Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties
interview by John Shorb
John Shorb is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, and a B.A. from Carleton College. Here, he continues his editorial work for ARTS by interviewing practicing artists and curators for our “in the gallery” column.
Kellie Jones, associate professor in art history and archaeology at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, met me at the Brooklyn Museum to discuss “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties” which she co-curated with Teresa A. Carbone, curator at the Museum. Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2011) and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, and Third Text. She has also curated “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
For “Witness,” Jones and Carbone assembled paintings, drawings, photography, and other media to highlight the broad array of visual art created by a diverse range of artists at a seminal time in U.S. history. The exhibit has traveled to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and is currently at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from February 15 to May 10, 2015.
John Shorb: In your essay in the catalogue, you begin with the idea of well being. How do you see that as linked to spirituality or religion?
Kellie Jones: It’s definitely linked. The idea of total well being includes spirituality. I don’t talk about it very much in my essay in the catalogue, so I was interested in talking to you because I thought, yes, that’s in there. I was influenced by the book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson. In reading her book, I was really struck by that idea of total well being and I’ve always felt that art is about that—about being able to express yourself fully. When people can’t express themselves, it’s really problematic. And that ties into the right to religious freedom, which is part of this country’s basic framework.
How do you see spirituality or religion coming through the exhibition?
It’s definitely there, but the pieces in the exhibit are primarily secular in terms of what they image or bring to us. Yet we know that so many people were driven to participate in this movement by their spiritual beliefs. You see that, certainly in some of the photographs. There’s the photograph by Danny Lyon of civil rights activist (and later congressman) John Lewis kneeling with other demonstrators and then the many photographs of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So in various ways you have spirituality and religious leaders upfront. Overall, people made a commitment and that shows up. In “Human Relations Portfolio: Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner,” 1965, by Ben Shahn, you have people who are Jews, Black people, potentially Christian, working together for civil rights. A number of pieces by the photographer Gordon Parks also feature Muslim subjects (Ethel Sharrieff, Chicago, Illinois, 1963).
There’s the Charles W. White drawing, “Birmingham Totem,” which commemorates the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. In that piece, you see the destruction of the church, and you have the youthful figure on top, who is the architect of the new world. When that bombing happened, the girls that were killed were in Sunday school.
John Shorb is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, and a B.A. from Carleton College. Here, he continues his editorial work for ARTS by interviewing practicing artists and curators for our “in the gallery” column.
Kellie Jones, associate professor in art history and archaeology at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, met me at the Brooklyn Museum to discuss “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties” which she co-curated with Teresa A. Carbone, curator at the Museum. Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2011) and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, and Third Text. She has also curated “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
For “Witness,” Jones and Carbone assembled paintings, drawings, photography, and other media to highlight the broad array of visual art created by a diverse range of artists at a seminal time in U.S. history. The exhibit has traveled to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and is currently at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from February 15 to May 10, 2015.
John Shorb: In your essay in the catalogue, you begin with the idea of well being. How do you see that as linked to spirituality or religion?
Kellie Jones: It’s definitely linked. The idea of total well being includes spirituality. I don’t talk about it very much in my essay in the catalogue, so I was interested in talking to you because I thought, yes, that’s in there. I was influenced by the book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson. In reading her book, I was really struck by that idea of total well being and I’ve always felt that art is about that—about being able to express yourself fully. When people can’t express themselves, it’s really problematic. And that ties into the right to religious freedom, which is part of this country’s basic framework.
How do you see spirituality or religion coming through the exhibition?
It’s definitely there, but the pieces in the exhibit are primarily secular in terms of what they image or bring to us. Yet we know that so many people were driven to participate in this movement by their spiritual beliefs. You see that, certainly in some of the photographs. There’s the photograph by Danny Lyon of civil rights activist (and later congressman) John Lewis kneeling with other demonstrators and then the many photographs of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So in various ways you have spirituality and religious leaders upfront. Overall, people made a commitment and that shows up. In “Human Relations Portfolio: Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner,” 1965, by Ben Shahn, you have people who are Jews, Black people, potentially Christian, working together for civil rights. A number of pieces by the photographer Gordon Parks also feature Muslim subjects (Ethel Sharrieff, Chicago, Illinois, 1963).
