Black Image Production: Moving Toward Art and Art Histories

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBlack Image Production: Moving Toward Art and Art HistoriesRomi CrawfordRomi Crawford Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTelling OfThe project here is to resituate and also find place for a cache of images that come from a black photographer’s archive, that of Karega Kofi Moyo. Moyo is a Chicago-based photo artist who made work during a pivotal period for black liberation and cultural production in Chicago, between 1968 and 1978. The Moyo repository is replete with images of black intellectual, social, and cultural life, significant for their historical import but also noteworthy art historically.Three genres of black cultural production in the 1960s and ‘70s are registered in this volume of Portable Gray, notably through black image production, that is, the committed, professional imaging of and by black people. The photographic images selected from Moyo’s archive speak to 1) social and political agency, 2) education, and 3) art, as well as the insistent blur of these formations. The specific foci, or the pertinent narratives assembled here for Portable Gray include scenes of “Afrikan Liberation Day” in 1973; Kwame Ture at Communiversity in 1970; and Festac ‘77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in 1977.In effect, these particular images are useful for their “set (me) off” points.1 They have emotional and formal qualities that help initiate a closer investigation into black cultural productivity on Chicago’s South Side in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the ways or modes of collectivizing that supported such productivity during this era. Some of the images include decipherable and enticing personages, recognized Chicago cultural workers, such as Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), the founder of Third World Press; writer Useni Perkins; and activist/comedian Dick Gregory, all leading a procession through the streets on “Afrikan Liberation Day.” Similarly, Kwame Ture, otherwise known as Stokely Carmichael, one of the stand-out black social organizers of the ‘60s, digs into his lesson and message at the blackboard of a Communiversity classroom. The images also include lesser-known persons who comprised an attentive, ready, wide awake (even pre-woke) black populace. Researching and learning more about these specific occurrences and events, as well as those known and unknown who participated in them, is an aspect of this pursuit. Equally, if not more, compelling is the opportunity to re-up the commitment to vigorously produce in the realms signaled in Moyo’s images, including art, education, and politics.1. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida describes the search for knowing what it is in certain photographs that “sets me off.” See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) p. 19.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointTelling OnMoyo’s archive then is more than an object of inquiry to parse for its varied histories. It is also, on various levels, instructive. It tells of black social, political, and cultural life in Chicago in the ‘60s and ‘70s and, given the circumstances of this and other black photographic archives’ near loss, it also tells on black social, entrepreneurial, and cultural subsistence. In short, the project of moving these images beyond their boxed state and further out into the world brims with nostalgia for the black liberation era and teems with (loving) critique. Accordingly, through varied strategies (including writing, theater, and visual arts), the Moyo photographs and the research that attends to them will be deployed to tell of and also tell on the Chicago histories that it brings to light.One such strategy is new art making which negotiates the past and present generation’s successes. This volume of Portable Gray includes petit artworks by Theaster Gates which quietly maintain and also question the black liberation moment revealed in Moyo’s images. Rather than work into and alter the images themselves, Gates prints the gift works from his Black Madonna Press on the South Side of Chicago. It is an intervention that aligns with the ‘60s endeavor of (some) black artists to procure black institutional and economic support. It also critiques the ongoing problem of black involvement and agency at the site of production. It doesn’t resolve but nudges a solve for and disentanglement from this ongoing dilemma. Gates’s work in the end is as artist and also as the manufacturer—a role he willingly assumes given that the self-sufficiency revealed in Moyo’s images implies and instructs around self-sufficiency and solvency in all areas, from business to art making.22. Haki Madhubuti, pictured center in the “Afrikan Liberation Day” image, founded Third World Press to publish black writers, for example.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointA basic notation below of the Moyo images also portends another eventual strategy, dramatic in nature, for telling on, or beyond the facts, probing into the emotional grit, of the “Afrikan Liberation Day,” Communiversity, and Festac ‘77 histories.Act 1“Afrikan Liberation Day”1973On a Chicago streetHaki Madhubuti, Useni Perkins, Dick Gregory, and other black peopleAct 2“Kwame Ture at Communiversity”1970Audience of attentive young peopleAct 3“Festac ‘77”Lagos, NigeriaOpening processionFrom the editors In this edition of Portable Gray, Theaster Gates and Romi Crawford are working with a total of four images created in the early 1970s by Karega Kofi Moyo. One image is incorporated as a special edition print produced by Theaster Gates’s Black Madonna Press. The other three images serve as the three different covers for this issue. In each case, the images not used for the cover make up the suite of images accompanying Crawford’s essay, where you will also find a reference image of the cover photo.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Portable Gray Volume 2, Number 2Fall 2019 Published for the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707155 Views: 233 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.