Opening Eyes in the Ghettos

Art may not be the ghettos' most urgent need. But more and more museum curators are eager to prove that it does have a role to play in the blighted areas of their cities. They are all too aware that museums on Sundays are filled almost exclusively with affluent whites; although black and Spanish-speaking schoolchildren may be guided through for a fleeting visit by their teachers, few return with their parents, and still fewer poor adults come in alone. To open their eyes, white administrators are now taking art to the ghettos with branch museums or art-mobiles. Often, they find whole streets in Harlem covered with murals by amateurs. Near by are apt to be makeshift art schools set up by residents. Although desperately in need of funds and technical assistance, such homegrown facilities suggest that underprivileged areas want art and are willing to do something about getting it.

Watts Wreckage. What speaks most eloquently, both black and white museum sponsors have found, is not art produced by the cultural ancestors of white America. Most ghetto exhibitions are carefully tailored to their audiences, designed to help meet the widely voiced demand from Negroes for more information about their neglected Afro-American heritage. Currently, several dozen projects are under way in about 20 cities, financed by $400,000 worth of seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts, by states' arts councils, private benefactors and locally raised nickels and dimes.

In Brooklyn's depressed Bedford-Stuyvesant area, the Brooklyn Children's Museum took over a building that had formerly housed a pool hall and an auto showroom, last month set up a neighborhood branch called MUSE. Its exhibits invite participation; there are African drums to pound, African masks that can be worn, and a display of exotic headgear with a sign, "Please try one on."

Detroit's International Afro-American Museum, organized by Dr. Charles H. Wright, a black gynecologist, is a trailer that tours schools. Among its exhibits: African statues from the collection of G. Mennen Williams, a clay model of the 14th century West African metropolis of Timbuctoo, and exhibits on the ancient (6th century) Zimbabwe civilization in Rhodesia.

Most successful in this field is Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C., launched nine months ago under Smithsonian auspices and currently supported largely from local donations. It has drawn more than 40,000 visitors, with shows of African artifacts and craftwork borrowed from local embassies and even an African food fair. "This place," says Director John Kinard, 30, a native of Washington's inner city, "has brought people who wouldn't otherwise be caught dead in a museum." Shows are often scheduled on the basis of requests found in the suggestion box, giving local residents, as Kinard points out, a real feeling of "this is our thing." Even the reality of violence in the ghetto is being dramatized; last month Washington's Gallery of Modern Art put on view 66 pieces of sculpture assembled by Los Angeles Artists Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell from three tons of charred wood, stained plaster, bent wire, broken dolls and burnt-out machinery culled from the wreckage of the 1965 Watts riots.

Chalk-Ins. Just as important as the exhibits are the many new art-teaching programs, which offer talented Negroes a chance to get ahead--and even untalented ones a chance for creative self-expression. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will conduct a month-long course this summer in which two young artists, Robert Israel and Richard Randell, will instruct 100 youngsters for six hours a day in the use of new materials like plastics and in sophisticated assembly methods. Not only is tuition free, but students receive a $75 stipend to make up for money that they might have earned on summer jobs.

In Washington, D.C., Architect Colin "Topper" Carew, 24 runs the New Thing Art and Architecture Center in a reconverted dry-cleaning establishment and two old houses. He has schooled 2,000 Negro children during the past year in everything from painting and sculpture to dance and film making. One of his students, Herbert Ball, 14, has been making a documentary of life in the Washington streets. "I tried to show the good and the bad," says he. "We showed a dirty girl, you know, then faced the camera on a sanitation sign."

In Los Angeles, Jim Woods runs Studio Watts, a fine-arts school where Negro and white Angelenos learn such subjects as pottery and design from "masters," who take on ten students each as apprentices. Woods also stages an annual "chalk-in," a rousing affair in which any and all comers are invited to draw an 'entry on the street outside. More than a few of the children who attend are troublemakers at their regular schools. Yet teachers from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Manhattan report that when children find themselves doing well in art classes, behavior in regular school and sometimes their grades improve as well. As one boy in a class run by Manhattan's Whitney Museum explained: "Here I'm treated like a person and an artist. At school, they treat me like a convict."

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