(3 of 4)
Shaped and Draped. Those artists for whom the question of blackness seems irrelevant—they are probably the large majority—are busy establishing their own kind of individuality. Some have handsomely succeeded, and in an extraordinary diversity of styles. Take Sam Gilliam, who was born in Mississippi 37 years ago, took an M.A. from the University of Louisville, and now teaches at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. His canvases are not so much shaped as draped—in drooping paint-spattered bunches, like clothes drying on a line. He had one on view in this year's Whitney Annual, has had shows at Washington's Jefferson Place Gallery and the Phillips Collection. The only hint of racial origin on the guy-roped canvases of Joe Overstreet is his use of African and, most lately, American Indian colors.
Daniel Larue Johnson came out of Los Angeles' Watts ghetto, but no one would ever know it from his works. He made his way via a scholarship and gumption to New York (where he made friends with Larry Rivers and Willem de Kooning) and Paris (where he met Riopelle and worked with Giacometti). Manhattan's prestigious French & Co. gallery gave him a show last month, where his slab-sided totems sold briskly for upwards of $3,500 apiece. As for being a black artist, he snaps: "Such questions are frivolous. They have nothing to do with the consciousness of people who attempt to make art."
Outside of their art, these men are often as passionately involved with the black predicament as any of their more graphically explicit colleagues. Chicago's Richard Hunt, 34, makes welded sculptures out of old automobile parts, and has had no complaint of studied neglect—he has been shown in museums from New York to Milwaukee to Pittsburgh to Houston. "But I'm not running away from being black," he insists. "I live in a ghetto-type situation now, and I'm involved with trying to get new low-cost housing in this neighborhood. It's different from painting pictures about it, and that is why I like it—because it's a different area of involvement."
Cocktail Sales. Whether their work is polemical or not, most black artists feel that the art world is controlled by whites and still largely closed to them. True, such artists as Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden have been widely recognized on their merits. Moreover, despite the efforts of the newly zealous black historians, no neglected genius has been turned up. though figures like Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister and Henry O. Tanner have been given refurbished status. The past lack of major black painters is not due to any inherent lack of artistic talent on the part of black men—African sculpture disproves that. It is largely a function of the economic fact that in the U.S. few black men could afford to launch into careers as artists, or were encouraged to do so by their society.