Assembling the Diaspora: Black Arts and International Vision

For African Americans, transforming “scraps” has a long and consequential history—in foodways, visual art and material culture, and fashion. These works have long told tales about economics and access, about power and subversion of power. But in the post-colonial and “Black Arts” decades, political and cultural commentary were particularly sharply injected into works built from scraps in the forms of assemblage, collage, and collection. A striking number of significant African American artists in the 1960s and 1970s—Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, John Outterbridge, and David Hammons, among others—used these artistic strategies to pointedly enact and call attention to the way that the notion “diaspora” provides an understanding of how distinct parts make up a cross-continental (and frequently subversive) whole. Indeed, Saar has spoken quite movingly about a trip she took with Hammons to the Field Museum in Chicago, where they were both deeply influenced by an exhibit of African art.

Through readings and historical location of some key works, I will explore the self-conscious way these art forms were used to pointedly connect African American art to African and Caribbean traditions: Saar’s employment of ritual objects, Bearden’s depiction of printed fabrics, Hammons’s invocations of Islamic design. For this generation, then, the artistic process of gathering and connecting takes on profound and empowering political significance.