In 1966, Stokely Carmichael made his famous call for "Black Power." The artist-educator David Driskell set about organizing a major exhibition on the history of black artists.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination) heightened the sense of need for black artists to support black causes.
C., 1963," monumental presence.ĭespite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the violent events of the years from 1965 (with the assassination of Malcolm X and the Selma March a month later) to 1968 (and the Rev. Leading the group was Roy DeCarava, whose restricted, velvety range of dark tones gave his work contemplative depth and sometimes also, as in his famous "Mississippi Freedom Rider, Washington, D. Nearby is a mini-show in a single gallery showing the photography of New York's Kamoinge Workshop (Kamoinge being the Kikuyu word for "a group of people working together"). But see his stunning "Processional (aka Procession)" (1965), based on images from the Selma to Montgomery march, and the earlier "America the Beautiful" (1960), which gradually reveals itself as a fearsome gathering of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet it was a risk for Lewis, who had won acceptance, if not wide exhibition, among the abstract expressionists. The restriction was not difficult for the fairly established Bearden, whose large-format photomontages were winning wide recognition. They held one group show in Greenwich Village in 1965, with the single requirement that all works include social comment exclusively in black and white. (The group included one woman, Emma Amos, who at 25 was also the youngest.) The first half of the show, on the museum's fifth floor, is organized geographically and begins in New York, where a group of 15 painters led by Charles Alston, Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis in the summer of 1963 formed the Spiral Group, intending first to organize a bus trip to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
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