A Momentum Of Perception

page...1...2...3

rtists like Tanner and Motley were, in a sense, liberating African Americans from the peripheral status that American and European art assigned them. Through portraiture, Tanner and Motley humanized African Americans on their own terms, Harris says. "They were trying to use culture to undermine misperceptions and to also suggest that African Americans had the same middle-class aspirations—and the same cultural productions—as anyone else."

The Pan-African identity that had taken root at the 1893 Chicago Conference began to fully overtake derogatory representations of blacks by the 1960s, Harris says.

Several things were happening: the Negritude movement was beginning to explore what was common—what was African—among people of African descent. Once the notion of an "African" was established by whites, Harris says, African descendants began reinventing that construct until it represented who they felt they were.

African American artists increasingly were beginning to visit Africa. "You had the Liberation movement in West Africa," Harris says. "West African nations were coming loose from colonial domination." Many postcolonial leaders had studied in the West and had connected with people of African descent in Paris, London, and the U.S.

"These global connections began to bear fruit in that people felt that they could go back and visit Africa," Harris says. "Once the artists started going there, instead of Europe, for validation, things changed in the artistic expression of the United States."

John Biggers was one of the first African American artists to visit Africa. Biggers, originally from Gastonia, N.C., traveled to Ghana and several other African nations in 1957.

Biggers had a career-long concern with the role and contributions of black women, Harris says, and his paintings transformed black women and their work into iconography. That transformation—along with an evocation of traditional African motifs—can be seen in Biggers' Shotguns series of paintings, which depict southern black women standing in front of their homes. These are shotgun houses—simple, inexpensive dwellings built such that the rooms are laid out in a direct line, usually front to back—supposedly so named because a shotgun fired through the front door would pass straight through the house and out the back door.

Railroad tracks run across the foreground of each painting in the Shotguns series, suggesting that these women live "on the other side of the tracks." The repeating patterns formed by the gables of the houses are reminiscent of those found in both African American quilt making and in central African Kuba cloth, Harris says. The women in Shotguns, Fourth Ward remind Harris of sculptural veranda posts carved by the Yoruba of West Africa. Beside each woman sits a washboard, kettle, or cooking pot, which suggest a value and appreciation for the work these women have done.

"Biggers, in visual praise poems, lauds and celebrates these women and their world of meager means and suggests a status transcending circumstance," Harris says. "Here is a reclassification of black women, bent but not broken by racial and sexual abuse and poverty, into something akin to the Yoruba notion of iya wa (our mothers)—women of spiritual and social force."

y the 1970s many African American artists were becoming less concerned with reacting to ways African Americans had been depicted and perceived. Instead, artists like Nelson Stevens were more interested in what Harris calls a proactive mode of creativity—Stevens was celebrating a black aesthetic centered on black skin, black hair, and black style, Harris says.

More recently, African American women have begun to directly address their own portrayals in art. The subject of Lorna Simpson's You're Fine is a reclining, fully clothed black woman with her back to the viewer. Harris says the woman in You're Fine subverts assumptions about male perspectives and prerogatives—she's not accessible for consumption.

In his own art, Harris has tried to explore who African Americans are as a people. He became interested in Caribbean and South American cultural forms during graduate school. Later, while on a trip to Brazil, he saw firsthand how elements of Yoruba culture had crept into New World art. Likewise, both Old and New world elements often exist side by side in Harris' art—some of his most recent work examines the influence of African religions on religions practiced in America (see Emergency Box).

"The realm of images, both popular and artistic, is a political field where high-stakes struggles are played out," Harris says. "It's important to recognize that there's been African American resistance in art at every level and during every period—from early Abolitionist efforts through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

"Too often we tell the story of how whites perceive blacks, and we don't tell the story about how African Americans have felt about how they were perceived and what they've done about it."

Michael Harris is a winner of the 2000 Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement.

Discuss this story.

© 2000 Endeavors, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.