When Black Experimentalism Became Black Power

In Painting and Other Stuff, Kerry James Marshall captures the challenge artists face when they decide to remain committed to experimentalism and blackness. During the 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement, visual artists were committed to representing blackness, but the impulse to represent blackness often became inseparable from the impulse to experiment with new ways of representing blackness. The art of Black Power experimentalism was representation for freedom’s sake. The Wall of Respect gave a new spin to “outsider art” when it made the mix of representation and abstraction create a feeling of a black outdoors, a black way of being out within representational space. The black experimental impulse directly became a practice of Black Power when the artists in Afri-Cobra, the most impactful Black Arts Movement visual arts collective, shaped their shared vision around a set of principles that produced one of the most groundbreaking approaches to black abstraction.