The Beauty of Black Art

By Jack E. White/New York

So often, the news from black America seems to be all bad: crime, broken families, failing schools, abject hopelessness. Yet amid the bleak circumstances that envelop so much of the African-American community, a singularly heartening piece of good news has been overlooked. Black artists are now embarked on one of the most astonishing outbursts of creativity in the nation's history. Never before -- not even during the legendary great Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the bristling Black Arts Movement of the '60s -- have black artists produced so much first-rate writing, music, painting and dance. For them, and for their appreciative audience among both blacks and whites, it all amounts to a new black cultural renaissance.

Consider the achievements since 1993 alone, when Bill Clinton invited Maya Angelou to be the first poet since Robert Frost to read an original work at a presidential Inauguration. George C. Wolfe won a Tony Award for his direction of Angels in America. Novelist Toni Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rita Dove was appointed the country's first black poet laureate. Two works inspired by the Rodney King affair -- 56 Blows, a symphony by Alvin Singleton, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a one- woman docudrama by playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith -- were rousing successes. Yusef Komunyakaa became the third black, after Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove, to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The emotionally charged dances of choreographer Bill T. Jones -- who some critics say exemplifies the spirit of the new black upsurge -- were a powerful high point of last spring's Gay Games IV in New York City.

This burst of black artistry is a by-product of an underappreciated American success story: the growing clout and affluence of the black middle class. Since 1967 the number of black families with incomes of more than $50,000 has quadrupled to more than 1 million, and with this increased wealth has come an increase in education, leisure and interest in the arts. Exploiting the new freedom created by the drive for civil rights during the past generation, black artists have escaped from the aesthetic ghetto to which they were once confined, where the patronizing assumption was that they would find inspiration only in their own milieu. As they move from the periphery to the mainstream, they are free at last to follow their various muses. Composer Singleton, for example, cites as models not only Miles Davis but also Igor Stravinsky. "It's limiting to be called just an African-American composer," he says. "There's no reason to limit yourself in any way." This attitude particularly marks many of the youngest and brashest creators, labeled "cultural mulattoes" by novelist Trey Ellis. Largely reared in integrated suburbs and educated at prestigious colleges and universities, they lay claim to the cultural traditions of both blacks and whites.

Young or old, today's African-American artists increasingly strike themes that are racially and culturally universal. Some emphasize age, gender or sexual orientation over ethnicity. Others, like Morrison and novelist Charles Johnson, whose Middle Passage won the National Book Award for fiction in 1990, explore the black experience in America. Still others, such as Wolfe, choreographer David Rousseve and writer Darius James (Negrophobia: An Urban Parable), dissect racial stereotypes, while those like choreographer Ralph Lemon and sculptor Martin Puryear reflect no identifiable racial content at all. Rita Dove summarizes the trend best when she says: "There are times when I am a black woman who happens to be a poet and times when I am a poet who happens to be black. There are also times when I am more conscious of being a mother or a member of my generation. It's so hopelessly confused that I don't make a big deal out of it."

A big deal should, however, be made of these artists, who are creating some of the most striking and significant work in every genre:

DANCE The most versatile and inventive of America's black dancer- choreographe rs is Bill T. Jones, 42, the son of impoverished farm workers from upstate New York. In 1988 his longtime lover and collaborator, Arnie Zane, died of AIDS. Jones himself was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985; today he works with the intensity of someone who knows his time is running out. He creates as many as five new pieces a year for his own New York City-based Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company, as well as for such classical troupes as the Berlin Opera Ballet and the Boston Ballet. "I'm terrified," he says, "but I'm going to try to pursue these dreams I have while I can."

Zane's memory and death's inevitability are hovering presences in much of Jones' recent work. In a long solo piece called Last Night on Earth, Jones uses elements as varied as sign language and jittery body bends from break dancing to evoke the moods of a loving relationship. The piece ends with Jones, dressed in an apron-length white skirt, sitting, kneeling and finally lying on a shroudlike white cloth as he hoarsely and painfully intones the words of the old spiritual Nora's Dove.

Jones' most ambitious dance piece is Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, a three-hour multimedia performance work that requires a cast of 50. The first half is an interpretative summary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel about the horrors of slavery, using both narrative and mime. (In the racially mixed company, Simon Legree is often played, ironically, by a black dancer.) The second half explores the nature of religious faith in an age plagued by evils like AIDS. It includes gospel singing, minstrel-show dancing and an improvised, unscripted conversation on whether the disease is God's punishment for homosexuality, conducted between Jones and a clergyman recruited from the local community. The piece concludes with the entire cast, along with previously selected volunteers from the audience, standing nude and silent onstage.

