Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

Interesting exhibition at Tate Modern looking at the art which emerged from the civil rights movement.

Before you went in there was a useful installation of five TVs showing speeches from the main protagonists which gave a good grounding in the politics of the time. The show then ran in roughly chronological order starting with a catalyst of a 1963 show at the Metropolitan Museum called Harlem on my Mind which did not include any art by African American artists.

I realise now I come to write that, as the leaflet was mainly a poster style list of artists, I’m not too sure what my notes mean and what bit they apply to! So apologies for this slightly random write up!

There was a good room early on looking at street art focusing on the Chicago Wall of Respect which was referred to thought-out the rest of the show as so many of the artists mentioned later had worked on it. Artists partly took to working on the streets as they felt excluded from galleries plus were working out who their audience was.

I loved the bright room on East Coast abstraction. The artists were criticized at the time for making less of a statement about what Black art was but they came as break in the heavier political art. In amongst the political works I liked Noah Purifoy’s “Watts Riot” from 1966 made from objects taken from the rubble of the riot and Dana C. Chandler’s work Fred Hampton’s Door 2 inspired by a Black Panther activist who was killed in a police raid.

I liked Sam Gilliam’s work from the 1970s  where he took the canvas off the stretchers and knotted it in different ways for each showing so the work was different every time.

Closes on 22 October 2017

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