There’s the Charles W. White drawing, “Birmingham Totem,” which commemorates the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. In that piece, you see the destruction of the church, and you have the youthful figure on top, who is the architect of the new world. When that bombing happened, the girls that were killed were in Sunday school.
Charles White, “Birmingham Totem,” 1964. Ink and charcoal on board.
181.4 x 101.3cm. ©1964 The Charles White Archives
In some ways, even the Ku Klux Klan had their own spirituality, at least in terms of using the symbols of Christianity. You can see that in the photograph of the cross burning by Bruce Davidson (“Ku Klux Klan Rally, Atlanta, Georgia,” 1962), which brings out the idea of using religion or spirituality to persecute—an inversion of how these symbols were used by the civil rights organizations to promote equality. Norman Lewis’s piece “Double Cross,” 1971, in the show could be seen to have this kind of ambiguous relationship with Christianity as well.
Or I see spirituality coming through in more subtle ways such as Frank Stella’s “Bouquet for Malcolm” which is a memorial painting—this idea of grief, of mourning, that could point us toward ideas of spirituality and religion.
And the piece “Monument to Malcolm X No. 2,”1969, by Barbara Chase-Riboud feels like a kind of death shroud. Why do you think that is the case that most of these pieces in the exhibit are more secular? Is it because there wasn’t as much religious work or work with religious themes from the time period?
No, I’m sure that there are works out there and we just might not have seen them. It’s just like when people saw this show, many were really amazed because most of what we know about the Civil Rights Movement in visual culture is in photographs or it’s televisual. Even just bringing out paintings and sculpture and pieces of performance was surprising. I imagine there’s much more you could find when looking through another lens.
The Jim Dine piece points to that idea of bringing artworks into this context, or placing them in dialogue with other similar works.
Yes, that’s an amazing piece. You know he created all those black objects. In many ways it’s standard Pop practice, and then boom, it hits you when you see a sink with a black flourish of paint around it, with the title “Black Bathroom No. 2.,” 1962. Even if the artist might maintain he wasn’t thinking about civil rights issues, everyone else was. Segregation and the colored restrooms and waiting rooms had just barely been outlawed.
Connie Choi, our research assistant for “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,” and Dalila Scruggs, then an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum, found out about gallery exhibitions put on to support the work of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). Jim Dine’s print “Three Rainbows for CORE,” 1966, was in one of those exhibits. So when you look across art history at pieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Dine and so forth, all of the sudden these pieces come out that are made specifically for one of these shows—the Stella piece, for example. These artists might not have been talking about it because it could negatively affect their market or it just was not what you did. The artists who did have this kind of political focus were the people who had been around in the 1930s, for example Shahn or Philip Guston, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence.
I wanted to ask about Romare Bearden’s piece, “Sermons: the Walls of Jericho” 1964.
The walls in that piece are the walls of exclusion; and Bearden envisions art breaking down these barriers. You have African art blasting apart western classical architectural structures. The title the “Sermons: the Walls of Jericho,” is, of course, a well-known Spiritual: “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” (and the walls come tumbling down). Bearden was thinking about how African Americans often see themselves in the place of the Israelites in the Bible. Bearden has a number of pieces that are sermons, and from this moment on, he is looking back at Southern traditions and thinking really hard about them. He is addressing the importance of reclaiming lost heritage, reclaiming African culture, and acknowledging these histories.
There’s another piece by Bearden, “Evening Meal of the Prophet Peterson,” 1964, which is a dinner table scene with a religious leader and his family. This connects with another work on view, George Tooker’s “Supper,” which shows people sharing bread at an interracial dinner table. Both focus on the idea of the shared meal, the domestic sphere and spirituality.
The Barkley Hendricks piece, “Lawdy Mama,” 1969 also has a religious art connection.
Here Hendricks uses the elements from a Byzantine icon employing gold leaf and that creates a halo effect with the woman’s hair. The idea of the religious icon is intentional—he is enshrining the beauty of the Black woman. Hendricks is playing with the idea of icons.
