Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
Page 11
The only daughter of a courts administrator and a teacher, Howardena Pindell had grown up in the segregated Germantown and Chestnut Hill neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Her parents—both of whom held multiple degrees—had started her in weekend art classes at a young age. A gifted student, she had graduated from her all-girls high school early, in part as an escape. “I would be held back from certain kinds of classes or have my artwork hidden when there were competitions,” she told the art historian Kellie Jones. “I couldn’t call that sexism.”18
Pindell left for Boston University, where she won a scholarship and became the only Black student in the art school. “There was a very clear sense of what you could and couldn’t do,” she said. She could not share a dorm room with a white friend. She could not run for student office. She joined Delta Sigma Theta, a Black sorority. But she could not find relief there from her alienation. She became one of the top students in the art program. But a rich parent of a white student attempted to offer the school an endowment if it could convince her to leave the school.19 Pindell cultivated her own solitariness.
After receiving her MFA from the Yale School of Art, Pindell began working at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 and rose to become an assistant curator of prints and illustrated books. When the BECC protests began, she watched with interest, and through her friend Lucy Lippard quietly began attending Art Workers’ Coalition meetings. When others realized that she worked at the MOMA and began to distrust her intentions, she stopped coming.
Pindell had met Winer when she was in London as a young museum assistant, and the two became fast friends. They were similar—brilliant, decisive, uncompromising. After Winer moved back to New York City to begin working at Artists Space, Pindell had subleased then eventually passed on her downtown apartment to Winer. Now Pindell was helping to lead the protest against Artists Space.
Pindell had become aware of Donald’s exhibition through a young Black woman named Janet Henry. Slender and tender-eyed, Henry was about a decade younger, born to a family of artists. She had worked as education director at the Studio Museum in Harlem and then joined Linda Goode Bryant, who had established the Just Above Midtown gallery to show contemporary African American art. Teaching children to make art was Henry’s greatest joy.
“How I conceive of the world—I realize it’s kind of Pollyannaish,” she said. “Why would you do things that are evil and mean to people? I can’t fathom that and I can’t understand people who do.”
In January 1979, Henry received the announcement card for The Nigger Drawings. Staring at Donald’s half-tone pine tree, trying to make sense of it, she became curious. “I looked at it and said, ‘I wonder if this is a Black person doing something about that word,’” she recalled.
But when she visited Artists Space, Henry took in Donald’s works with increasing anxiety. Here were images of a doorway, a nebula, an inverted upside-down scene of a man playing a trumpet for children on a boat, large dark fields of charcoal. What was Donald trying to say? Did he actually understand what the word meant? She walked over to her friend Cindy Sherman and soon the Artists Space staff had gathered around her. Why, she asked them, are these pieces called The Nigger Drawings?
Someone—she couldn’t remember who—told her that perhaps it was because the artist liked to use charcoal and often got it on his hands and face. Someone else—she couldn’t remember who—brought her pictures of some of Donald’s other works. It was the thing artists might do for other artists in a gallery like this in the middle of a quiet, unbusy afternoon.
But Henry’s head was already loud with noise. She could not process what they were telling her, what all these pretty pictures were for, why this wall in the main gallery of this downtown alternative space had the words “The Nigger Drawings” emblazoned across it. She left the studio gasping for air. She found herself in the subway, heading as fast as she could to West 57th Street to the Just Above Midtown gallery. Henry recalled, “I came in there babbling.” Linda Goode Bryant got Henry to calm down and tell her story. Then Goode Bryant began making calls.
Pindell and Lucy Lippard began composing the “Open Letter to Artists Space.” Henry and Goode Bryant initiated a letter-writing campaign to James Reinisch, the head of the New York State Council on the Arts. NYSCA still provided over 60 percent of Artists Space’s operating funds. Under the name of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, the group that had protested the Met a decade before, they began to lobby NYSCA, whose members included Romare Bearden, and the National Endowment for the Arts to cut off Artists Space’s funding.
