Black Arts West

Black Arts West PDF Author: Daniel Widener
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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.

Black Arts West

Black Arts West PDF Author: Daniel Widener
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Lisa Gail Collins
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813541077
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Verner D. Mitchell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538101467
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This reference identifies key contributors to the Black Arts Movement, the name given to a group of poets, artists, dramatists, musicians, and writers who emerged in the wake of the Black Power Movement. This book also discusses major works produced during the period, as well as significant publications, influential groups, and organizations.

Building the Black Arts Movement

Building the Black Arts Movement PDF Author: Jonathan Fenderson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252084225
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

British Black Art

British Black Art PDF Author: Sophie Orlando
Publisher: Dis Voir Editions
ISBN: 9782914563765
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The conditions of development of British Black Art are tied up with a social and cultural history of Europe, especially the anti-immigration policies of Margaret Thatcher and their consequences, such as the Brixton riots of the early 1980s. British Black Art Works suggests new narratives about canonical artworks of the British Black Art movement, such as Lubaina Himid's 1984 "Freedom and Change," Eddie Chambers' 1980 "Destruction of the National Front" and Sonia Boyce's 1986 "Lay Back Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great," interrogating their critical agency from an art-historical perspective. These artworks, art historian Sophie Orlando argues, imply a critical analysis of Western art history. This volume introduces readers to an important, long-marginalized movement and recontextualizes it with groundbreaking scholarship.

Behold the Land

Behold the Land PDF Author: James Smethurst
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
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.

Historical Dictionary of African American Theater

Historical Dictionary of African American Theater PDF Author: Anthony D. Hill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538117290
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
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.

Two Plays: Song of the Lusitanian Bogey

Two Plays: Song of the Lusitanian Bogey PDF Author: Peter Weiss
Publisher: New York : Atheneum
ISBN:
Category : German drama
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


Art for People's Sake

Art for People's Sake PDF Author: Rebecca Zorach
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9781478001003
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. In Art for People's Sake Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence. Working with community leaders, children, activists, gang members, and everyday people, artists developed a way of using art to help empower and represent themselves. Showcasing the depth and sophistication of the visual arts in Chicago at this time, Zorach demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics and artistic practice in the mobilization of Black radical politics during the Black Power era.

Black Post-Blackness

Black Post-Blackness PDF Author: Margo Natalie Crawford
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252041006
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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.