The assembly of works by AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a collective of African American Chicago-based artists active during the 1960s and 1970s, now on display at the Logan Center for the Arts could fairly be described as a time capsule; it is more important for the moment it captures than for its contents. In addition to this exhibition, titled AFRICOBRA: Philosophy, the collective currently has two other exhibitions on the southside of Chicago: AFRICOBRA: Prologue—The 1960s and the Black Arts Movement, at the South Side Community Art Center, and AFRICOBRA: Art and Impact, at the DuSable Museum of African American History. Historically and aesthetically, the work in Philosophy conveys a palpable yearning on the part of the artists to carve out a viable place for African American identity within the visual arts and society at large. The show is all about the urgency of a political moment that still resonates forty years later.

Gerald Williams. Wake Up, 1969; Acrylic on canvas; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and Logan Center for the Arts

Much of the work on display features iconic compositions of figures, standing front and center in an almost neo-Byzantine style. The simple messages surrounding the figures are frank and explicit, creating a collection of works that border on propaganda. This is by design, according to the pillars of AFRICOBRA’s aesthetic philosophy described by founding member Barbara Jones-Hogu’s 1973 manifesto, “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRICOBRA.” Jones-Hogu states that compositions must feature “the figure frontal and direct to stress strength, straight forwardness, profoundness, and proudness” and that “subject matter must be completely understood by the viewer, therefore lettering [ought to] be used to extend and clarify the visual statement.” [1] Steeped in the politics of self-determination, black nationalism, and Black Power espoused by the burgeoning Black Arts movement, AFRICOBRA artists Jeff Donaldson, Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Jae Jarell, Wadsworth Jarell, and Gerald Williams created colorful figurative works loaded with messages calling for greater political consciousness.

Williams’s painting Wake Up (1969) features a central figure holding out a pamphlet, as if offering the text to the viewer. It describes the “King Alfred Plan,” a conspiracy broadside circulated throughout Williams’s neighborhood during the early 1970s that claimed that the government would force black militants into concentration camps in the event of a national emergency. Williams’s work documents people’s fear that the government would take extra-constitutional measures against its citizenry in the wake of a catastrophe. Although an unfounded concern, its existence seems especially justified given today’s data mining by the National Security Agency and drone strikes on American citizens. The phrases “Can You dig,” “Wake up,” and “Check this out” are painted around the figure, calling noisy attention to the pamphlet while also emphasizing the burning mistrust of government prevalent within Williams’s community.

The artists of AFRICOBRA made art that was very much tied to the moment and place in which they were creating. Nixon-era slang phrases and shades the artists call “Cool-Ade colors,” referring to the vividly saturated hues of the popular flavored drink, appear as AFRICOBRA orthodoxy. A screenprint by Wadsworth Jarrell titled Revolutionary (1972) is an AFRICOBRA update of Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (1895). The figure is depicted mid-howl in radiant bands of orange, pink, yellow, and blue lettering. The colors are at once brilliant and dissonant, as though the air itself were shattering into spectral fragments and phrases that read “Black is Beautiful.”

Language and color are distinct signifiers of American popular culture, yet the group contextualized such tropes, as well as those concerning the figure and the incorporation of text into the picture plane, as visual elements essential to black ethnicity. According to Jones-Hogu, the artists operated through a belief that “we had specific visual qualities intrinsic to our ethnic group” and set out to create works that spoke to and for “all Black people regardless of their land base.”

After decades of evolving identity politics, the essentialist rhetoric in Jones-Hogu’s paper now reads as naively optimistic. How does a small band of artists living in one American city even begin to speak for a pan-global African diaspora? Impossible as the task may have been, it was an important early step toward greater cultural visibility for black artists in the post–Civil Rights Movement era.

Jeff Donaldson. J. D. McClain’s Day in Court, 1970; Mixed media; 28 x 23 in. Courtesy of Jameela K. Donaldson and the Logan Center for the Arts

The collective sought to integrate and expound upon all facets of African American experience. Donaldson’s work often deals with the trials and complexities of racial justice in America. His painting J.D. McClain’s Day in Court (1970) shows two figures, one in prison stripes holding a gun pointed at another dressed in black with a skull for a head. The image reflects a newspaper clipping incorporated into the composition that features the real-life J.D. McClain sighting his gun at the judge presiding over his trial for murder, a standoff that left McClain, the judge, and several others dead on the courtroom floor. In Donaldson’s parable, the judge and the justice system he represents—not McClain—is the angel of death, reaching out toward the gunman’s genitals, a gesture that symbolically threatens future generations of young black men.

Carolyn Lawrence. Uphold Your Men, Unify Your Families, 1970; Acrylic on canvas; 24 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Logan Center for the Arts

The artists also collectively addressed the theme of family in a series of individual pieces, some of which have conflicting messages regarding gender and responsibility. Lawrence’s Uphold Your Men, Unify Your Families (1970) is a graffiti-scrawled call to arms for women to support family cohesion by way of sustaining men, while Jones-Hogu’s Black Men We Need You (1970) both chides and encourages men by depicting an idealized father holding a child. Clearly, being black is the dominant identity signifier here, where gender is viewed through a more conventional lens. Like so many actions deemed radical when carried out by marginalized populations, the performance of tradition is made as a statement of defiance in itself.

Despite the assertions of the artists themselves, AFRICOBRA did not create a universal black visual language. But in their failings, the collective reveals something essential about the history of Western art. The pieces on display were made to have an immediate impact by black artists whose white contemporaries were largely toiling in the apolitical waters of Minimalism, Pop art, and Conceptualism. Confronted with works that so forcefully emphasize racial identity, those more revered canons come into focus as art that must be recognized—in addition to what merits they have—as work made by white artists for white audiences dealing with white concerns. Too often work of this nature is accepted as identity neutral while art made by black artists is viewed through a lens of race. After so many years, these artists still have something to say.

