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Racist Stereotypes and the Legacy of Absence The backlash of the Post-Reconstruction era and the rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan have all contributed to the creation of racist stereotyping of African Americans. In both popular culture and high art, African Americans were represented according to what Albert Boime has called a system of "visual encoding" which reflected the social hierarchy and the status of African Americans in society. In the white imagination, Blacks were cast as sambos, mammies, pickaninnies, jigaboos and coons, as seen in the minstrel shows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These negative images have had a profound and destructive impact on African American life. They are rooted in the scientific racism of the 19th century, which served as an ideological tool to justify European hegemony and exploitation of the "other" by casting people of African-descent and other non-westerners as inferior races of people. In the 1960s and 1970s, African American artists confronted these stereotypes head on. They took control of Black representation by deconstructing these racist images. Selected works by Jeff Donaldson, Murry DePillars, Faith Ringgold, Frieda High, and Betye Saar focus on the image of Aunt Jemima, a reincarnation of the Black mammy. The work by Camille Billops deconstructs the minstrel representation of Blacks, while Emma Amos critiques European classical ideals as universal standards of beauty for women. These works also reflect the different strategies African American artists have adopted in subverting, ridiculing, or inverting negative images. A sampling of younger artists' works reflects emerging discourses in the fields of Black art and visual culture from gender and feminist perspectives. Examples are the works of Carrie Mae Weems, and Reneé Cox, which provide an insight into how such discourses are evoked in mapping absence and presence within post modernist and conceptualist frameworks.
The Flag At the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans appealed to the ideals of justice and equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, symbolized in the American flag. By the time of the rise of the Black Power Movement, the American flag had become a symbol of oppression and exploitation. In the 1960s and 1970s, African American artists used the flag to highlight the contradictions between the official narrative which proclaims justice and equality as the law of the land, and the everyday realities of discrimination against African Americans in the socio-economic and human rights spheres. In this exhibition, the works of Faith Ringgold, Dana Chandler, Gordon Parks, Emma Amos, David Hammons, and Carol Byard represent the visual strategies adopted by these artists in using the flag as a symbol of institutional racism.
African American Abstraction Historically, many African American artists have deliberately chosen to work within the conventions of abstraction in general and abstract expressionism in particular. Artists of the Black Arts Movement often regarded these modes of expression as mainstream during the 1960s and 1970s. Viewed as less African-centered at a time when positive figurative images served the need for expressing pride in race and cultural heritage, the work of African American abstractionists was often excluded from major surveys of the Black Arts Movement. Ironically, mainstream museums and art galleries also excluded such artists from its surveys of abstract expressionism, while white art critics and historians in America glossed over their distinct contribution to this movement. A closer look at the work of these artists reveals their distinct style, color and aesthetic perspectives, which often overlap and intersect with the artistic vision and ideological concerns of the Black Arts Movement. The work of artists such as Ellsworth Ausby, Norman Lewis, Charles Searles, and Al Loving, among others, are examples of this neglected tradition.
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