Much of Jones' oeuvre is no more specifically black in theme and context than that of, say, his younger contemporary Mark Morris is explicitly white. Like Morris, Jones has a gift for campy comedy and a capacity to shock -- offstage as well as on. Some of his dances feature transvestitism, topless females and full frontal nudity by both sexes. Last summer during a fund- raising performance, Jones dropped his pants and exposed himself while standing near two children. He later apologized to outraged parents, explaining that he was trying to test the boundaries of propriety.

Jones is not the only black choreographer to resist the aesthetic dominance of the late, great Alvin Ailey, whose masterworks were mostly composed to black music and whose themes were rooted in African-American history. The austere, abstract work of Ralph Lemon, 42, for example, owes a clear visual debt to such white Post-modern experimentalists as Meredith Monk and Trisha Brown. With their sense of order and symmetry, Lemon's dances even resemble the plotless ballets of George Balanchine, in spirit if not vocabulary. When a friend in Denver challenged Lemon to create a piece with a black theme, Lemon demurred, but a chance meeting with Le Vaughn Robinson, a street-corner tap dancer, changed his mind. The result of their collaboration was Buck Dance, based on the syncopated clog dancing (the precursor of tap) that slaves performed to entertain their masters.

"Here I am, this intellectual choreographer, not even dealing with race at all," says Lemon, "and there's buck dancing, which is my history as an African American. Part of us wants to be black and rooted in a black tradition. Another part of us wants to be free. It all creates a wonderful tension for the work."

Ulysses Dove, 47, another New Yorker, defiantly opts for freedom. He has earned the rare distinction of being the only dancer to have performed for both Ailey and Merce Cunningham, whose choreographic visions were diametrically opposite. Despite his admitted debt to Ailey, for whom he also composed dances, Dove has no interest in centering his own work on black motifs. In fact, sex rather than race dominates most of the 17 pieces, raw but energetic, that he has created since he stopped dancing in 1980. "If you want to be political, the place to do that is politics," he says. "If I want to give you a message, I can write it down. I have a deep concern for the condition of black youth, but my way of dealing with it is to donate money to the United Negro College Fund. I think that does more than any dance I can do."

LITERATURE No longer are black writers restricted to one or two breakthroughs per decade -- Richard Wright in the '40s, Ralph Ellison in the '50s, James Baldwin in the '60s. Today's new authors are publishing an enormous amount of successful fiction, history, poetry and criticism. Terry McMillan's potboiler, Waiting to Exhale, stayed on the New York Times best- seller list for 37 weeks in 1992 and 1993. Recently three books by black authors were simultaneously on the list for the first time ever: Angelou's Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now; Having Our Say, a sprightly memoir by two sisters, Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany, who have lived more than a century; and Makes Me Wanna Holler, Nathan McCall's story of his life as a young criminal. All three attracted a large number of both white and black readers. As Charles Harris, president and publisher of New York City's Amistad Press, says, "We've laid to rest the racist canard in the publishing industry that black people don't read."

As a result of the popularity of these books, established publishing houses are avidly acquiring manuscripts from black authors. New black-controlled companies are also springing up. Chicagoan David E. Driver, a former vice president of Merrill Lynch, grew tired of the stock market and started the Noble Press in 1988. His biggest success so far has been Volunteer Slavery, journalist Jill Nelson's account of racism and sexism at the Washington Post. Though the book was rejected by more than a score of mainstream firms, it sold more than 40,000 hard-cover copies for Noble. The house has now attracted books from such black writers as Nelson George (Urban Romance), who previously dealt with traditional publishing companies. "There are a number of black writers who feel that the big publishers have not learned how to market to a black audience," says Driver. "Some of them feel their books would have sold a lot more if a firm that was more attuned to the black market were pushing it."

Some blacks are exploring territory that has traditionally been the province of white authors. Among them: science-fiction writer Otavia Butler (Kindred), whose books deal with extraterrestrial multiculturalism, and mystery writer Walter Mosley (Black Betty), whose Easy Rawlins detective stories are said to be a favorite of President Clinton's.

Perhaps the most remarkable newcomer is Pittsburgh-based novelist Albert French, 51, who this year published what may be the best first novel by a black author since Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in 1969. French's Billy, the story of the execution of a 10-year-old black Mississippi boy for the accidental killing of a white girl, evokes the lyricism of Jean Toomer's 1923 Harlem Renaissance classic Cane.

