1971: A Year in the Life of Color

by Darby English

In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural Contemporary Black Artists in America , at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.

1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists’ desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color’s special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture’s preoccupation with color.

Genres: Art

312 pages, Hardcover

Published December 20, 2016

About the author

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and author of 1971: A Year in the Life of Color and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness.

Reviews

[Jacques de Villiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

One’s art was not just something one made; one collaborated with it and followed its lead. One risked oneself for it, allowed oneself to be changed by it. Though emphatically a realm of self-government, one’s practice was resolutely for a viewer, to whom it represented a kind of vulnerability. One humbled oneself before the idea of a viewer, though never absolutely—one spoke of one’s work’s capacity, even its desire, to reward an open perspective by becoming and revealing things one did not intentionally place. To speak of one’s art was not to describe what should be seen in it. It was to describe one’s hope that the work would find itself, as it were, in a serious relationship, one in which the work could become more than what it—objectively—was by being seen for exactly what it was. Modernist art was an integral component in a scene of singular plenitude, of the absolute shattering of fixed identities.

[Mills College Library]

700.8996 E584 2016

[erin donnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read through to the penultimate chapter, Making a Show of Discomposure, which is excellent.