Rebecca Zorach
afterall.org
Barbara Jones-Hogu, Unite, 1970, screenprint, 80.6 × 57.2cm,
Collection of the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago. Courtesy
the artist
Among the legacies of the political art of the late 1960s and early
70s in the United States was an expanded role for something that came
to be called 'community art'. Community art, in the sense of youth art
workshops and neighbourhood art organisations, was not a new
phenomenon. But its visibility increased with the production of large-
scale public murals in US inner cities. These often unauthorised
interventions into the visual landscape were inspired by the Mexican
muralist movement and more immediately by Chicago's Wall of Respect, a
collective portrait of black heroes created in 1967 at 43rd Street and
Langley Avenue on the city's South Side. The Wall of Respect was
designed and painted collaboratively by the Visual Arts Workshop of
OBAC (Organisation of Black American Culture), a group of South Side
African-American practitioners of music, visual arts, literature and
drama. The mural represented black heroes and heroines in a variety of
fields; it was itself an attempt at representing not a uniform and
undifferentiated 'community', but an articulated collectivity. It
reflected an ambition on the part of Chicago's African-American
artists that art might both refashion black identity and create models
for coalition-building. The Wall of Respect spawned other murals
throughout the United States, as well as a further experiment in
collective artistic work, the group known as AfriCOBRA — the African
Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. AfriCOBRA flourished in Chicago in
the late 1960s and early 70s, amicably separating when members of the
group moved to Washington, DC after 1970. New artists joined when part
of the group migrated to the East Coast after 1970. Members continue
working in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland and elsewhere, drawing on
AfriCOBRA's aesthetic precepts in their individual ways.
Community has become a vexed term in art criticism. Since the 1960s,
collaborations between artists and communities have emerged as a major
component of the art world, sometimes grouped under terms like 'new
genre public art', 'community-based art', 'social practice' or 'social
cooperation'. Much of the community art of the 1960s and 70s was
figurative and overtly political; directly challenging formalism, it
has also, thereby, become a foil for more ironic, discursive and self-
referential forms of postmodernism that have been prized by both the
art market and the world of art criticism. As Eva and James Cockcroft
noted in 1975, the artwork produced in the mural movement was
disparaged on grounds of quality: '"Quality" is the code word for much
of the criticism of the figurative community-oriented murals.'1 In an
article on the Cityarts Workshop in New York, they argued that
'community murals cannot be adequately or properly discussed within
the terminological confines of contemporary art criticism' because the
mural movement was a conscious protest against the elitism of the art
establishment.
From the perspective of the art critic, community art is typically
perceived as being neither sufficiently critical nor aesthetically
rich. Serving frequently as a euphemism for racial and ethnic groups,
'community' carries connotations of populism, participation and
collaboration, but can also suggest an undifferentiated (if located)
public with problematic representational politics. It suggests, that
is to say, a grouping that speaks with, and is reduced to, a single
voice. Miwon Kwon, following Iris Marion Young and Critical Art
Ensemble in their separate critiques of the term 'community', argues
that community implies an excessive uniformity: put simply, 'the ideal
of community finds comfort in the neat closure of its own homogeneity'.
2 A related concern is that 'community engagement' or participation is
merely a public-relations alibi for elite institutions. The assumption
in much of this critique, however, is that the community is what or
whom the artist works with — the community is not the artist. The
community becomes the medium, material and support of the artist's
work. But what about when the community is the artist?
When one community uses art to speak to another, somewhat different
community?
When community art has political contestation at its core, or
manifests its own conflicts clearly? Such projects so rarely included
in the canon of critical, political art.
AfriCOBRA members used the term community (and indeed 'commune') at
times, but they also referred to themselves as a family, and chose
this theme for their first exhibition. Family is no simpler or less
problematic than community (and particularly among politicised African
Americans in the wake of the controversial 'Moynihan Report', which
will be discussed further on), and my point is not to glorify it.
Rather, as a term that characterises this group's structure,
relationships and subject matter, it can enrich our analyses, helping
us think in particular about the intersection of race and gender.
How might we produce a finer-grained understanding of different kinds
of groupings and collaborations, their internal dynamics and their
forms of address? AfriCOBRA is not only of historical interest, but
also contributes to ways we might think today about the structure and
formation of collectives.