A former newspaper photographer and Army veteran who was wounded in Vietnam, French took up writing to battle the depression that settled over him after a magazine he founded went out of business. "I could not come out of my apartment for three years except to go to the store," he says. "I started writing because the only thing I could control in my life was putting words on paper." Billy was composed in longhand in a six-week blaze of energy.

What makes French's rich psychological portraits so extraordinary is that he has never visited Mississippi or researched its racial practices, nor has he read much serious fiction other than the novels of his cousin John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Story). "The writer I admire the most is the person who wrote Black Beauty, the horse book," says French, without a hint of irony. Two more of his novels -- Patches of Fire, about Vietnam, and Holly, an interracial love story set in North Carolina in 1944 -- will soon be published.

MUSIC Composer Anthony Davis comes from a talented family: his brother Christopher is a gifted actor and his cousin Thulani an accomplished poet. Davis recalls that at Yale he encountered an essay by Nietzsche extolling opera as a reflection of a people's cultural identity. "I thought that a truly American opera would be based on African-American music," says Davis. That is precisely what he accomplished in his powerful and biting 1984 work X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (with libretto by cousin Thulani), a fierce, modernist, free-tonal piece that employs elements of jazz, blues and gospel.

At the same time, Davis is no stranger to traditional European forms. "We can appropriate European art in the same way Europeans did ours," he says. "That's what is so much fun for me: I'm stealing their stuff." He has occasionally steered away from overtly African-American subjects: Under the Double Moon (1989) is a science-fiction adventure about telepathic twins; Tania retells the story of the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Both operas demonstrate Davis' sure confidence with harmonic and melodic techniques that combine elements of both black and European tradition. "I didn't want to be boxed in, and it was necessary for my development to feel free," says Davis. "I can apply the African-American sensibility to any subject. It doesn't have to be restricted to what's considered a black thing. " His next opera, Amistad, nevertheless brings Davis back to a black theme. It concerns a 19th century incident in which Africans revolted against the crew of a slave ship and ultimately won the right to return home.

Brooklyn-born Alvin Singleton, 53, also comfortably bridges the gap between European and black forms, though many of his pieces explore black themes. His orchestral composition Even Tomorrow, for example, is an homage to Thurgood Marshall, but the music itself is strictly formal in style.

DRAMA America may have no finer playwright than August Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer prizewinner whose cycle of plays depicting black life in the U.S. during each of the decades of the 20th century (including Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson) often stings with the power of a Tennessee Williams or a Eugene O'Neill. Though Wilson, unlike composer Davis, sticks to black subject matter, he too seeks to transcend racial limits in his themes. Referring to the late black painter-collagist Romare Bearden, Wilson says, "Bearden has said -- someone asked him about it -- 'I try to explore in terms of the life I know best those things that are common to all culture.' When I read that I said, 'Ah-ha, that's what art should do. This is something I can do.' So I have more or less taken that as my credo, and that's what I try to do when I sit down to work."

Even so, in 1990, Wilson touched off a controversy by insisting that only a black director could bring the right perspective to a film version of Fences, his 1985 drama about the life of a former Negro League baseball player. The movie has yet to be made. Wilson is equally skeptical of so-called color-blind casting, in which black actors play traditionally white parts and vice versa. "I don't think you can do a black Death of a Salesman, for example, without looking at the fact that here's a black guy who's going around knocking on people's doors selling stuff in 1949. In 1949 he can't go around knocking on white people's doors without getting in trouble," he says. "It's just not logical."

Anna Deavere Smith takes a different, almost journalistic approach to drama. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is based on 220 interviews that she conducted with Los Angeles residents of every race and economic class after the city's devastating riot in 1992. Onstage Smith employs her formidable talent for mimicry to portray such characters as Reginald Denny, the white truck driver who was almost beaten to death by black gang members, police chief Daryl Gates and a Korean store owner -- all in their own words. The result is a painful, multifaceted portrait of racial differences. Says Smith: "My work is both political and personal. I'm trying to resolve this problem of strangeness and closeness in our world that's getting closer and closer. I'm interested in telling every side of the story."

Blacks are also increasingly playing the unaccustomed roles of director and producer. Three years after the death of Joe Papp, who established New York City's Public Theater, George C. Wolfe has become the artistic leader of one the nation's most influential stages. Kenny Leon, a former law student turned actor and director, runs Atlanta's Alliance Theater, the most prominent stage in the South, and Tazewell Thompson heads the Syracuse Stage, where he has produced new plays by both black and white dramatists. All believe their role is to transform theater in ways that help audiences understand America in its many racial and cultural dimensions. As Wolfe says, "By the time we get through with this century, there should be no such thing as a white cultural institution, because America is not all white."

