Black Arts Movement

About Black Arts Movement

In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, the poet Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem, and a national movement followed. Its aim was art made for and with Black communities, in their own neighbourhoods and institutions.

Chicago produced two defining visual projects. In 1967 artists of the Organization of Black American Culture painted the Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural of Black heroes on the South Side. The next year Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams founded the collective later called AfriCOBRA, whose paintings and screenprints used high-key colour, rhythmic pattern and bold lettering. In California, Betye Saar armed a mammy figure with a rifle in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Look for portraits of leaders, raised fists, African textile patterns and words set into the image. Its institutions and imagery shaped later Black artists.