Art historian Kellie Jones gave a keynote speech Saturday morning at the Saint Louis Art Museum that had all the intricacy and spirit of an Oliver Jackson assemblage or an Eric Dolphy saxophone excursion.
Jones spoke in layered detail about abstraction in African-American visual art. In a brisk 45-minute talk illustrated with images of contemporary work, she really schooled an overflowing crowd of artists, collectors, curators and friends of the museum.
Jones opened with conversational remarks about specific pieces in the museum collection made by black artists working in abstract directions, and she concluded with a candid Q&A session that spoke to the immediate social setting of this art and this museum in a city that, she said, “has a ways to go” toward adequately representing all of its citizens’ genius.
The guts of her talk, however, was excerpted from her curator’s notes to a show she organized in Spring 2006 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980. Reading from the previously published work made sense. Jones was speaking to a collector’s group as part of the programming developed around a new show at the museum, African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections. The 2006 show Jones produced was an important precursor to the current Saint Louis Art Museum exhibition, which was curated by Andrew Walker, with the assistance of Alisa Swindell and Janeen Turk.
Jones’ remarks only glanced at the artists represented in the St. Louis Connections show: Oliver Jackson, John Rozelle, Michael Marshall and Phillip J. Hampton (Hampton was in the house, along with many other working artists). The St. Louis American will return to these artists and this important show many times throughout its run in Gallery 337, which ends March 23. This Saturday, Kellie Jones laid the intellectual groundwork to understand the emergence and evolution of these artists in the contemporary art market.
In her view, the abstract black artist has been challenged from every side. The art market, she said, typically prefers black artists whose work is identifiably “black.” Such work, depicting black folks, signals to the public that the institution has invested in work by an African-American artist. Since abstract art is non-objective, when it deals with the human figure it tends to distort it beyond recognition. By looking at abstract work, it is difficult to guess that the person who made it is black.
Jones got belly laughs, especially from the artists, during the Q&A session, when she acknowledged that not knowing the race of the artist is, in so many ways, a good thing.
“It’s nice when people are surprised by that,” she said, before enacting a sista exclaiming, “Hey!” when she discovers that a piece of art she really enjoyed was made by an African American.
Jones said, “It doesn’t have to blast out, ‘Hey, I’m black!’”
But, as her talk made clear, the art market often has imposed just that expectation upon black artists.
Since the famous pioneers in abstract art, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, were white, black artists who pursued work in these directions often were accused of being derivative. Jones – who knew many of these pioneering black artists as a child in New York – ably expressed their frustration at the limited critical insight their work received when it was new.
Jack Whitten, for example, learned technique from setting tiles as a tradesman that he later applied to his art. The effects he produced were compared by critics to Pollock’s work, without any attempt to understand Whitten’s individual process.
As the white-dominated art market tended to underestimate or ignore their work, black abstract artists also faced skepticism from the black community. Here again, the association with “white” art often was seen as a liability, an attempt to sell out. Jones pointed out that black artists were exploring abstraction during turbulent decades when the black community was aggressively on the move, socially and politically. It always has been difficult to attach abstract art to a social message, so abstract artists always face the charge of irrelevant navel-gazing.
“In the black nationalist atmosphere of the period, some abstract artists were rejected,” Jones said. “Figurism” – representing recognizable human figures and objects – “was seen as more militant.”
Jones also delved into deeper psychic issues that African-American artists face when departing from the recognizable human figure. The body has a special set of meanings for a people who have survived institutionalized slavery and widespread, federally sanctioned lynching.
Jones said, “It’s hard to let go of the figure when you’ve only had a hold of it 20 years.”
As the work represented in her slide show made very clear, many artists overcame these crippling obstacles to make fascinating and often beautiful work. Alma Thomas, Charles Sebree, Jack Whitten, Manuel Hughes (another St. Louis connection), Norman Lewis – if you are unfamiliar with any of these names, some wonderful discoveries await you.
Jones dwelled at length on Norman Lewis, because the Saint Louis Art Museum recently acquired his magnificent painting Twilight Sounds, which also is on display. This acquisition itself is noteworthy. Jones said that by adding artists like Lewis to the collection, curating shows like African American Abstraction and hosting curatorial programs like the Romare Bearden Fellowship, which trains minority museum professionals, museums like SLAM “are getting up to code.”
During the Q&A, I asked her if, in terms of access, the Saint Louis Art Museum “is up to code or still getting up to code”?
She said, “We’re getting there.”
Next week we will discuss her answer and the response to it by Andrew Walker, assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of American art at SLAM.
African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections will be on view in Gallery 337 (on the top level, with the Contemporary Art) through March 23.