How do you see “Witness, Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties” connecting to what’s going on in art today?
What was great is that when the show was up it was the spring of activism at the Brooklyn Museum: you had the big Ai Weiwei exhibit as well as an environmentally focused installation by Swoon. So it connected this earlier historical moment of the 1960s with what is going on currently and also globally. Certainly we know that Martin Luther King, Jr. and others learned their lessons of non-violent direct action from Gandhi; likewise, civil rights practices spread internationally as well.
You can also connect “Witness” to the show up right now at the Brooklyn Museum, “Crossing Brooklyn,” which showcases quite a bit of socially-engaged and performative artmaking that artists are using now. It looks different today in terms of media, but there is a connection there. There are a couple pieces in Witness that use similar strategies: artwork by Benjamin Patterson and Yoko Ono both utilize text and performance, both worked within the Fluxus art movement. I hear from young artists all the time when I curate exhibitions. It’s a revelation for young artists who don’t know these histories. They see people doing things that they can connect with on a personal, intellectual and social level, if not in terms of medium. The activist thrust, what they were actually trying to do, is similar even if the work looks different.
The thing that I love about the show is that people addressed civil rights in many ways. You didn’t have to be a photographer or a figurative painter. You could make abstract painting like Sam Gilliam’s “Red April,” 1970.
Or I see spirituality coming through in more subtle ways such as Frank Stella’s “Bouquet for Malcolm” which is a memorial painting—this idea of grief, of mourning, that could point us toward ideas of spirituality and religion.
And the piece “Monument to Malcolm X No. 2,”1969, by Barbara Chase-Riboud feels like a kind of death shroud. Why do you think that is the case that most of these pieces in the exhibit are more secular? Is it because there wasn’t as much religious work or work with religious themes from the time period?
No, I’m sure that there are works out there and we just might not have seen them. It’s just like when people saw this show, many were really amazed because most of what we know about the Civil Rights Movement in visual culture is in photographs or it’s televisual. Even just bringing out paintings and sculpture and pieces of performance was surprising. I imagine there’s much more you could find when looking through another lens.
The Jim Dine piece points to that idea of bringing artworks into this context, or placing them in dialogue with other similar works.
Yes, that’s an amazing piece. You know he created all those black objects. In many ways it’s standard Pop practice, and then boom, it hits you when you see a sink with a black flourish of paint around it, with the title “Black Bathroom No. 2.,” 1962. Even if the artist might maintain he wasn’t thinking about civil rights issues, everyone else was. Segregation and the colored restrooms and waiting rooms had just barely been outlawed.
Connie Choi, our research assistant for “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,” and Dalila Scruggs, then an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum, found out about gallery exhibitions put on to support the work of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). Jim Dine’s print “Three Rainbows for CORE,” 1966, was in one of those exhibits. So when you look across art history at pieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Dine and so forth, all of the sudden these pieces come out that are made specifically for one of these shows—the Stella piece, for example. These artists might not have been talking about it because it could negatively affect their market or it just was not what you did. The artists who did have this kind of political focus were the people who had been around in the 1930s, for example Shahn or Philip Guston, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence.
I wanted to ask about Romare Bearden’s piece, “Sermons: the Walls of Jericho” 1964.
The walls in that piece are the walls of exclusion; and Bearden envisions art breaking down these barriers. You have African art blasting apart western classical architectural structures. The title the “Sermons: the Walls of Jericho,” is, of course, a well-known Spiritual: “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” (and the walls come tumbling down). Bearden was thinking about how African Americans often see themselves in the place of the Israelites in the Bible. Bearden has a number of pieces that are sermons, and from this moment on, he is looking back at Southern traditions and thinking really hard about them. He is addressing the importance of reclaiming lost heritage, reclaiming African culture, and acknowledging these histories.
There’s another piece by Bearden, “Evening Meal of the Prophet Peterson,” 1964, which is a dinner table scene with a religious leader and his family. This connects with another work on view, George Tooker’s “Supper,” which shows people sharing bread at an interracial dinner table. Both focus on the idea of the shared meal, the domestic sphere and spirituality.