The Wall of Respect was not finished when it was finished. It was
repainted several times, reflecting conflicts within OBAC Visual
Artists' group, which eventually fractured under the strain of
internal and external pressures.3 AfriCOBRA emerged from this
experience in 1968 as a smaller group naming itself COBRA (the
Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists). The artists soon became
aware of the European group CoBrA and changed their name to AfriCOBRA.
As AfriCOBRA, the founding group included five artists, Jeff
Donaldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu (then Barbara Jones), Gerald Williams
and Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell. Eventually it included as many as five
more artists in Chicago; East Coast members joined after Jeff
Donaldson took a position as chair of the Art Department at Howard
University, Washington, DC in 1970.
Already in 1962 Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell had discussed the idea
of 'a "negro" art movement based on a common aesthetic creed'. It was
just a 'daydream balloon […] we let it float […] the "negro" sky was
pregnant with optimistic fantasy bubbles in those days'.4 In 1968,
with fissures in the Civil Rights Movement and a series of
assassinations of public figures, many political bubbles were
bursting. It was in that moment that Donaldson and Jarrell came
together again with others to form a 'family' of artists.
'Family' suggests an acknowledgement of different roles and identities
among members. The OBAC Writers Workshop had organised itself
similarly, but the writers described their project in somewhat
different terms, as a submersion of individual identities. In an
interview in the Chicago Defender, don l. lee (later Haki Madhubuti)
said of the Writers Workshop, 'We give to each other. My vacuum might
be filled by Carolyn, Kathy or any one of the others'; another
(unnamed) member adds, 'we are no longer individuals'.5 In contrast to
the writers' circle, AfriCOBRA's rhetoric does not suggest a total
merging of the individual into the collective. In initial meetings,
artists showed their work to one another and identified particular
aspects that would contribute to the collective aesthetic. While their
styles converged, they remained cognisant of the qualities each had
brought. As Jones-Hogu described their shared aesthetic principles in
1973, they involved 'Black, positive, direct statements created in
bright, vivid, singing coolade colours of orange, strawberry, cherry,
lemon, lime and grape […] Black positive statements stressing a
direction in the image with lettering, lost and found line and shape'.
6 As Donaldson wrote in the magazine Black World, emphasising that
group and individual identities were not in conflict, Superreal colour
for Superreal images. The superreality that is our every day all day
thang […] Coolade colours for coolade images for the superreal people.
Superreal images for the SUPERREAL people […] We are a family. Check
the unity. All the rest must be sensed directly. Check out the image
[…] We are a family of image-makers and each member of the family is
free to relate to and to express our laws in her/his individual way.
Dig the diversity in unity. We can be ourselves and be together, too.
7
The 'super-real', as they imagined it, is a form of surrealism that is
not distortion but reality-plus. AfriCOBRA did not remove figuration
but adds to it in colour and luminosity, in the use of text and in
what the AfriCOBRA manifesto refers to as 'syncopated, rhythmic
repetition' — inspired stylistically and sometimes in subject matter
(especially in the case of Wadsworth Jarrell's work) by music.8 Within
these shared commitments, members were free to define their own
subject matter, media and stylistic orientations.
In the above quote, Donaldson refers to the group as a family, a theme
that also emerged immediately within the group's subject matter.
AfriCOBRA's first exhibition, 'The Black Family', was held at WJ
Studios (Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell's studio on 61st Street in the
Chicago neighbourhood of Woodlawn) in 1969. 'Family' had multiple
resonances in this moment. In a specific sense, the choice to
emphasise family was a response to the stereotype of the dysfunctional
black family presented in the widely read Moynihan Report.
This 1965 report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, was
produced for President Lyndon Johnson by then- Assistant Secretary of
Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who was later to become a US Senator).
The Moynihan Report, as it came to be known, asserted that matriarchy
was prevalent among black Americans and judged this situation a
pathology that 'imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male'.9 On a
very basic level the exhibition title might be seen as a direct
riposte to Moynihan: 'The Black Family' rather than 'The Negro Family'
implies a more politicised and proud identity.
But what kind of family was it? On the one hand, Wadsworth Jarrell's
painting Black Family (1969), his first acrylic painting and one of
his offerings for the 'Black Family' exhibition, depicts a
paradigmatic American nuclear family. The male figure is dominant —
standing, with his long arms enclosing the woman and children.
