CategoriesStyles and Movements
Spiral Group
A New York collective of Black artists, formed in 1963 during the civil rights movement, that debated how art should answer the struggle.
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About
In July 1963, weeks before the March on Washington, Black artists met in Romare Bearden's studio in Lower Manhattan to ask what their art owed the civil rights movement. Hale Woodruff suggested the name Spiral, after the Archimedean spiral that moves outward as it rises. Over two years the members, among them Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, Emma Amos, Richard Mayhew, Reginald Gammon and Felrath Hines, argued over whether art should picture Black life directly or whether the freedom to work abstractly was itself the point.
Their only group exhibition, in 1965, was restricted to black and white, a choice with obvious resonance. The work ranged from Lewis's abstractions, in which marching crowds dissolve into brushmarks, to Gammon's Freedom Now (1963), a painting of demonstrators. Bearden proposed a collaborative collage; when it lapsed he made his Projections (1964), photomontages of Black life. The group disbanded in 1965.
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