The Barkley Hendricks piece, “Lawdy Mama,” 1969 also has a religious art connection.
Here Hendricks uses the elements from a Byzantine icon employing gold leaf and that creates a halo effect with the woman’s hair. The idea of the religious icon is intentional—he is enshrining the beauty of the Black woman. Hendricks is playing with the idea of icons.
How do you see “Witness, Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties” connecting to what’s going on in art today?
What was great is that when the show was up it was the spring of activism at the Brooklyn Museum: you had the big Ai Weiwei exhibit as well as an environmentally focused installation by Swoon. So it connected this earlier historical moment of the 1960s with what is going on currently and also globally. Certainly we know that Martin Luther King, Jr. and others learned their lessons of non-violent direct action from Gandhi; likewise, civil rights practices spread internationally as well.
You can also connect “Witness” to the show up right now at the Brooklyn Museum, “Crossing Brooklyn,” which showcases quite a bit of socially-engaged and performative artmaking that artists are using now. It looks different today in terms of media, but there is a connection there. There are a couple pieces in Witness that use similar strategies: artwork by Benjamin Patterson and Yoko Ono both utilize text and performance, both worked within the Fluxus art movement. I hear from young artists all the time when I curate exhibitions. It’s a revelation for young artists who don’t know these histories. They see people doing things that they can connect with on a personal, intellectual and social level, if not in terms of medium. The activist thrust, what they were actually trying to do, is similar even if the work looks different.
The thing that I love about the show is that people addressed civil rights in many ways. You didn’t have to be a photographer or a figurative painter. You could make abstract painting like Sam Gilliam’s “Red April,” 1970.
May Stevens, “Honor Roll,” 1963. Courtesy RYAN LEE, New York.
This connects to prophetic voice. How you see prophetic voices coming through in the exhibit?
That is the voice of that era, and you can see it coming through in the art. This relates to the piece we placed at the beginning of the exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, May Steven’s “Honor Roll” 1963. The painting has the names of people who were activists, one of whom was eight years old. When I was writing the essay for the catalogue, the Sandy Hook tragedy happened. I was thinking about young people being at the forefront of the movement and who were dying for this country. I had the opportunity to give my niece’s Girl Scout troop, who are all nine years old, a tour of the exhibit, and they understood the ideas in the show. When I asked them what segregation was, they knew. So you can imagine that the children of that time knew what was going on. They wanted to go to school, they wanted to have more books, they wanted total well being. They had a right to that. And what’s amazing is that we’re not talking about young people of twenty but more like six or seven years old. Ruby Bridges and all those six-year-olds in the 1950s went out to integrate schools in the south. You can’t get more prophetic than young people. You have to be taught to hate people or to be intolerant. You don’t come into the world that way. There are a lot of prophetic voices in the show—but for me, those young voices are the most singular.
That is the voice of that era, and you can see it coming through in the art. This relates to the piece we placed at the beginning of the exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, May Steven’s “Honor Roll” 1963. The painting has the names of people who were activists, one of whom was eight years old. When I was writing the essay for the catalogue, the Sandy Hook tragedy happened. I was thinking about young people being at the forefront of the movement and who were dying for this country. I had the opportunity to give my niece’s Girl Scout troop, who are all nine years old, a tour of the exhibit, and they understood the ideas in the show. When I asked them what segregation was, they knew. So you can imagine that the children of that time knew what was going on. They wanted to go to school, they wanted to have more books, they wanted total well being. They had a right to that. And what’s amazing is that we’re not talking about young people of twenty but more like six or seven years old. Ruby Bridges and all those six-year-olds in the 1950s went out to integrate schools in the south. You can’t get more prophetic than young people. You have to be taught to hate people or to be intolerant. You don’t come into the world that way. There are a lot of prophetic voices in the show—but for me, those young voices are the most singular.
John Lewis, future chairman of the SNCC, and others demonstrate at the Cairo pool, which did not allow blacks. Photo by Danny Lyon, Cairo, Illinois 1962, Vintage gelatin silver.
