1971-1972
In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum made several changes to its bureaucracy and exhibitions as a way to represent Black art. The first two Black trustees Charles Z. Wilson and Robert Wilson were recruited in order to promote Black art into the institution (Who’s Who). The show Art & Technology, a collaboration between artists and scientists.
In an attempt to advance Black arts the LACMA put on two shows in 1971, the first was between January 26 to March 7, 1971 the LACMA put on the exhibit Three Graphic Artists, which showed the work of three artists, Charles White, David Hammons, and Timothy Washington.
A second show in 1971, “The Art of Black Africa” opened on August 17, which was a rotating installation of works on loan from local collections (“Two Centuries of Black American Art at LACMA”). In an article written in the Los Angeles Sentinel, Stanely Robertson, writes on the necessity of a gallery space devoted to Black Africa. He writes on the historical invisibility as well as the negative stereotypes surrounding Black art. Where, for example, the styles of Matisse, were heavily influenced by African Art, however, hardly acknowledged and defined as “savage”. Robertson quotes an art critic, William Wilson who describes the exhibition in LACMA,
Two small exhibition spaces are crowded with 127 top examples of the art of Africa, mainly from the central portion. That is the area minded by slave traders who brought black captives here. The artistic heritage that was stolen from them is incalculable … It is chilling to think what an insipid business modernistic art might have been with the inspiration to formal dignity and spiritual passion it derived from the art of Black Africa (Robertson).
It was the start of some institutional representation and acknowledgement of Black art in Los Angeles. As Robertson explains in an anecdote on a white woman and her child, internalized racism, or viewing Black art as lesser or savage, was still incredibly prevalent in these spaces. Even, the overt marginalization, placing 127 pieces in two small rooms, is representative of the value the LACMA placed upon these artifacts.
The Pasadena Art Museum further exhibited black artists in the early 1970s. In December of 1971 until January of 1972, the gallery showed the work of Romare Bearden, an African-american artists interested in depicting Black America through art. The exhibit, “The Prevalence of Ritual,” previously shown at the Modern Museum of Art in New York focuses on the black experience in the United States. Quoting Bearden himself, the press review from MoMA explains, “Bearden holds that the life style of the black in America is ‘perhaps the richest because it is the one life style that is talking about life and about the continuation of life . . . through all of the anguish -- the joy of life.” The press statement further goes along to describe the art itself: “These works, according to Carroll Greene, the exhibition’s Guest Director, are laced ‘with allusions to both American and African origins that include spirituals and jazz, card-playing nights and church-going Sundays, family meals and blue Mondays, set against lush Southern landscapes and bleak Northern slums.” Bearden’s work is thus significant to Black culture overall; the showing of such themes in the Pasadena Art Museum reveals progress in representing the black experience through institutional art exhibits.
As LACMA and other Los Angeles galleries were beginning to recognize Black artists and their work, so were high schools and universities. Educational institutions were beginning to facilitate and fund programs, such as poetry reading and art installations, that emphasised values within Black culture within schools. In February of 1972 four LAUSD high schools formed a “black endowment fund” to support diverse cultural experiences in music and art for minority students. However, the exhibitions and cultural programs were not well received. Increased funding did not correlate to increased student and community engagement, but did heighten debate about the values associated with instituting such programs. Schools were sites of great controversy as demonstrated by a firebombing of the Black Student Union at UC Riverside during the spring of 1972 and a racially driven fight between large numbers of students at a Monrovia high school warranting police intervention and resulting in several injuries.
Black arts frequently had a political bent, and presumably one goal of much of that art was political enfranchisement of blacks in L.A. New attention to black arts was one mode through which white Angelenos became more sympathetic to integration, but the often the effect was greater racial friction as white fear and frustration grew. Some neighborhoods were targets of intentional integration as with Lynwood early in ‘72, while Watts had to be actively defended by the Black Caucus against a city proposal to build three new highways through and an industrial park in the community. Notably, it was also early in ‘72 when a class action lawsuit against the LAPD for patterns of brutality towards black and other minority residents was dropped by the attorney after three years of preparations for trial. In short, Black voices were being highlighted in Los Angeles as a form of interest convergence that allowed for the education of Los Angeles inhabitants, but did not represent a uniform acceptance of black rights or culture in the city.