It represents the Jarrell family only in part: Jarrell based the
mother and son on Jae and Wadsworth, Jr, but used a photograph taken
of a man on the street for the father and invented the small girl.10
This form of the family was only one of multiple possibilities for the
group. Jones-Hogu has said on the one hand that 'Family is the
foundation', but also that the group sought to present 'relationships
among all members of families', meaning extended families and other
forms of social organisation.11 For Donaldson, the rationale for the
exhibition's theme was that the black family was under attack.
Moynihan had just written that book that talked about the black family
being fragmented as if there had been no slavery. […] So that was
something we dealt with. Because we, we saw the black families being
more than a man and a woman and a child. But families can be distant
cousins and surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers and the guy who
delivers the ice. The extended family thing was very much alive in the
communities in the South and in the North when I was growing up.12
This might indeed be extended still further such that 'the black
family' refers to the entire community of black people, or at least
African Americans, just as 'the human family' sometimes refers to all
human beings. And as we have seen, AfriCOBRA itself identified
as a family. While it contained one married couple with a child (the
Jarrells), it was an extended sense of family that was primary in the
group's self-understanding. Jae Jarrell said in a 2010 interview,
'Once you're in AfriCOBRA you're always in AfriCOBRA. It's a
brotherhood, a sisterhood — it's a bond.'13
Part of what is striking about AfriCOBRA in Chicago is the prominence
of female members. This followed on the contributions of women —
Sylvia Abernathy, Myrna Weaver, Carolyn Lawrence and Jones-Hogu — to
the Wall of Respect. Though the initial vision for a black art group
had emerged from conversations between Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth
Jarrell in the early 1960s, many early members were women. Jae Jarrell
created provocative fashion designs, such as the Revolutionary Suit
(1970) that appeared in the pages of Black World. Jones- Hogu's
expertise in printmaking helped define the group's visibility beyond
art venues. Among the most visible and lasting works of AfriCOBRA were
screenprints, which represented a push toward a broader community
audience. Both Jones-Hogu's own work as a member of the group and the
prints designed by other members and produced collectively drew their
visual rhetoric from black revolutionary ideas like those of the Black
Panthers.
Many of the prints also reflected particular concerns of black women.
AfriCOBRA's approach to gender and family issues challenges (white)
feminist sensibilities in that the group often — very assertively —
promoted the paradigmatic role of men in the movement. As an example,
we can look to Carolyn Lawrence's Uphold Your Men, Unify Your Families
(1971).
A lone woman, arms crossed, stands in the foreground. She faces
forward, wearing a long dress and an Afro; her cheeks are painted with
stripes and her forehead with a spiral inspired by African design. She
looks resolute. The text surrounding her, blending into the more
abstractly patterned background, reads 'Uphold Your Men Unify Your
Families'. Uphold Your Men seems to hint that the woman must patiently
act in a supporting role for the sake of keeping her family together.
This position may be troubling to feminist sensibilities today, but it
responds to a specific historical situation. Black revolutionary
rhetoric was itself diverse, but a powerful strand, particularly in
cultural nationalist and Black Muslim contexts, prescribed subordinate
roles for women. In this way militants joined up with black middle
class ideologies, according to which it was an expression of status
for women not to need to work but rather to stay home and cultivate
domesticity. These views responded to Moynihan defensively, but they
also responded to a racist society that harassed and disparaged black
men and denied them chances at jobs. At the same time, black feminists
argued that simply shoring up black masculinity was not an acceptable
response to that situation. In the anthology The Black Woman, edited
by Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara), several authors identified a
pernicious acceptance of Moynihan's terms within the black community.
Gwen Patton, critiquing this acceptance, spoke of a prevailing
'Victorian ethos': Moynihan, she wrote, 'invisibly became the
guideline'14 and fuelled an imperative to recalibrate gender roles to
emphasise black masculinity. In her own essay Cade wrote that women in
some quarters of the movement were being asked to 'cultivate "virtues"
that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves'.15
Cade argues that rather than sacrificing the personal element of
politics to the urgency of the moment, on the assumption that it could
be taken care of later, 'We'd better take the time to fashion
revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary
relationships.'16
Given that family bonds were destroyed and prohibited by slavery and
the sexual abuse that went along with it, to create a 'black family'
was a constructive act, building from the ruins of African families.
