The Black Arts Movement Essay

as "the New Negro Movement" later the Harlem renaissance." The art today isn't really memorable

A newspaper article about what William Edward Burghard, a civil rights activist, thinks about the current state that black people are in. It entails ways of how art should be used to raise the status of black people in America. W.E.B. Du Bois helped others understand the thinking of people, especially African intellectuals, during the Harlem Renaissance.

The amazing era of the Black Arts Movement developed the concept of an influential and artistic blackness that created controversial but significant organizations such as the Black Panther Party. The Black Arts Movement called for "an explicit connection between art and politics" (Smith). This movement created the most prevalent era in black art history by taking stereotypes and racism and turning it into artistic value.

"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black...let 's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let 's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let 's do the impossible. Let 's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic." - Aaron Douglas.During the time of the harlem renaissance Aaron Douglas used his artwork to take pride in his african american culture. All of his artwork conveyed one common message and that was the role that African Americans played in society. All of this was seen in one of his major artworks which was the “Aspects of Negro Life,” mural on the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.

From the 1920’s to the mid 1930’s a literary, intellectual, and artistic movement occurred that kindled the African Americans a new cultural identity. This movement became known as the Harlem Renaissance, which is also known as the “New Negro Movement”. With this movement, African Americans sought out to challenge the “Negro” stereotype that they had received from others while developing innovation and great cultural activity. The Harlem Renaissance became an artistic explosion in the creative arts. Thus, many African Americans turned to writing, art, music, and theatrics to express their selves.

Du Bois and his NAACP colleague James Weldon Johnson asserted that the only uniquely “American” expressive traditions in the United States had been developed by African Americans. They, more than any other group, had been forced to remake themselves in the New World, Du Bois and Johnson argued, while whites continued to look to Europe or sacrificed artistic values to commercial ones. (Native American cultures, on the other hand, seemed to be “dying out,” they claimed.) African Americans’ centuries-long struggle for freedom had made them the prophets of democracy and the artistic vanguard of American culture.

Artworks are all unique and hold very significant meanings to the artist. Each artist’s art is meant to symbolize or represent something whether personally, socially, or universally. Charles W. White’s art, for example, focused on his and other African-Americans’ struggle to live in America during the 20th century. His artworks subjects are mainly about racism and the dignity of African-American’s. For example, in White’s Sound of Silence II it gives strength and courage to African-Americans to take pride in their ethnicity.

Du Bois is concerned with three main ideas within his essay, those being beauty, art as propaganda and how African Americans and their art will be ultimately judged. Beauty, however, is not how you view something’s allure to Du Bois, but rather who is it that will describe what is classical and beautiful? Suggesting that African Americans fit this role perfectly, Du Bois states “pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world.” He is also interested in how Negro art will distinguish itself from the works of other non-black artists.

The Black Power Movement encouraged black people who were willing to follow something similar to the BLACK code. The Black Code only pertained to the well-being, sharing knowledge, protection, and business to black people. Black Arts Movement actually started in 1965 by LeRoi Jones, better known as Amiri Baraka. He was living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his white wife, Hettie Cohen Jones. He actually left her to move to Manhattan to start the Black Arts Movement.

“those who embraced the Black Power movement often fell into one of two camps: the Revolutionary Nationalists, who were best represented by the Black Panther Party, and the Cultural Nationalists. The latter group called for the creation of poetry, novels, visual arts, and theater to reflect pride in black history and culture. This new emphasis was an affirmation of the autonomy of black artists to create black art for black people as a means to awaken black consciousness and achieve liberation.”

The Black Arts Movement was within African American culture from 1965 to 1975. The main concern was to separate from the western aesthetic and create a new black aesthetic. Another concern is for African Americans to view the world in their own way. The last concern is for a black artist to speak to Africans Americans spiritually and culturally. The three concerns of the Black Arts Movement coalesce and creates the Black Arts Movement. These major concerns helped motivate the Black Arts Movement and allowed African Americans to thrive as well.

The Black Arts Movement was a period that took place during the during the 1960s. The Black Arts Movement focused on a group of politically driven black artists. These artists were poets, artists, musicians, and writers who used their art to send messages in this period of Black Power. Those who adopted the Black Power movement often fell into one of the two categories: The Revolutionaries or the Culturalists. The Revolutionaries were those apart of or supported by the Black Panther Party, and the Culturalist Nationalists.

In this essay Adrian Piper discusses how the American society which is very much influenced by euro ethnics has/have being holding down African-Americans specially women, but also other colored people. The euro ethnics contemporary art world is administered by euro ethnic men, which only allows innovations of any kind to be acknowledged and be considered to enter the zero-sum if and only if they are inside the high ranks of society. Piper claims that the art of colored women artists (CWAs) are innovative treats to the euro ethnic art traditions, thus that’s why euro ethnics tend to negate CWAs.

The Harlem Renaissance was the most important movement in regards to both American art history and resistance art. The movement spoke to a new generation of artists, thinkers, poets, and scholars to discuss African American pride, history, social, and cultural attitudes within a form. This was also known as the New Negro Movement, stemming from the 1920s where African Americans sought to educate, shock, and celebrate their own culture. Public inspiration in Harlem became popular due to the works that Aaron Douglas created. In the postmodern era following the Harlem Renaissance, artists such as Faith Ringgold and Michael Ray Charles began to reillustrate ideas from the Harlem Renaissance and presents them as new ideas in several artworks, displaying its resistance to the status quo.

British art is respected across the world for it’s unique techniques and skills used for painting. A lot of artist from around the world visit Britain for it’s thick culture in the world of art and opportunities. Almost all ‘Minority art’ made in Britain falls into one of the two baskets, either it is created by an artist from an African- American/ Caribbean origin, or by the common people of the Indian-sub continental background. Despite of the attempts made to accumulate these two inconsequential groups together, in order to promote, what Britain still identifies as “Black art”, what they bring to the world of art is radically divergent, mostly because of their origin’s personal crisis as well as due to their history of struggle.