FILM The success of movies by black directors like Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing) and John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood) proved that black-oriented, mainstream movies can be profitable. Less commercial black filmmakers like Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) and Charles Burnett (To Sleep with Anger) continue to have difficulty raising money, but they produce substantial work nevertheless. One such movie is Haile Gerima's electrifying underground hit Sankofa, in which a young black woman is transported back in time to experience the horrors of slavery. Gerima, a professor of film at Washington's predominantly black Howard University, struggled for nine years to raise $1 million to make the movie, but he still didn't have enough left over to make prints for general distribution. In desperation, he rented a theater in Washington last winter for one week to show the film. Word-of-mouth response was so enthusiastic that Sankofa was held over for 11 weeks, yielding enough revenue to allow Gerima to duplicate the film and distribute it to other cities. Says he: "Without the support I've had from the black community, I would have been silenced totally."

ART The line between the mainstream and the avant-garde in painting and sculpture remains dramatic for black artists no less than for whites. At one extreme are easily accessible depictions of black life, such as printmaker Varnette Honeywood's realistic portrayals of African women, which the Huxtables of TV's Cosby hung on their walls. At the other extreme are the puckish conceptual works of such younger figures as Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim and of David Hammons, their artistic godfather. Hammons, 51, paints or uses found objects to create pieces that raise unsettling questions about the significance of race. For example, after his 16-ft. by 14-ft. portrait of a blond, blue-eyed Jesse Jackson titled How Ya Like Me Now? was installed on a street in Washington in 1989, a group of young black men knocked it down with a sledgehammer. Hammons was unruffled. "They didn't smash it," he told an interviewer. "They anointed it."

So far no one has physically attacked the work of 35-year-old multimedia artist Lorna Simpson, but her installations are equally confrontational. Mixing photographs with short blocks of text and recorded bits of conversation, she focuses on the ways in which black women are treated like objects in everyday language and imagery. In a 1992 piece, Self-Possession, Simpson uses a Polaroid frontal image of a woman's torso dressed in black. Its red-gloved hands frame her abdomen and the words IS 9/10THS OF THE LAW. Simpson has also collaborated with actress Alva Rogers on Places with a Past, a work that combines audiotapes, relics and photographs to evoke the slave trade in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1990 Simpson was the first African- American woman artist to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. In that same year she had a solo exhibition in the Projects Room of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

For all the acclaim they have received, many artists remain disappointed by the degree of support that the black public is giving their burgeoning renaissance. Though blacks avidly consume the works of African-American writers, filmmakers and dramatists, they remain wary of cutting-edge conceptual art, as well as dance and serious music. It is only a small consolation that these fields do not draw large white audiences either.

Mainstream audiences often feel that much of the output of the avant-garde is too far out, too high-priced and at times too outrageous for their taste. Some of the most daring work -- for example, the sexually explicit dances of Bill T. Jones -- is simply offensive to many viewers. Choreographer David Rousseve recalls that after a performance of his multimedia production Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams in Los Angeles, a member of the audience left a note with the stage manager that read, "Get this trash off the stage." Says Rousseve: "I thought it was a homophobic homeboy or something, but the stage manager said it was a black woman, dressed in a suit, who looked like a lawyer or professional woman."

The black middle-class instinct to play it safe helps explain why black galleries that have sprung up in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago are more likely to exhibit work by such traditional artists as Bearden and Jacob Lawrence than the more adventurous creations of the newer black painters. According to June Kelly, owner of an African-American gallery in Manhattan, middle-class blacks have not yet developed the assurance to feel comfortable with art that is boldly original in style and content. "Americans, black or white, are not steeped in art," she says. "An interest in buying it comes only after a certain level of income and sophistication is reached." Black social critic Stanley Crouch has a harsher view: "Black people have no interest in art to any significant degree," he says. "They have not developed a taste for any culture that is not utilitarian."

Insofar as that is true, it will change. It took more than 300 years, a civil war and a determined civil rights movement for blacks to become first- class citizens, and a generation later, they are still striving. What is so encouraging is that they, and indeed the public at large, have before them the fruits of a historic movement. For artists and their audiences, exploring the black renaissance may be like coming into a promised land.

With reporting by Breena Clarke and Janice C. Simpson/New York