The question was what kind of family this would be.
For most black movement women, coalition with white feminists was not
viable: most white feminists at the time had difficulty recognising
their own racial privilege, and could not see gender as a key vector
for the oppression of black men.17 For many black women who were
sensitive to gender oppression as well as racial oppression, to join
with white women risked trading one oppressor for another — a risk
many white women could not understand. That white women might not be
friends, but rather rivals or even enemies, is central to Jones-Hogu's
Black Men We Need You (c.1971). The print contains the title text but
also (in smaller lettering that is harder to make out) the words:
'Black men preserve our race. Leave white bitches alone.' The main
figure and apparent speaker is a black mother with two children.
Jones-Hogu's focus on women in this print and others emerged after she
joined AfriCOBRA. Her earlier series of prints titled America, America
II and America III condemned American culture at large, and featured
mostly male figures. Jones-Hogu incorporated in the print elements of
the US flag — its overall striping punctuates the composition more or
less innocuously, but its fields of stars are composed of armies of
white-hooded KKK-like figures, their forms simplified into five-
pointed shapes. Juxtaposed with these geometric elements are angry
male faces and skeletons that evoke violence.
Jones-Hogu's Unite (1970) represents a turning point in her own work
that came through her involvement in AfriCOBRA.18 Following the
group's aesthetic creed, she began to emphasise 'positive images' of
black power and to create prints that made specific demands on black
viewers. Unite was inspired, Jones-Hogu says, by the Black Power
salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in
Mexico, and by Elizabeth Catlett's sculpture Homage to My Young Black
Sisters (1968), which Jones-Hogu saw in Catlett's studio while on a
visit to view Mexican murals in 1968.
Unite shows a V-shaped group of black men standing, each with one fist
raised, their relatively undifferentiated faces (unified in the spirit
of the print's command) lit from the left.19 They appear against a
backdrop formed by repetitions of the word 'Unite'.
This single word is shaped into wedges of colour and repeats (in
different colour combinations) in full and partially about ten times.
The handling of bodies, too, establishes a mid-point between the
pictorial detail and drawn lines of Jones-Hogu's own earlier work and
the geometric blocks of colour and more simplified and abstracted
(though still quite legible) bodies and faces of her AfriCOBRA prints.
Colour is also in transition, from the flag's colours (plus muted
blacks and browns), toward what AfriCOBRA called 'coolade
colours' (after the fruit drink Kool-Aid).
Unite inaugurates a series of prints whose purpose is not to critique
the state of affairs but more directly to motivate action. Others
include Rise and Take Control (1971) and Nation Time II (1971). Both
titles are inspired by poems: Margaret Walker's 'For My People' (1942)
('let a race of men now rise and take control' — in her reprise of
this line in the lettering on the print, Jones-Hogu notably changes
'race of men' to 'black race') and Amiri Baraka's 'It's Nation
Time' (1970). The cultivation of 'positive images' to combat a racist
visual culture was a strongly shared and clearly articulated goal for
the Black Arts Movement, in which both these poets also participated.
In his account of AfriCOBRA's founding and early years, published in
Black World in 1970, Donaldson echoes the language of the 'positive':
AfriCOBRA created 'images which deal with concepts that offer positive
and feasible solutions to our […] problems'.20 The legibility of the
single command Unite in Jones-Hogu's print, and its affirmative,
militant message and content — the idea of the formation of a
collective — are characteristic components of the 'positive image'.
One aspect of AfriCOBRA artists' work that has received little
attention is the way in which formal and technical strategies express
not only individual meanings but also the structure of the collective
as collective. In Wadsworth Jarrell's Revolutionary (1972), the effect
of small blocks of colour (mostly made up of text) is nearly
pointillist. The first impression is one of a bright uniformity; the
figure, Angela Davis, is accessible to the viewer as a recognisable
face, but the text that makes up her image is much more difficult to
discern. The viewer is drawn in and then has to puzzle out the meaning
— an effect that might be analogous to speaking in code. This aspect
of AfriCOBRA's collective style can be called kaleidoscopic: its
multiple discrete small blocks of colour alternately define and cut
across representational forms.
