Object: Diversity

IS there such a thing as black art? Museums and gallery owners across the country seem to think so, and are rushing to mount shows. But as in other such efforts, earnest, liberal Whitey does not seem to have got it just right.

Some angry young black artists consciously paint black. Others of the generation that came of artistic age during the time of the new black militancy are painting and sculpting in styles ranging from expressionist to minimal, and they resist being classified racially. All these artists generally resent white sponsorship, even while recognizing that they have to deal with the white Establishment. As black men, they must approve the new recognition won by black artists. But as artists, they dislike the white man's current celebration of them merely because they are black. As one artist put it: "The black artist is a man, baby, not some kind of plastic superman you can make tap dance to Whitey's tune." Said another scornfully: "If they want black art, just take a canvas, paint it black, call it Nigger Number One, and they'll eat it up."

Young and Angry. The youngest and angriest care neither about what Whitey thinks nor about what they call the "white man's aesthetic." Their sole interest is to create a black art to which the black community can respond.

A good example is Boston's Dana Chandler Jr., a product of the tough Roxbury ghetto. At 28 he is a painter whom few in Boston can ignore, since his huge, bright Black Power murals glare from the sides of buildings that people pass by every day. Chandler's avowed intent is to "create a black museum in the inner city." His scorn for the white art world is complete. "Frank Stella? So much crap! It's decorative and costs lots of money and doesn't say anything. Earthworks? What the hell does it mean to black people if you get bulldozers and dig holes in the ground? All this stuff whites are buying tells the black man a lot about where the white community is at, namely, nowhere." His easel works are as bold and simple as his walls. In The Golden Prison, he shows a black man behind bars beneath a flag with yellow and red stripes. "Why yellow? That's because America has been yellow and cowardly in dealing with the black man." In Freddie Hampton's Door, a rendition of the Panther leader's bullet-splintered door bears a stamp of U.S. Government approval.

Into the Street. Some 20 other muralists, with encouragement and materials supplied by the city of Boston, have splashed their pride and sometimes anger on public walls. They are not subtle, nor are they meant to be. Among the most skilled is Charles Milles' mural painted on a handball wall in Orchard Park, in the primarily black Roxbury neighborhood. It proudly depicts black aspirations in dance, theater and music--and brings a spot of color to an otherwise dismal plavground.

Elsewhere, notably Washington, Detroit and Chicago, black artists have also taken to walls. "People decorate the street because that's where their life is," says Artist Don McIlvaine, whose Into the Mainstream enlivens the rear wall of a store in Chicago's Lawndale ghetto. On The Wall of Respect, at the corner of 43rd St. and Langley Ave. in a desperately depressed part of Chicago's South Side, new scenes are frequently added to reflect changes in ghetto feelings. Originally it was dominated by athletes, peaceful marchers and popular heroes, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Now some of these have vanished beneath a wave of red paint, and in their place is a huge, malevolent Ku Klux Klansman under whose baleful eyes policemen are beating black youths.

By comparison, Detroit's Wall of Dignity is calm and restrained. Painted primarily by Chicago Artist Bill Walker, it faces a rubble-strewn lot on Mack Avenue in Detroit's East Side slums, and brings to the residents a saga of the black man's history from ancient Egypt to LeRoi Jones' exhortation: "Calling all black people. Calling you urgent."

Flags and Chains. Though less overt than Chandler and the muralists, other young artists are painting or sculpting out of their sense of black identity. David Hammons, 26, of Los Angeles, well remembers his childhood in Springfield, Ill. The youngest of ten children of a welfare mother, he passed Lincoln's house every day on his way to school, which somehow relates to his fascination with the American flag. "I don't know whether it's the black skin against the bright colors or the irony of the flag being held by an oppressed people. I do use the flag for some kind of shock value."

Also aimed at shock, but much cooler, is the work of New York's Malcolm Bailey, 22. In Hold (Separate but Equal), a group of black and white figures are lined up on opposite sides of the canvas, but both races are in the same boat--a slave ship. "Real revolution won't occur until poor whites as well as poor blacks realize they are oppressed," Bailey explains. Bailey's career is typical of the new opportunities opening for talented young blacks. Born in Harlem, he got scholarship funds to Pratt Institute. He appeared in the Whitney Annual show this year, and is now living in the artists' community of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Barbed wire and chains are the materials of Melvin Edwards, 32, who was born in Texas. He has received seven grants, studied at both U.C.L.A. and U.S.C., is currently teaching at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and has recently had a show at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. He disclaims any polemic intent. Still, a fellow sculptor remembers that when they tramped the streets of Watts together and Edwards started collecting bits of wire and jagged metal among the rubble of back lots, he called them "lynch fragments."

Shaped and Draped. Those artists for whom the question of blackness seems irrelevant--they are probably the large majority--are busy establishing their own kind of individuality. Some have handsomely succeeded, and in an extraordinary diversity of styles. Take Sam Gilliam, who was born in Mississippi 37 years ago, took an M.A. from the University of Louisville, and now teaches at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. His canvases are not so much shaped as draped--in drooping paint-spattered bunches, like clothes drying on a line. He had one on view in this year's Whitney Annual, has had shows at Washington's Jefferson Place Gallery and the Phillips Collection. The only hint of racial origin on the guy-roped canvases of Joe Overstreet is his use of African and, most lately, American Indian colors.

Daniel Larue Johnson came out of Los Angeles' Watts ghetto, but no one would ever know it from his works. He made his way via a scholarship and gumption to New York (where he made friends with Larry Rivers and Willem de Kooning) and Paris (where he met Riopelle and worked with Giacometti). Manhattan's prestigious French & Co. gallery gave him a show last month, where his slab-sided totems sold briskly for upwards of $3,500 apiece. As for being a black artist, he snaps: "Such questions are frivolous. They have nothing to do with the consciousness of people who attempt to make art."

Outside of their art, these men are often as passionately involved with the black predicament as any of their more graphically explicit colleagues. Chicago's Richard Hunt, 34, makes welded sculptures out of old automobile parts, and has had no complaint of studied neglect--he has been shown in museums from New York to Milwaukee to Pittsburgh to Houston. "But I'm not running away from being black," he insists. "I live in a ghetto-type situation now, and I'm involved with trying to get new low-cost housing in this neighborhood. It's different from painting pictures about it, and that is why I like it--because it's a different area of involvement."

Cocktail Sales. Whether their work is polemical or not, most black artists feel that the art world is controlled by whites and still largely closed to them. True, such artists as Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden have been widely recognized on their merits. Moreover, despite the efforts of the newly zealous black historians, no neglected genius has been turned up. though figures like Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister and Henry O. Tanner have been given refurbished status. The past lack of major black painters is not due to any inherent lack of artistic talent on the part of black men--African sculpture disproves that. It is largely a function of the economic fact that in the U.S. few black men could afford to launch into careers as artists, or were encouraged to do so by their society.

Today, black artists are still sparsely represented in museums and private collections. Henri Ghent, who as Director of the Brooklyn Museum's Community Gallery is one of the few blacks to hold a job at the decision-making level in any U.S. museum, admits: "Everyone today will swear on a Bible that there is no discrimination in art. But it is still a fact that more paintings are sold over cocktails at private parties--from which blacks are excluded--than at the galleries."

All that black artists are demanding, or so they say, is fair exposure. It looks as if they are in the process of getting it. Then they will be on their own--both as blacks and as individuals. They say, properly, that they want it that way.

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