By Colony Little
While it originated in New York in the 1960s with Black literary activist Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement quickly gained traction in Southern California in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. Drawing on new mediums flourishing on the West Coast, the Black Arts Movement as it manifested there put the focus on community uplift and radical change.
Yet, despite the fervent calls for unity during this period, the face of the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles was overwhelmingly male, the contributions of Black women largely overlooked, sidelined, or silenced. As art historian Kellie Jones notes in South of Pico, her groundbreaking scholarship on the Southern California Black Arts Movement, “Black women were integral to both the struggles for Black freedom and women’s liberation. But as a number of writers have concluded, black women were expected to disregard the racism and class privilege of white feminism and turn a blind eye to the misogyny of Black Power.”
Despite these challenges with mainstream visibility, Black women artists and arts advocates in Los Angeles did manage to forge new pathways that circumvented sexism and racial bias, creating revolutionary work and spaces to show it. Here are five of them.
In 1972 Betye Saar responded to a call for artworks from the Rainbow Sign. Long before the birth of the Black Arts Movement, Saar had established a successful career in in design and printmaking, then evolved into one of the forebears of California assemblage art. Her work combined elements of cosmology, mysticism, Southern African-American folklore, and political commentary. (And it still does: at 96 years old, Saar continues to create art that reflects the way she experiences the world.)
In response to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the Rainbow Sign, which attracted such luminaries as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Jayne Cortez, Elizabeth Catlett, Shirley Chisholm, Nina Simone, and Alice Walker, was organizing a show about Black heroes. It was at this exhibition that Saar debuted what would become an infamous work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, a shadow-box assemblage consisting of a mammy figurine placed against a backdrop of multiple images of a smiling Aunt Jemima.
Resting in the statuette’s left hand is the barrel of a longneck rifle; a broom in her right hand partially conceals a small pistol. In front of her is a postcard of another mammy figure holding a porcelain-white baby. In the center of the work Saar placed a large Black Power fist that subverts the air of servitude conveyed in the postcard. With this piece, Saar upended racist iconography by empowering her subjects with tools of resistance that release them from oppression.