Black Arts West
Black Arts West

Author: Daniel Widener

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-03-08

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0822392623

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From postwar efforts to end discrimination in the motion-picture industry, recording studios, and musicians’ unions, through the development of community-based arts organizations, to the creation of searing films critiquing conditions in the black working class neighborhoods of a city touting its multiculturalism—Black Arts West documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the riots of 1992. Focusing on the lives and work of black writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers, Daniel Widener tells how black cultural politics changed over time, and how altered political realities generated new forms of artistic and cultural expression. His narrative is filled with figures invested in the politics of black art and culture in postwar Los Angeles, including not only African American artists but also black nationalists, affluent liberal whites, elected officials, and federal bureaucrats. Along with the politicization of black culture, Widener explores the rise of a distinctive regional Black Arts Movement. Originating in the efforts of wartime cultural activists, the movement was rooted in the black working class and characterized by struggles for artistic autonomy and improved living and working conditions for local black artists. As new ideas concerning art, racial identity, and the institutional position of African American artists emerged, dozens of new collectives appeared, from the Watts Writers Workshop, to the Inner City Cultural Center, to the New Art Jazz Ensemble. Spread across generations of artists, the Black Arts Movement in Southern California was more than the artistic affiliate of the local civil-rights or black-power efforts: it was a social movement itself. Illuminating the fundamental connections between expressive culture and political struggle, Black Arts West is a major contribution to the histories of Los Angeles, black radicalism, and avant-garde art.

New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement
New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement

Author: Lisa Gail Collins

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2006-05-16

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0813541077

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During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture—which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement—has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.

Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement
Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement

Author: Verner D. Mitchell

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-05-15

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1538101467

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The Black Arts Movement (BAM) encompassed a group of artists, musicians, novelists, and playwrights whose work combined innovative approaches to literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre. With a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy—along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers—these figures represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture. Between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, the movement produced some of America’s most original and controversial artists and intellectuals. In Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement, Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis have collected essays on the key figures of the movement, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, Sun Ra, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and Archie Shepp. Additional entries focus on Black Theatre magazine, the Negro Ensemble Company, lesser known individuals—including Kathleen Collins, Tom Dent, Bill Gunn, June Jordan, and Barbara Ann Teer—and groups, such as AfriCOBRA and the New York Umbra Poetry Workshop. The Black Arts Movement represented the most prolific expression of African American literature since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Featuring essays by contemporary scholars and rare photographs of BAM artists, Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement is an essential reference for students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature and African American cultural studies.

Historical Dictionary of African American Theater
Historical Dictionary of African American Theater

Author: Anthony D. Hill

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-11-09

Total Pages: 755

ISBN-13: 1538117290

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This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Theater reflects the rich history and representation of the black aesthetic and the significance of African American theater’s history, fleeting present, and promise to the future. It celebrates nearly 200 years of black theater in the United States and the thousands of black theater artists across the country—identifying representative black theaters, playwrights, plays, actors, directors, and designers and chronicling their contributions to the field from the birth of black theater in 1816 to the present. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on actors, playwrights, plays, musicals, theatres, -directors, and designers. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know and more about African American Theater.

Behold the Land
Behold the Land

Author: James Smethurst

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1469663058

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In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s. Traveling across the South, he chronicles the movement's radical roots, its ties to interracial civil rights organizations on the Gulf Coast, and how it thrived on college campuses and in southern cities. He traces the movement's growing political power as well as its disruptive use of literature and performance to advance Black civil rights. Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement's legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement's southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.

Rites of Passage
Rites of Passage

Author: Walt Crowley

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 1997-10

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0295974931

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On a hot summer night in 1963, a teenager named Walt Crowley hopped off a bus in Seattle’s University District, and began his own personal journey through the 1960s. Four years later at age 19, he was installed as “rapidograph in residence” at the Helix, the region’s leading underground newspaper. His cartoons, cover art, and political essays helped define his generation’s experience during that tumultuous decade. Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle weaves Crowley’s personal experience with the strands of international, intellectual, and political history that shaped the decade. As both a member and in-house critic of the New Left and counter-culture, the author offers a unique perspective in explaining why the experiments and excess of the period “made sense at the time.” Anti-war marches, human be-ins, rock festivals, psychedelic drugs, underground newspapers, free universities, light shows, inner-city riots, radical skirmishes, and hippie antics are chronicled with personal anecdotes, contemporary accounts, and historical insights. In the pages of Rites of Passage, the reader will encounter Black (and White) Panthers, the Seattle and Chicago Seven, Weathermen and Radical Women, and many more remarkable characters. As an engaging blend of history and personal reminiscence, Rites of Passage places the sixties in a context unavailable to its participants at the time. In addition to his text, Crowley has assembled a chronology of the decade beginning with its harbingers in the forties and fifties and continuing through its aftermath. This compilation covers political, social, and cultural events, and provides the most complete synopsis of sixties history now in print.

Building the Black Arts Movement
Building the Black Arts Movement

Author: Jonathan Fenderson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2019-03-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780252042430

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As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges--corporate, political, and personal--that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions. An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.

Black Post-Blackness
Black Post-Blackness

Author: Margo Natalie Crawford

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-05-12

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780252041006

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A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.

The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture
The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture

Author: Jo-Ann Morgan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-17

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0429885873

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This book examines a range of visual expressions of Black Power across American art and popular culture from 1965 through 1972. It begins with case studies of artist groups, including Spiral, OBAC and AfriCOBRA, who began questioning Western aesthetic traditions and created work that honored leaders, affirmed African American culture, and embraced an African lineage. Also showcased is an Oakland Museum exhibition of 1968 called "New Perspectives in Black Art," as a way to consider if Black Panther Party activities in the neighborhood might have impacted local artists’ work. The concluding chapters concentrate on the relationship between selected Black Panther Party members and visual culture, focusing on how they were covered by the mainstream press, and how they self-represented to promote Party doctrine and agendas.

Now Dig This!
Now Dig This!

Author: Kellie Jones

Publisher: Prestel Publishing

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13:

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This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works.