4.10 The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts movement (BAM) ran from about 1965 to 1975. Its artists, writers, musicians and playwrights saw art as a political tool to help achieve Black liberation. The poet and playwright Amiri Baraka helped launch it by founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem in 1965, soon after Malcolm X's assassination.

BAM artists didn't agree on one vision of what Black art should look like, but they shared the belief that Black art was distinct in its inspiration, features and purpose. It should speak to Black audiences, draw on Black speech, music and history, and help build Black consciousness. Poets like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni and Haki Madhubuti read their work aloud in community settings, often with the rhythms of jazz and Black speech.

Like the Harlem Renaissance, which announced the 'New Negro' (3.11), BAM laid a new political foundation for Black art. But where many Harlem Renaissance artists depended on white patrons and publishers, BAM stressed independence and community control. It also honored the long tradition of Black cultural production, linking contemporary artists to the writers and musicians who came before them.

BAM inspired new Black magazines, publishing houses, art centers and scholarly journals. Examples include Broadside Press in Detroit and Third World Press in Chicago. In Chicago, artists painted the Wall of Respect (1967), an outdoor mural honoring Black heroes, and later formed the AfriCOBRA collective.

The movement also helped create some of the earliest African American Studies programs in universities (1.1). The flourishing of Black poetry, drama, music and visual art showed that Black culture deserved serious study across many disciplines, which helped make African American Studies an interdisciplinary field.

Elizabeth Catlett, a granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, was an artist who made sculptures, paintings and prints about race, gender, class and history. She moved to Mexico in the 1940s and later became a Mexican citizen, and her art blends African, African American and Mexican modernist traditions.

Her print Negro es Bello II ('Black Is Beautiful II'), the required source, shows two faces in the style of African masks along with images of black panthers, surrounded by the phrase 'Black Is Beautiful'. Made in Mexico with a Spanish title, it shows how the Black Is Beautiful and Black Power movements reached across borders (4.12).