By the end of the same Monday, March 5, that the Open Letter had arrived, Helene Winer had also received an urgent telegram from NYSCA:
WE WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS THE COUNCIL’S DISTRESS AT THE POOR TASTE USED IN SUCH A CHOICE OF TITLES. WE BELIEVE ART SHOULD BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER AND NOT BE DIVISIVE AS SUCH TITLE BECOMES, PARTICULARLY SINCE IT IS UNRELATED TO THE CONTENT OF THE WORK.
(Signed,)
THE NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS20
First there had been the pictures. Then followed words about the pictures, hot with appeal, accusation, and outrage. All week the letters poured in.
Linda Goode Bryant wrote that the word “nigger” was simply the reminder of a childhood marked by “the stench of southern jails, cocked guns, dog bites, and the ever present red screaming cries of ‘nigger.’”21 In her letter to NYSCA’s Reinisch, Janet Henry wrote as if she was also responding to Winer, Watkins, and Sherman in the way she could not when she was breathless in the gallery. “Alright, then,” Henry wrote, “why not Black Drawings? Charcoal is black, uncomplicated, straightforward BLACK. The word Nigger is neither.”22
Henry wrote that when she had stood in the gallery, she felt that “no matter how good you get, no matter how much you are needed, you ain’t what we are and therefore will never drink from the same fountain we do. You will also put up with anything we choose to sling in your face.”
She concluded, “Seems like somebody’s asking for a fight.”23
A RACE CONVERSATION, PART 1
Donald was unrepentant. He fired off his own broadside to the signers of the Open Letter, comparing himself to D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs. He wrote in a third-person passive voice: “It would be presumptuous to consider that the artist’s titling of his work ‘The Nigger Drawings’ was an explicitly racist gesture.”24
But Winer removed the title from the gallery wall. Then she closed the gallery for a day, to give the staff a reset. Still, when they returned, the calls continued, the letters piled up. NYSCA and NEA officials were hinting that the organization’s funding would be reduced. Board members were losing patience. The staff was fearful of Black protests. Winer had begun fearing for the organization’s survival.
On the day the exhibition closed, she sent out a public letter of apology.25 She then appealed to her allies to send letters of support to NYSCA and the NEA. She asked Donald not to make any more media statements. But when the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein came calling, Donald gave an interview, telling Goldstein, “A lot of what fed this controversy is that my art is real. I’m not some punk who sat down and scrawled these things. There’s an intelligence operating here.”
“All you moralists,” Donald said. “It takes an amoral kid like me to make things move.”
Goldstein returned to his desk and pounded out a piece he called “The Romance of Racism”: “The romance is that ‘nigger’ no longer refers to race, that anyone can be a nigger under the right circumstances and that artists—those jaunty explorers on the frontiers of consciousness—are niggers in spades.”26
The article hit the stands three weeks after the show had closed, but the controversy was yet to crest. Twenty-four artists signed a letter to the Voice, including most of the original signers of the Open Letter; Benny Andrews, who had led the protest at the Met in 1969; and prominent artists Leon Golub, David Hammons, and Sol LeWitt. They accused Goldstein of falling for Newman’s
“self-promotion stunt.”
“Typical of social practice in the art world, racism appears in chic packages,” they wrote. “[M]any in the art world lull themselves into believing that in an art context racism isn’t racism: it’s art.”27
THINGS FALL APART
On April 7, Newman responded with another public letter, all but naming Andre, Lippard, and LeWitt as aggressors on the wrong side of what he called an “artistic generation gap”:
It was these same people who, in the sixties when government support of the arts was being debated, warned against the danger of censorship; particularly with respect to any government programs designed to support and nurture the avant-garde. What happened?…
I have the good fortune, if only by virtue of age, to be a product rather than a part of that art world whose processes have led these people to such a protest (against me). I am at worst a Frankenstein of it.28
Then he finally gave his explanation for the title. “To the degree that I consider that ‘nigger’ is a prejudicial term, my use of it in the title is a means of locating the viewer within the dichotomy that exists between the titling of the art and the actual content of the drawings.” Newman had intended, he said years later, to “create something beautiful, place it next to something ugly, and stick the viewer in the middle.”29
But The Nigger Drawings had succeeded only in dividing the avant-garde along racial lines. Publicly Winer backed Donald. “He felt [the title] had an esthetic complexity, it was metaphorical,” Winer told the Washington Post. “I was surprised that everyone who was offended saw it only in the absolute, slur meaning.”30
“At this point, ‘nigger’ is a broadly used adjective that no longer simply refers to Blacks in a pejorative context,” she told Goldstein. “People are neutralizing language. These words don’t have quite the power they used to—and that seems like a healthy thing.”
Finally she nodded to the pop culture. “If anyone has perpetrated the use of that term, it’s Black people. They can’t use it to the degree that they do and then disallow its use by whites. I mean we do have some sort of culture exchange.”31
Douglas Crimp, the managing editor of the leftist art journal October and the curator of the Pictures exhibition, argued that categorically calling any use of the word “nigger” was ridiculous. Worse, attacking Artists Space’s funding was censorship “from those pretending to defend a liberal cause.”32 He said, “It’s damaging to think about the political issues and not the work.”33 He circulated his own petition in support of The Nigger Drawings, free expression, and full funding for Artists Space. Laurie Anderson, Rosalind Krauss, and Roberta Smith signed on.
In an Art in America piece, Smith gave the art a favorable review. She wrote that Donald’s critics seemed to have an unsophisticated understanding of aesthetics. Worse, she said, they misunderstood artistic freedom.
“Certain opponents of the work’s title have objected to its use by a ‘white artist’ in reference to ‘abstractions,’” she wrote, “suggesting that it might have been all right for a black artist to have used it for nonabstract work. It is peculiar to declare a word off-limits and even more peculiar to declare it off-limits to some people and some work and not others. Making something taboo is, among other things, to ask that the taboo be broken.”34
But the meaning of the words and the work, Donald’s critics insisted, went beyond what was in the frames. “The decline of the civil rights movement in the 1970s has been accompanied by a resurgence of both covert and explicit racism,” the art critic Alan Wallach wrote. “The style of our age is what the French unabashedly call ‘le style retro’—a style with built-in nostalgia for the 1940s when whites ruled the world and blacks were kept in line with racist violence.”35
The stakes were not only aesthetic, they argued, but structural. Their protest was about misrepresentation and lack of representation. The art historian Carol Duncan wrote, “This demonstration is about whose images become visible, not the freedom to make images.”36 Less than 4 percent of artists who had shown at Artists Space were Black.37 A survey of forty of the city’s most important galleries found that only 27 percent of the represented artists were women, 3 percent Asian, and 2 percent Hispanic. Less than 1 percent were Black.38
Artists of color were showing on the periphery of the art world: Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown on West 57th Street, Joe Overstreet’s Kenkeleba House on the Lower East Side, Basement Workshop in Chinatown and Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio in Spanish Harlem and the Studio Museum in Harlem. “The attitude was, ‘Let’s just do it ourselves,’” said Janet Henry. “The other part of that was white artists were saying, ‘You don’t belong down here anyway.’” Winer admitted to Goldstein that she felt unqualified to curate a show of artists of color at Artists Space.39
Given how deeply so many of the principals on both sides knew each other, the fight had become personal. “He wants intimacy,” Howardena Pindell said of Donald. “I don’t want to give him intimacy.” She might have also been feeling the same about Winer.
Here at the far edge of mass consciousness, the dispute unraveled like a family clash—innocence and intimacy lost, small slights and major injustices accumulating unredressed, the staking of ground and the planting of flags, the messy collision of grand histories. No one could imagine how portentous it all would be in the end.
