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Reflecting on Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment (1897), the trail-blazing African American art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray wrote in 1915: “It seems to me fitting and proper that in a paper concerning Emancipation and the Freed that we should pay liberal tribute to the Negro soldiers and sailors, whose work, whose sacrifices, and whose valor, so fully justified, and so strongly contributed to make secure, the Freedom which had been proclaimed by President Lincoln.”

This essay also explores devotion and allegiance on the parts of African Americans during the Civil War, but neither in the retrospective afterglow of Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece, nor in the “glory” days of battle and sacrifice that surrounded the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth’s ill-fated assault on Fort Wagner. Rather, I’ve chosen to focus on a well known, but little discussed black-and-white photograph of two men – one black and one white, in a nearly deserted Civil War camp – taken in 1863 and usually attributed to the Mathew Brady National Photographic Art Gallery. I preface my discussion with the idea that appended to Murray’s praise for black soldiers and other celebrations of African American valor during and after the Civil War were more subliminal meditations on black loyalty in the pre- and post-Civil Rights eras – loyalties specifically directed towards embattled white Americans – and on a supreme faith in the United States of America from blacks who, because of historical injustices and systemic discrimination, had little or no reason to believe in American democracy…

In the pocket-size percentage of Romance that contains “dem shoes,” Thomas Hart Benton was knowingly prefacing the idea of the “romantic South” with more than the painting’ designated title could ever convey. Whether or not one interprets the unshod man’s shoe-baggage as ill-fitting personal effects, prestige items, Mark Twainisms, lynch fragments, or odd trophies of respectability, their significations offset and treaded heavily over the outward storylines and conceits of an idealized South and its “special way of life.” The moon at dusk (or is it the setting sun?) conspired with Benton, winking and intimating that the romance we assumed was present in the painting could rightly be tapped as such, but one whose “crude facts” and asylum-seeking lovers betrayed an even greater devotion and human trajectory, all under the watchful eye of God.

Much has been written about artist David Hammons and his recurring basketball imagery, ostensibly symbolizing African American youth’s dreams of success in the National Basketball Association and, alas, the futility of those pie-in-the-sky fantasies for so many dreamers.  “It’s an anti-basketball sculpture,” Hammons famously proclaimed in a 1990 interview with Sports Illustrated about Higher Goals, one of his most famous basketball-themed works.  “Basketball has become a problem in the black community,” he continued, “because kids aren’t getting an education.  They’re pawns in someone else’s game.” Hammons’s published thoughts about the allure of sports for black youth, especially basketball, often leading young men to overlook other viable avenues for future successes, are frequently echoed in the career counseling literature for young people, stating over and over the odds against talented, young black athletes being selected for one of those coveted places on a major league sports team.  “His over-sized basketball hoops, exquisitely adorned in bottle caps in mock Islamic designs,” notes artist/critic Coco Fusco and art gallerist Christian Haye, “become blistering critiques of black youth’s obsession with financial success through sports stardom as the admonitory title, Higher Goals (1986), comes into focus.” Or what museum curator Franklin Sirmans describes as “the absurdity of the perpetuation of the myths around getting out of the ghetto via sports.” “That’s why it’s called Higher Goals,” Hammons explained to Sports Illustrated about his bottle-cap-decorated basketball backboards and hoops, installed in Harlem and Brooklyn, NY, and placed on soaring telephone poles. “It means you should have higher goals in life [other] than basketball.”

Perhaps not prominent enough in the discussions about these basketball references in David Hammons’s art – neither in the artist’s own commentaries, nor in critiques by other pundits – are meditations on the underlying ambiguities and dialectical thinking that Hammons invariably utilizes in these works.  Rather than casting African American “hoop dreams” as chimeras and hopelessly futile, Hammons frequently infuses these works with an uncanny optimism, allusions to bold ambitions, profound spirituality, and a cultural pride that, rather than shutting down or disparaging the dream, transforms it into a living and breathing concretization; an altar-like appendage to the black community that, in all of its reiterations and amplifications by Hammons, is more interminable and aspirational than limiting and delusional.

In the context of an essay about art, visual culture, and racial blackness, the qualities of embodiment and abstraction might seem at odds with one another. The transitive verb embody connotes the act of giving bodily form to something, to incarnate or make something corporeal, and to give something a definitive, tangible, visible, or concrete configuration. A noun rather than expressing an action, the word abstraction and its descriptive form abstract broadly insinuate the antithesis of concreteness: the formation of an idea (as of the qualities or properties of something) by mental separation from particular instances or material objects. As one considers artistic conceptions of racial identities, embodiment stresses the artistic act of visibly capturing a racial quintessence, whereas abstraction enables an artist to avoid racial specificities and corporeal materializations altogether, ostensibly through artistic designs and forms that differ from the embodying kind. Is it possible then for these two qualities to coexist (or, at least, to serve an artist’s creative potential without compromising her integrity), especially as pertaining to art and visual culture that privileges an African American or black diasporic point-of-view (in terms of subject matter, aesthetics, or production)?

