Faith Ringgold’s Die: The Riot and its Reception

2017

in August 1967, as the slogan Black Power burst the confines of African Ameri-can subcultures and global anti-colonial movements began to circulate prominently within mainstream mass media, seven men from two countries met via a transnational telephone connection to talk about the colour black. Their conversation, and its subsequent publication in the arts journal artscanada's October 1967 issue titled "Black," provides this article's focus. While the thematic issue indexes a rare intersection between eiite art and racial politics, and while it is unlikely that any of these representatives of innovative contemporary art practices intimate with the radical countercultures of Greenwich Village and Yorkville saw any cloying taint of bigotry compromise their views about art and art-making, the issue nonetheless enforces covert racism sustained by ideologies of W/iiteness. The result is that rather than embracing creative expression associated with black, Black-as-race is construed as alien to contemporary arts mise-en-scène. RÉSUMÉ En août 1967, quand le slogan « Black Power » se fait entendre au-deld des subcultures afro-américaines et les principaux médias commencent à couvrir les mouvements anti-impérialistes mondiaux, sept hommes vivant dans deux pays, par l'intermédiaire d'un lien téléphonique interurbain, ont eu une échange sur la couleur noire. Cet article porte sur cette conversation et sa publication ultérieure en octobre 1967 dans un numéro de la revue artscanada intitulé « Black ». Ce numéro thématique est l'occasion d'une rare intersection entre l'art d'élite et la politique raciale. R est peu probable que ces représentants de pratiques innovatrices d'art contemporaii}, avec leur connaissance intime des contrecultures radicales de Greenwich Village et de Yorkville, aient été conscients d'avoir exprimé des préjugés à l'égard de l'art et de la création artistique. Pourtant, le numéro comporte des exemples de racisme implicite soutenu par une idéologie favorisant la blancheur. En conséquence, plutôt que de reconnaître l'expression créative associée à ce qui est noir, les interlocuteurs traitent le noir en tant que race étrangère par rapport à l'art contemporain MOTS CLÉS Art et politique raciale; artscanada; Black Power; Périodiqes Krys Verrall is a fine arts and cultural scholar with an interest in the relationship hetween marginal populations and cultural production. She teaches in the

Beyond Parochialism: Telling Tales about Black Activism and Conceptual Art. Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance, 2018

In the early 2000s my research began to look at the relationship between conceptual art and black cultural activism in the 1960s in Canada. Although scholars, artists, and activists in black studies, art history, and art criticism recognize the period as a vital wellspring for all of these fields, few have teased apart conceptual art’s and black cultural activism’s complex relationship in a Canadian context. Thus, my objective is to outline a process for historical cultural research, which is in itself conceptual, in order to find another idea, one that simultaneously brings into view intersections and elisions between 1960s conceptual art and black cultural activism.

Rebecca Zorach and Marissa Baker Eds. The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago's South Side, 2018

A vivid portrayal of cultural activism in Black Chicago during the 1960s through the eyes of one young artist and activist, Masequa Myers (now the Executive Director of the South Side Community Arts Center).

Urban Geography

This article analyzes the spontaneous production of graffiti art and murals covering the entrances of businesses in the central business district of Oakland, CA, in the wake of the global protest movements, in 2020, against state violence and systemic racism. I argue that the art made legible what gets hidden through the violent processes of gentrification, neoliberal urbanism, and displacement/dispossession. The paper rethinks what borders, policing, and reclamation mean in a time of economic instability and a global health crisis, through the placement of these vernacular expressions in Downtown Oakland. What is revealed through the art is the convergence of two co-constitutive publics-a segregated, decaying city mostly inhabited by poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents and laborers, and a modern, prosperous, neoliberal city that caters to a privileged class of white residents and tourists-especially as the city grappled with the management and regulation of public space in the midst of a global pandemic. The article thus theorizes public space as layered and always contested, and not simply a space of conflict but also collective engagement.

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2020

has arrived not a moment too soon. The field of African American art history is poised to offer new insights on the complexities of postwar Black artistic communities. While scholarship on 1960s to 1970s formalist abstraction by Black artists has increased in the last five years, the unfortunate flip side is that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) too often gets positioned as the ideological bad object, set against the abstract painters and sculptors whose style of work was late modernist and therefore coded as white. 1 Within this rubric, paintings, sculptures, and public projects generated by artists affiliated with the BAM are too frequently characterized as wholly figurative and positioned as strawmen to the supposedly more critical operations of abstraction. Happily, Art for People's Sake is a powerful rejoinder to the notion that the BAM only ever constituted static, unchanging ideas about Blackness, communal belonging, or "the people." The book's signal intervention is to question the terms of modernist criticality and negation-or "art that is aesthetically antagonistic, preferring irony, ambiguity, and the production of discomfort"as the only, or most important, criteria for significant art of the late twentieth century (16). Instead, as Zorach effectively articulates, the BAM insisted on affirmation and care as practices of criticality. Zorach makes the case that over a period of ten years, artists in Chicago's flourishing BAM established innovative forms of cultural communication with Black people across many walks of life. The end goal was not simply making contact with Black viewers but transforming them to race consciousness. She suggests that this change was uniquely achieved via mural painting, new collective social formations (Organization of Black

Caa.reviews, 2017

Advances in Applied Antrhropology, 2020

Political Protest Graffiti is an increasingly visible form of rhetoric that provides a democratizing space to enable its disenfranchised peoples to articulate their own narratives. As a form of visual activism, the George Floyd Protest Graffiti acts to historically document the tragic sentiment of the collective protest demonstration and testify to political and racial struggles in America. In this essay, I examine the George Floyd Protest Graffiti as a discursive site to analyze how emotions come into play in its production. With a rhetorical power to communicate ideas and influence public debate, I contend that the Floyd cultural graffiti production functions as a system of socio-cultural negotiations and a political call to arms to collapse structural racism in America.

This paper reports on the use of historically provocative artwork (i.e., artwork that challenges master narratives of history) created by Titus Kaphar and graduate students learning about leading with a socio-political consciousness about racism. The authors provided 17 students a series of prompts, based on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and critical art analysis, to instigate reflection, dialogue, and artistry in response to a painting by Kaphar. The authors organized participant-generated artwork into assemblages and crafted accompanying narratives which illustrated the inter/intra-changes among the components of the process and expressions: (1) compositionality, (2) aesthetics, (3) temporality, (4) historical injustice/oppressiveness, (5) manifestations of power. Thus, participants' artwork exposed how engaging with historically provocative can heighten socio-political complexities relating to the consciousness of race/ism and white(ness) supremacy.