ABSTRACT
On July 5, 1963, Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston gathered with Romare Bearden in his New York studio for conversation about how as African American artists they might become more engaged in the ongoing freedom struggle. The Spiral artists eventually chose the all-encompassing title “Works in Black and White” as a “symbolic recognition of the civil rights struggle,” with profits to go to civil rights groups. An added benefit of assigning a theme was that it encouraged new work. When Spiral artists were considering how to thematically organize an exhibition, Alston had suggested Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica as a prototype. The younger Saxophonist Charlie Parker’s own “search for a new musical vocabulary and syntax not tied to ‘Western’ values and aesthetics” made him something of a patron saint to those of the Black Arts Movement who themselves sought to forge a Black aesthetic separate from European dictates within the visual and literary arts.