… The fabled, upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem has long held a special place in the history of this urbanizing process, and in the greater cultural mythos surrounding a twentieth-century black identity. “Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and talented of the whole Negro world,” hawked James Weldon Johnson in 1925. Perhaps more than any other African American community, Harlem has connoted a particular type and degree of city credential: that of possessing the biggest and the most ethnically diverse community of peoples of African descent in the world; of its residents (whether deserving the label or not) being the penultimate, world-wise cosmopolites; and of symbolizing (through its community organizations, local businesses, cultural and leisure activities, and national headquarters) black modernity writ large. Although Harlem’s reputation was, in part, the residual effect of being located in New York City, the community’s African American face and its magnetic pull on an inordinate number of black movers and shakers in public life contributed to its legendary status, which was firmly established by the beginning of the first World War.

One of the earliest artworks to convey something about Harlem’s tumultuous origins is George Bellows’ Tin Can Battle, San Juan Hill, New York. Although not an image of Harlem, Bellows’ drawing of this old Negro quarter in Manhattan’s West Sixties – demolished after World War II to make way for the Amsterdam Housing Projects and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts – made vivid the terrible living conditions and random violence which compelled its residents to pack up and move uptown. Like his fellow Ashcan artist Robert Henri, Bellows delighted in depicting the poor and the common masses, and his spirited treatment of black tenement dwellers in various states of repose and arrested action had the buried message of giving a forum to the related notions of Negro insurgency and flight (to Harlem): a sentiment San Juan Hill’s notorious history of race riots could have easily planted in the mind of the socially aware Bellows.

Screens, Entryways, and Cabinets in Twentieth-Century Black Visual Discourse

Historically, African Americans have been attuned to the cultures of secrecy and impasse. Before emancipation, enslaved men, women, and children, although physically and socially confined, were the sentient repositories of a wide range of suppressed information (genealogical, proprietary, and criminal) that their legal status prohibited them from publicly disclosing or responding to, either in testimonies or actions. In the years immediately following the abolition of slavery and up to the civil rights era, African Americans had to navigate carefully through mainstream society’s private clubhouses, so-called legal systems, and other clandestine operations for fear of violating long-held confidences and facing the fatal consequences of disclosure. The psychological muzzles and real-life restrictions prompted, in 1895, the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to write, famously, “We wear the mask.” Although conceived and composed with that period’s narrowly typecast black entertainers in mind, Dunbar understood how the theater’s limitations on the spectrum of black emotional expressivity – encapsulated in the metaphor of a grinning, deceptive mask – extended into everyday, cross-racial interactions. Similarly, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (whose phrase “herein lie buried many things” forms part of this essay’s title) in 1903 notably reminded readers that from the perspective of “the Veil” or, rather, the mantle of racial difference and discrimination, one could begin to fathom black spirituality, sorrow, and struggle, past and present. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century – and even encroaching into our own twenty-first-century Facebook moment – Du Bois’s metaphor of living “behind the Veil” and Dunbar’s poetic refrain “We wear the mask” are themes in African American arts and polemics that, rather than operate obliquely as mere literary conventions, touch a deep, resounding core within a modern, African American ethos.

… The world that Johnson painted in Florence that year – a supernaturally colored domain comprised of regal, yet humble, black women installed on porches, children at play and at rest, and flowers in riotous, full bloom – was, at once, familiar and outlandish, connecting the artist to the ultimate locus of origin: mother; while envisioning that same, fundamental life source within a part cultural, part invented space of impromptu games, performed rituals, imparted legacies, and constantly changing scenery. Like the “too-big-to-be-breast-fed” child in Johnson’s Maternal, the artist returned in 1944 to the comforting, all embracing arms of home, partaking of not only the emotional sustenance of the female element, but of the vertigo-inducing experience of self-consciousness, of finally grasping one’s purpose in life even if it meant the proverbial reentry into the symbolic womb: in this instance, Johnson’s primal, African American folk roots. Although it was practically second nature for this Expressionist to feel his way through the world, and to visually cast it in the operative role of emotional vehicle for his art, it was another matter altogether for the bereft and distraught Johnson to totally immerse himself in the maternal lap and bosom of Alice/Florence, and to transform his temporary asylum and sanctuary into a new and, arguably, more honest mode of modern painting.

Every intermittent sighting of Barkley L. Hendricks’s work over the past few decades has been a revelation. Paintings previously seen (and about which I claimed some critical expertise) were invariably a surprise and an art historical conundrum to behold again and again. The particular modes of dress to which Hendricks’s subjects subscribed were not only a lens onto a prior history of fashion and style, but a close-up view of the multiplicity of personas that Hendricks and his subjects adopted, outwardly crying out it seemed for post-portrait examinations. The few recognizable subjects in paintings whom I later met and had a chance to compare to their artistic portrayals always elicited a barrage of questions in my mind (re: What were the circumstances of the picture?  How does the subject feel about his/her portrayal?  Who is really calling the shots here?). Much of this work has been in existence since the 1960s and, yet, its pictorial weight and eternal allure is a mystery in today’s guileless world of visual excess and hyper-visibility.