1945-1980: learning resources

Harlem 1948, Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks and the photo essay

Key points

• The mass media’s portrayal of urban spaces like Harlem in the years after World War II often reinforced negative stereotypes of African Americans. Photographer Gordon Parks and writer Ralph Ellison wanted to offer corrective views of African American life in the popular press. This led them to collaborate on the 1948 essay “Harlem is Nowhere.”
• The text of the essay focused on the Lafargue Clinic, the first non-segregated psychiatric clinic in New York. Ellison argued that segregation and racism were having negative psychological effects on African Americans, and that problems present in Harlem represented larger systemic issues across America. These are issues he would tackle in his famous book, Invisible Man.
• The photographs by Parks were not meant to illustrate the essay. They present their own visual argument about the tensions around race in both Harlem and the United States more broadly by portraying the psychological and societal difficulties that were a daily part of the African American experience.

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“Who am I? Where am I? How do I come to be? Behind endless walls of his ghetto, man searches for social identity. Refugees from southern feudalism, many Negroes wander dazed in the mazes of northern ghettos, the displaced persons of American democracy.”

Jasper Johns, Flag

Key points

• The image is painted in encaustic, which allows the viewer to see the layers of newspaper beneath the painted surface. This process reflects the dense history and complex meaning embedded in the symbol of the American flag.
• As a precursor to Pop Art of the 1960s, Johns was one of the first artists to make art based on common everyday objects.
• By representing a flag, Johns eliminated the artist’s subjective role to choose color and forms to express an idea, and thus forces us to reconsider these things traditionally valued in art.

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From wire to weightlessness, Ruth Asawa, Untitled

Key points

• Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the forced relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens—among them, Ruth Asawa. These Americans were imprisoned in internment camps, often secured with barbed wire and guard towers.
• Works of art created by artists who come from marginalized groups (including women and people of color), are often explained in terms of their biographies and histories of trauma. While historians have connected Asawa’s use of wire to her time in internment camps, these sculptures are also based on her artistic experiences at Black Mountain College and teaching in Mexico.
• Asawa’s wire sculptures transform a mundane and unattractive material into weightless, organic shapes that create movement. The sculptures, especially when seen in groups, reflect a mid-20th-century shift in the expectations and materials of fine art to create a more immersive and participatory experience.

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Identity and civil rights in 1960s America

Key points

• In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement promised greater equality for African-Americans, who struggled for visibility and equal rights.
• It isn’t clear how Andrews intends us to interpret the relationship between the man and the American flag in this painting. The flag may symbolize the promise of freedom and democracy, or it may suggest that the United States remains a hostile environment for African-Americans.
• The artist’s experience as the son of

  sharecroppers

  in Georgia and in the racially-divided New York art world led him to advocate for greater equality in society, as well as within the cultural sector.

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Romare Bearden, Three Folk Musicians

Key Points

• Romare Bearden is often best known for the collages depicting Black American life that he created in the 1960s. In the collages, Bearden combines cut and torn paper, taken from pre-existing drawings and paintings as well as from magazines, to portray his subjects as part of a complex and dynamic composition. In Three Folk Musicians, the complexity is heightened by the placement of the collage elements on top of an underlying, abstractly painted canvas.
• Bearden was a founding member of the Spiral group, formed in 1963 and dedicated to their identity and role as Black artists within the unfolding Civil Rights Movement. At this time, Bearden began to focus on the practice of collage, specifically responding to European and American modernism by expertly blending abstraction and representation to form a unique type of socially charged imagery. His collages and other later works were integral to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
• Throughout his career, Bearden maintained relationships with musicians and described his creative practice as similar to forms of improvisational music-making such as jazz. In Three Folk Musicians, the inclusion of both the Western European guitar and the African banjo reflect Bearden’s awareness of African culture and intentional fusion of it into a modern American context.

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