In the use of blocks of colour that are discrete but which combine to
an overall effect, AfriCOBRA's works speak to the production of the
collective, expressing chromatically the new form of collectivity that
members were fashioning. The printmaking process is one demonstration
of this. Each artist created his or her own design for a print, and
Jones-Hogu, the only expert printmaker, oversaw the creation of the
screens and the printing of the sheets. For large blocks of colour,
the artists mounted hand-cut stencils made from Rubylith film on the
screens, one screen for each colour. They created finer detail and
tonal variation by photo transfer.21 Then, members worked in groups,
mostly without regard to individual authorship, printing about fifty
sheets (the capacity of their drying rack) per session. With their
multiple colours, each print required several screens and careful
attention to registration. The multi-part process of printing, pulling
and hanging each sheet reflected the complexity of a collaboration in
which members retained individuality while working together on a
shared project. With minimal financial resources, the group pooled
their labour out of necessity. The process itself generated and re-
generated the collective. Collectivity as form was not separate from
the work of art — indeed, it was itself a work of art. Whether or not
members were shaping (in Cade's terms) revolutionary selves and lives,
they were, as a group, shaping revolutionary relationships.
The relationship of group and individual is expressed in a more
iconographic way in Jones-Hogu's Black Men We Need You and other
prints in which blocks of colour work in especially meaningful ways.
While Black Men represents one mother with her children as the origin
of the title's demand, the recipients of the utterance are also
represented in a series of profiles on the upper right and lower left
that suggest a more generic larger group, reflecting the double
impetus to individualise and collectivise.
In other work, colour blocks create a geometric dappling effect over
embedded text and depicted figures that both separate and unify them.
In To Be Free (1972), Jones-Hogu connects past, present and future,
with a main family group of mother and child in the left foreground
surrounded by figures representing past and future. Colour attaches in
specific ways to the figures. For instance, some figures are radically
altered by the passage of circular bands of colour that radiate
outward from a sun-shaped abstracted face, inspired by African
imagery, in the upper right corner. But the artist explicitly does not
allow the colour black to be affected by the colour bands. Unlike
Unite, in which red and purple were printed over the black outlines of
the raised arms, the printing of this multi-screen print does not
involve any blending of colours. The imperviousness of black here
might just reflect the chromatic behaviour of the pigment. The colour
could also be read in symbolic racial terms: black possesses a power
and steadfastness that the other pigments don't.
The behaviour of black as ink colour also affects the gendered
depiction of bodies in To Be Free. All the male figures are rendered
entirely or almost entirely in black — we might say they 'represent
the race' — and are thus unaffected by the bands of colour. Their
upright, black forms punctuate the print's overall colour. At the same
time, they thereby appear more generic. The other figures, and the
text, made up of bright coolade colours, are striped wherever the
concentric circles of sunlight meet them. Within this general rule,
one figure stands out distinctly: the woman in the foreground, leaning
over her child, clad in black trousers and a black vest. Because she
is dressed primarily in black, the effects of the colour bands on her
form are minimised.
The background woman and her children emerge out of (or recede into?)
the sun's bands of light. They appear insubstantial in that they are
subject to this schematic sunlight: the outline of the bands of colour
cuts through their forms and alters the colour of their bodies and
clothing. The difference between foreground and background is a matter
of past and present. The print's text reads 'To be free know the past
and prepare the future'. The woman in the foreground, with her single
child and modern dress, suggests the woman of the present, to whom the
statement is directed. The woman in the background, with her African
dress and three children, seems to represent the past, emerging from
the African sun. The woman who stands between them is a mediating
figure, holding a piece of patterned African cloth that connects
present to past.
Only a close look reveals that this mediating figure carries a rifle.
It's not obvious what this black form signifies, as the rifle's barrel
points directly upward over her rounded back, but her bandolier
establishes that it is her gun. As with the Panthers' ideology, the
print proposes that women's role in bearing and teaching children is
indeed revolutionary. They embody the passage from one generation to
another; they also suggest a sense of individuality with respect to
the group. But women's role is double: they also have to prepare to
fight. With the modern, foreground figure — whose masculine dress is
printed in the steadfast black pigment of the male figures — and the
contrasting bright colours of the 'African' women and children, Jones-
Hogu implies that it is on the body of this female figure, addressee
of the image's message, that past and present, male and female norms,
and individual and collective come together. The question remains
whether this position constitutes too heavy a burden (conceptual, or
actual) to bear.
