1971

Darby English works against the grain of consensus when it comes to writing the history of modern African-American art. The book presents not a neglected but, rather, a rejected chapter in African-American art history. The time is 1971, when the American racial drama had become a state of emergency represented by polarities of white and black. Among the holdouts against this were a significant number of black artists committed to abstraction in painting and sculpture (Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Frederick Eversley, Sam Gilliam, Alvin Loving, Alma Thomas, and Jack Whitten). Black cultural leaders such as LeRoi Jones, Cedric Dover, Romare Bearden, and Ishmael Reed inveighed against them: a black artist doing abstraction was seen to flout the social demand for representative images. Worse, that these artists collaborated with non-blacks was seen to undermine the need for racial autonomy. The book explores two exhibitions of contemporary black art that appeared in 1971 and have been ignored by many African American art historians: the Whitney’s Contemporary Black Artists in America, organized by white curator Robert Doty, and The DeLuxe Show, presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto and organized by Yale-trained painter Peter Bradley through the patronage of white philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil.