Suchergebnisse

African American Los Angeles in the middle decades of the last century was alive with militancy, movement, and creativity. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960 – 1980, curated by Kellie Jones, captures this vitality while offering a nuanced survey of how visual artists in that community used the materials and ideas of the then-emergent post – abstract expressionist sensibility to shape a vital part of the Black Arts movement. In this review Geoffrey Jacques suggests how Now Dig This! can serve not only as a window into the particularities of the African American arts community of Los Angeles in the last century's middle decades, but as a way of adding nuance to our ways of seeing art history, art making, and the art world generally during that period.

The exhibition of prints Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, curated by Judith B. Hecker at New York's Museum of Modern Art, offered a view of South African art-making practice that flourished among all sectors of society during the apartheid years. The exhibition evoked a combination of cynicism, nostalgia, even sadness. The politics and the politically oriented art of the twentieth century recall utopian hopes that ended in dashed expectations. Yet art that speaks the language of the twentieth-century insurgent Left also recalls the brutality attributed to those struggles. The exhibition showed an acute awareness of these problems and seemed to have been organized with them as a sort of subtext.