'Family' allows for a specific description of relationships and
structures that 'community' leaves vague. It may be no less
problematic than 'community', but perhaps one advantage is that it is
not obviously a utopian term. Jones-Hogu herself stayed in Chicago
when other members left, and eventually slowed her printmaking career
to care for her young son, illustrating the fact that symbolic forms
of family may come into tension with the personal obligations of
specific families. Still, family might, in combination with other
terms, allow us to think of collectivity differently, to begin to
proliferate different constructive and analytical models for groups in
general. While the artworks produced by AfriCOBRA should take a more
prominent place than they have so far in histories of twentieth-
century art, the group's creation and articulation of new practices of
collectivity are important artistic contributions in their own right,
and should be counted as a significant legacy of the group.
Footnotes
Eva S. Cockcroft and James D. Cockcroft, 'Cityarts Workshop —
People's Art in New York City', Left Curve, no.4, Summer 1975, p.14. ↑
Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another, Cambridge, MA and London: The
MIT Press, 2002, p.150. ↑
After a fire in early 1971, the building on which the Wall of
Respect was painted was
demolished. ↑
Jeff Donaldson, 'Africobra 1 (African Commune of Bad Relevant
Artists): "10 in Search of a Nation"',
Black World, October 1970, p.80. ↑
Sheryl Fitzgerald, 'Chicago's Black Artists: A New Breed', Chicago
Daily Defender, 17 August 1968, p.1. ↑
Barbara Jones-Hogu, 'The History, Philosophy, and Aesthetics of
AfriCOBRA', originally published
in Afri-Cobra HI (exh. cat.), Amherst: University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, 1973; revised in 2008,
http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/6808/history-philosophy-and-aesthetics-africobra/
(last accessed on 2 July 2011). ↑
J. Donaldson, 'Africobra 1', op. cit., p.86. ↑
S. Fitzgerald, 'Chicago's Black Artists', op. cit. ↑
Quoted in Margo Natalie Crawford, 'Must Revolution Be a Family
Affair? Revisiting The Black Woman',
in Dayo F. Gore et al. (ed.), Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical
Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, New York: New York University
Press, 2009, p.188. ↑
For more on Wadsworth Jarrell, see Robert L. Douglas, Wadsworth
Jarrell: The Artist as Revolutionary,
Rohnert Park, CA: Pomegranate Art Books, 1996. ↑
Interview with the author, 1 July 2011. ↑
Jeff Donaldson interview, HistoryMakers Digital Archive, Story 31
(April 2001), available at http://www.idvl.org/thehistorymakers/iCoreClient.html#/&s=1&args=N1%3BP-1%3Bids
[Jeff%20Donaldson,%20Story%2031:10208] (last accessed on 2 July 2011).
↑
From 'Africobra: Art for the People', http://www.tvland.com/shows/africobra
(last accessed on 8 March 2011). ↑
Gwen Patton, 'Black People and the Victorian Ethos', in Toni Cade
(ed.), The Black Woman: An Anthology, New York: Mentor Book, 1970, p.
146.
T. Cade, 'On the Issue of Roles', in T. Cade (ed.), The Black
Woman, op. cit., p.103. ↑
Ibid., 110. ↑
See M. Crawford, 'Must Revolution?', op. cit. ↑
Uniquely among Jones-Hogu's prints, Unite exists in impressions
signed only by her and in impressions marked with a small AfriCOBRA
stamp and their icon of a Gelede mask with sunglasses. When Jones-Hogu
first made the print, she was finishing her printmaking thesis at the
Illinois Institute of Technology. Her work had already been informed
by AfriCOBRA's aesthetic philosophy, but the work belonged, initially,
to her individual practice as an artist. When the group decided to
work in the print medium, she made more impressions with the AfriCOBRA
stamp. Interview with the author, 1 July 2011.
Interview with the author, 11 October 2010. ↑
J. Donaldson, 'Africobra 1', op. cit., pp.83, 85. ↑
The exposures were done at Advantage Silkscreen and at the studio
of Ruben Aguilar (not a member of the group). They were sold for $10,
mainly at art fairs, exhibitions and conferences. Barbara Jones-Hogu
interview with the author, 1 July 2011. ↑
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment