Black Arts Movement
also: BAM
The Black Arts Movement was the African American cultural explosion that grew from the civil rights and Black Power struggles, roughly 1965-1975. Its founder is usually reckoned to be the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, who opened the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem in 1965 after the assassination of Malcolm X; Larry Neal called the movement 'the aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power.' Across the country - Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, the Bay Area - poets, dramatists, painters and printers built their own theatres, journals and presses, from Dudley Randall's Broadside Press to the National Black Theatre. The work was deliberately popular and political: performed poetry, community murals such as Chicago's Wall of Respect (1967), and a 'Black aesthetic' that put Black experience at the centre of art.
Defining characteristics
- Verse built for performance - anthems, chants and political slogans spoken to a crowd
- Bold, high-contrast graphic design in posters, journals and broadsides
- Community murals celebrating Black heroes and everyday life on neighborhood walls
- Afrocentric iconography drawing on African art, textile and symbol
- Direct, vernacular language rejecting Eurocentric polish and 'art for art's sake'
Key figures
- Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) — Poet-playwright who founded the movement and its Harlem theatre school
- Larry Neal (1937-1996) — Theorist who named the movement the 'aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power'
- Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024) — Poet whose readings became rallying events of the movement
- Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) — Poet whose work bridged the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts
- Dudley Randall (1914-2000) — Publisher of Broadside Press, the movement's key poetry imprint
Example works
- Black Art — Amiri Baraka (1966)
- The Revolutionary Theatre — Amiri Baraka (1965)
- Wall of Respect — OBAC Visual Arts Workshop (1967)
Sources
- Black Arts Movement - Wikipedia encyclopedia