ABSTRACT
In Mary Schmidt Campbell’s biography on Romare Bearden, An American Odyssey, she offers a clue about the stakes of the debate on African American abstraction art through a masterful use of what could have seemed like a small anecdote. One prominent critic who situated the work of African American abstract artists was the Guyana-born abstract painter Frank Bowling. An exemplary model is Kellie Jones’s path-breaking 2006 exhibition of African American abstraction, Energy / Experimentation at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Kobena Mercer focuses on the color symbolism in Bowling’s painting, Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman, 1968, with its Ethiopian tricolor scheme that has become known in the context of Pan-Africanism. Richard J. Powell has included Barbara Chase-Riboud within a set of artists who make the case for the marriage of “embodiment”—a race-based idea, a kind of “quintessence”—abstraction which could allow any “artist to avoid racial specificities and corporeal materializations altogether”.
