was being shown in commercial galleries and purchased by collectors at the time, and what would eventually be accessioned by museums from those collectors. The seventies coincided with the rise of women-run co-op galleries, as well as non-profit alternative spaces. There was demonstrable sexism in the marketplace and in the museums, and these spaces provided alternatives to the system that women were excluded from.
As was the case with the AfriCOBRA artists missing from our collections, awareness of feminist art and activism also redefines our understanding of Washington art in "the long sixties," beyond the Washington Color School. And, just as I found with African American abstract painters, works by women artists in general were underrepresented in our collections. It became necessary to solicit gifts from collectors of three women artists to achieve anything close to adequate representation in The Long Sixties. Clearly, there is a need for future exhibitions to address the different priorities of feminist and African American artists and find remedies for the inadequacies of museum collections in general. |