Exhibition Catalog

The concept of a “blues aesthetic” is an attempt to describe selected examples of art in this century, and to delineate several important aspects of this art.  Let’s be clear: what we are talking about is basic, twentieth-century Afro-American culture.  The term “blues” is an appropriate designation for this idea because of its associations with one of the most identifiable black American traditions that we know.  Perhaps more than any other designation, the idea of a blues aesthetic situates the discourse squarely on: 1) art produced in our time; 2) creative expressions that emulate from artists who are empathetic with Afro-American issues and ideals; 3) work that identifies with grassroots, popular, and/or mass black American culture; 4) art that has an affinity with Afro-U.S.-derived music and/or rhythms; and 5) artists and/or artistic statements whose raison d’etre is humanistic.

Although one could argue that other twentieth-century Afro-U.S. musical terms, such as ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, gospel, swing, bebop, cool, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, soul, funk, go-go, hip-hop, or rap are just as descriptive as “the blues,” what “the blues” has over and above them is a breadth and mutability that allows it to persist and even thrive through this century.  From the anonymous songsters of the late nineteenth-century who sang about hard labor and unattainable love, to contemporary rappers blasting the airwaves with percussive and danceable testimonies, the blues is an affecting, evocative presence, which endures in every artistic overture made towards black American peoples.

Following a 1953 tour of Ghana, Afro-American novelist and essayist Richard Wright described his first impressions of his “ancestral homeland” in the book Black Power. Wright was taken aback by the differences and similarities between Africans and black Americans. The shared characteristics were particularly puzzling for Wright, since he had long assumed that the centuries which had transpired and the traumatic experience of slavery obliterated any possibilities for African “survivals” in America. However, his face-to-face encounter with West African dance, gestures, and cultural patterns recalled similar traditions in the United States. Wright’s acknowledgement of “some kind of link,” along with the same realization by anthropologists and historians form the ideological core for the Field Museum of Natural History’s exhibition African Insights: Sources for Afro-American Art and Culture. The connections between various African peoples and their Afro-American descendants are often not immediately apparent. Layers of time, as well as cross-cultural influences, refashion African expressions into American statements. But the indelible mark of several West African civilizations continues through time and over the dominant culture, expressing itself in an outlook and style that is essentially “Black Atlantic.” The arts and cultures that exist along Africa’s west coast – from Senegal’s Cape Verde to just below the mouth of the Congo River – are reinvented among black populations in South America, the Caribbean, and the United States with striking results.

On the American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt’s utilization of the African American conjurer as a recurrent character in his short stories, the literary critic Richard H. Brodhead wrote that the act of entreating, via a vernacular hermetic, invariably appears in these writings “as a recourse, a form of power available to the powerless in mortally intolerable situations.”  I thought about this statement and its articulation of a particular set of remedies when I saw Betye Saar’s art assemblage Black Girl’s Window recently.  Completed in 1969 – at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the United States – and exhibited widely in its forty-odd year existence, Black Girl’s Window has long functioned, in the aforementioned framework, as an intersectional, multivalent talisman, inadvertently transforming Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ black-woman-at-the-window allegory into a threshold for which the occult combats a delimiting racial and gendered status quo. Now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Black Girl’s Window tacitly cajoles that revered institution, famous for celebrating formalism and for its indifference to racial and social matters in art, to now confront social concerns and political activism, albeit through Saar’s phantasmagoric aperture.

In the early to mid-20^th-century Chicago, Illinois loomed large in the collective imaginations of African Americans.  Unlike the similarly romanticized, predominately black New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Chicago’s African American South Side retained a kind of folk/rural character and racial authenticity as compared to other northern U.S. destinations for southern black migrants.  Even when one considers Harlem’s international notoriety – a residual effect of Harlem’s pivotal location in Manhattan – and its black cultural infusions from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Caribbean, Chicago’s large black population and their familial ties to the deep South and that region’s treasured jazz and blues traditions ineradicably colored that community’s persona and, in conjunction with a marked commercial/industrial profile, an illustrious cohort of black entrepreneurs, and an indispensible working-class, reinforced Chicago’s reputation as the other early 20^th-century, African American urban mecca.

Harlem’s cultural efflorescence in the 1920s and 1930s, which thrust into a national spotlight artistic luminaries like Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Paul Robeson, had an equivalent in the somewhat synchronic “Chicago Negro Renaissance,” as evidenced in the latter’s creative offerings from Earl Hines, Richard Wright, Archibald Motley, and Katherine Dunham.  These two, competing black urban “rebirths” were more accurately examples of a global black modernist, or “New Negro,” movement that, in addition to New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, emerged in the interwar years in other metropolises (like Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Kingston, Jamaica; and Paris, France) with sizeable black intelligentsias and creative cliques.

And, yet, in the years roughly between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II black Chicago experienced its own cultural flowering: a place and time in which the arts and letters, from Florence Price’s symphonic works to Big Bill Broonzy’s blues recordings, and from William Edouard Scott’s impressionistic canvases to Archibald Motley’s hothouse paintings, contributed to Chicago’s reputation as an African American focalized destination.  Like Mount Parnassus in antiquity, Chicago’s South Side, in spite of the economic hardships of its inhabitants, was also the home of poetry, music, and art, expressed in plaintive or remonstrating testimonials, rousing church services, foot-tapping jazz, and images of beautiful and fashionable people.  Painting a broad picture of interwar black Chicago, this essay explores how Chicago’s South Side became an African American cultural capital, with special attention to the role that the visual arts and culture more broadly played in this conferral.