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Elsewhere, notably Washington, Detroit and Chicago, black artists have also taken to walls. "People decorate the street because that's where their life is," says Artist Don McIlvaine, whose Into the Mainstream enlivens the rear wall of a store in Chicago's Lawndale ghetto. On The Wall of Respect, at the corner of 43rd St. and Langley Ave. in a desperately depressed part of Chicago's South Side, new scenes are frequently added to reflect changes in ghetto feelings. Originally it was dominated by athletes, peaceful marchers and popular heroes, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Now some of these have vanished beneath a wave of red paint, and in their place is a huge, malevolent Ku Klux Klansman under whose baleful eyes policemen are beating black youths.
By comparison, Detroit's Wall of Dignity is calm and restrained. Painted primarily by Chicago Artist Bill Walker, it faces a rubble-strewn lot on Mack Avenue in Detroit's East Side slums, and brings to the residents a saga of the black man's history from ancient Egypt to LeRoi Jones' exhortation: "Calling all black people. Calling you urgent."
Flags and Chains. Though less overt than Chandler and the muralists, other young artists are painting or sculpting out of their sense of black identity. David Hammons, 26, of Los Angeles, well remembers his childhood in Springfield, Ill. The youngest of ten children of a welfare mother, he passed Lincoln's house every day on his way to school, which somehow relates to his fascination with the American flag. "I don't know whether it's the black skin against the bright colors or the irony of the flag being held by an oppressed people. I do use the flag for some kind of shock value."
Also aimed at shock, but much cooler, is the work of New York's Malcolm Bailey, 22. In Hold (Separate but Equal), a group of black and white figures are lined up on opposite sides of the canvas, but both races are in the same boat—a slave ship. "Real revolution won't occur until poor whites as well as poor blacks realize they are oppressed," Bailey explains. Bailey's career is typical of the new opportunities opening for talented young blacks. Born in Harlem, he got scholarship funds to Pratt Institute. He appeared in the Whitney Annual show this year, and is now living in the artists' community of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Barbed wire and chains are the materials of Melvin Edwards, 32, who was born in Texas. He has received seven grants, studied at both U.C.L.A. and U.S.C., is currently teaching at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and has recently had a show at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. He disclaims any polemic intent. Still, a fellow sculptor remembers that when they tramped the streets of Watts together and Edwards started collecting bits of wire and jagged metal among the rubble of back lots, he called them "lynch fragments."