A RACE CONVERSATION, PART 2
In the handful of black-and-white pictures of the event that remain they appear, Black and white, sitting on the floor in a circle—fixed and intent and listening as if they are still connected by their debts to each other. But on the drugstore cassette of the event, their voices can be heard flaring, coarse and outraged.
The ballpoint scrawl on the tape label reads “Tape of Protest at Artists Space.” It is somehow appropriate that this cassette and these pictures, kept by the Black artist and filmmaker Camille Billops, are incomplete, at best impressionistic.40 Sometimes when Americans talk about race the images and the words refuse to correspond. History makes us heedless. Desire makes us deaf.
The moment is Saturday, April 21, 1979. In three years, downtown will become mythic Downtown, the sounds of hip-hop in strobing, miscegenating dance clubs that kiss the morning. But that point lies beyond the horizon, yet unimaginable.
Two weeks before, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition had sent Artists Space a telegram announcing their intention to visit the gallery the following Saturday. They planned to conduct an “evaluation tour,” the kind of protest that Faith Ringgold and Tom Lloyd had brought to the MOMA in 1969. Winer and the staff panicked. They sought counsel from board members. They sent unanswered telegrams to the Coalition begging for explanations. Finally Winer decided to lock the doors and stay home.
On the cold, rainy morning of April 14, the Coalition had arrived, choked themselves into the small lobby, and realized no one would be answering their door buzz. They moved out to the rain-drizzled street and the gathered media. Under a banner that read “Black Artists Locked Out of Artists Space,” Benny Andrews, who had been born to a Georgia sharecropper, told the crowd, “I came from the South, where ‘nigger’ was burned into the skins of people who were lynched.”41
So on the twenty-first, a few dozen protesters filed into the Artists Space gallery and arranged themselves in a circle on the floor. The staffers, reluctant and discomposed, followed Bob Blackburn, a former Artists Space board member and a Black artist who had signed on to the protest, into the gallery. There were graying men and young women, a mother with a baby, a few downtown journalists. Some supporters of Donald had arrived, too.
On the cassette, some voices are identifiable. Many more have been rendered faceless and nameless by time.
Blackburn opens the meeting by addressing Winer. “This is not an attack on Helene,” he begins, in the etiquette of confrontation. He acknowledges that as a former board member, he should have remained more involved with Artists Space. But
why, he wants to know, did she lock out the demonstrators the previous week?
Winer replies, “We couldn’t get any answers from members of the Coalition as to the nature of the event.”
“Why,” Blackburn asks, “would a gallery like this fear people like us so much that they would think we would do something?”
And then, from the circle: Why wasn’t there an apology? Artists Space is an alternative space. You have a larger responsibility not just to this one artist but to the community. Do you show other Africans’ work? Do you object to our objecting to this?
Ragland Watkins wedges in a question: “What is the nature of the complaints?”
It wasn’t so many years ago that they used to lynch niggers and that was considered OK. Would you have done a Kike show? How about the “Kike Drawings”? Is this indicative of the gallery’s attitude toward minority artists?
As Winer answers the crowd quiets. “Well, it is indicative of our policy toward censorship and control of an artist’s work and it certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with our exhibition policy in terms of who we show. If there’s a particular show, we treat it the way we treat every exhibition that occurs here.”
Pindell murmurs. Camille Billops is in disbelief. “You’re not free to have a ‘Kike Drawings,’” she shouts. “Artists are free to do anything in their studio but you know you can’t do that with public funds because they come down on you. You just try to do that. You’re full of shit. You know it. You know what power is.”
“We did issue an apology,” says Winer. “Apparently we made a mistake in a certain sense which was not anticipating what the response would be or how the feelings were. I’m saying that that is what is ignorance on my part or stupidity or a variety of things that you could call it, not to know what that would mean.”
Her voice now wobbles with doubt, as if she has begun checking out of the conversation. The baby wails. The clamor rises. Finally the noise on the cassette recedes, clarifies into two voices—Winer’s and a man’s, white and Black.