[1] Originally published in Afri-Cobra HI (Amherst: University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1973). Revised by the author, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Chicago 2008.

With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs, installation view, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, 2013. Courtesy of Romer Young Gallery

With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs, currently on view at Romer Young Gallery, includes work by San Francisco artists C. Wright Daniel, Pablo Guardiola, Jonathan Runcio, and Emma Spertus; the Los Angeles–based John Pearson; and New York–based artists Deric Carner and Letha Wilson. The press release notes as precedent curator Peter C. Bunnell’s Photography into Sculpture exhibition, mounted in 1970 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[1] Like Photography into Sculpture, With Cinder Blocks includes works that emphasize the imagined qualities of a photograph—specifically tactility and spatiality—by crafting sculptural or dimensional objects that incorporate photographic processes and imagery. Bunnell describes this process: “The maker of a photograph takes subjects—things—as he finds them and, with the selectivity necessary to determine their significance, manipulates them into an expression of his sensibilities so that they may constitute a revelation.”[2] The sensibilities that come to the fore in the works at Romer Young suggest a preoccupation with transformation, phenomenology, and materiality.

The notion of the photograph has been largely displaced by that of the image. Images are origin-less: endlessly reproducible and malleable, their content easily manipulated and re-presented. With Cinder Blocks explores the contemporary parlance by which photography reestablishes its physical parameters. It begins with process-driven explorations of exposure and gesture in which the image’s generative action is synchronous to its subject. Examples of this are Daniel’s silver gelatin prints, Untitled (Portrait) and Untitled (Profile Portrait) (all works 2013 except where noted), and Pearson’s Untitled (No. 2), a wall-hung cyanotype on silk and cotton fabric. To make his works, Daniel presses his face into the photographic paper, exposes, and then flattens the paper so that it records the creases and folds as shadows and peaks. Alternatively, Pearson draped his treated fabric on the desert floor; one sees the traces of dust or sand across the surface but also the rocks that held the edges down for the duration of the exposure. In an e-mail to gallery owner Joey Piziali, Pearson notes that while “photographs always look AT something, these cyanotypes are more an attempt to record being IN something.”[3] Both Daniel and Pearson depend on the direct contact of objects with photosensitized material to create records of their actions.

Jonathan Runcio. Model 3, 2012; steel, primer, concrete, and screenprint, 49 x 33 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco

Pearson’s cyanotype also highlights a contradiction that prevails in the exhibition and is noted in its title: the spatial presence of the sculptural objects is undermined by the photographic impulse to flatten. The white traces marking the place where rocks held down the fabric’s edges conjure the vision of it laid on the ground and compete with its fluid draping; I had a strong urge to reorient it from wall to floor. Nearby is Corner by Spertus, an ink-jet print mounted on plywood that depicts the actual corner between the two works. But Corner hovers between image and installation; the sculpture’s right angles abut the wall like a two-page spread of an open book. The contradictory impulse is most evident, though, in Runcio’s concrete-and-steel sculpture located at the front of the gallery. Model 3 (2012) is a wire armature of sharp angles and strict proportions supporting a concrete beam that slices through it; on one face of the beam is a barely discernible image screen-printed in bright yellow. Despite the architectural lexicon that defines its form—and which obtusely references the Case Study Houses that serve as its source material—the screenprint firmly orients the sculpture with a frontal position; one has to see it head-on to absorb the image.

Deric Carner. Kylix, 2013; pigment print on brushed aluminum, unique; 15 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco

In other words, in each of these works the materiality of the form calls into account the subject of the image and vice versa. Or more precisely, the material demands to be reckoned with as the artist “fuses the literal or symbolic component of the photographic image with a specific form,” as Bunnell notes.[4] For example, Satyr and Kylix, Carner’s pigment print collages of images taken from the antiquities collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rely upon the seamlessness between the image’s original gray background and the brushed aluminum on which they are mounted to craft both an illusion of depth and a logic of seeing the disrupted and reassembled object. Similarly, in Flaming Gorge Concrete Tondo, by Wilson, the deep fissures and folds molded into the concrete disc create both a rhythmic tension and a tangible sense of place for the image it bears of the stratified Wyoming canyon of the title. Both artists displace their subjects from context or orientation but re-embed them in a physical form that suggests an elapse of time and space and action; their origins are reinvented rather than translated.

Letha Wilson. Flaming Gorge Concrete Tondo, 2013; concrete, C-print emulsion transfer; 11 1/2  x 11 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco

In this sense, they bear affinity to the least sculptural work in the room, Guardiola’s untitled assemblage in which a photograph of two green bottles is hung adjacent to a small shelf on which stands one bottle filled with the shards of another. It immediately recalls numerous conceptual precedents, and its inclusion in With Cinder Blocks functions as a linchpin for the multiple dialogues unfolding in the show. One produces a photograph through a framing mechanism as well as a recording gesture. In each of the included works, that frame is not one we peer into but one we construct from process, material, and positioning and that enables us to be present with the subject rather than simply looking at it.

With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs is on view at Romer Young Gallery through July 27, 2013.

[1] Photography into Sculpture was also re-created in 2011 by L.A. gallery Cherry and Martin as part of the Getty Foundation’s citywide Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions.

[2] Peter Bunnell, Photography into Sculpture, exhibition wall label (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), np.

[3] From email exchange with Joey Piziali, shared with author on July 8, 2013.

[4] Bunnell, ibid.