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Kind of Blue: Benny Andrews. Emilio Cruz, Earle M. Pilgrim and Bob Thompson

Transcript of Panel at Northeastern University

By: - Jan 23, 2025

In 1986 I organized an exhibition of four African American artists who lived and worked in Provincetown. I was given the opportunity by Ellen O’Donnell, then the director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

That fall my exhibition, Kind of Blue, traveled to the gallery of Northeastern University at the invitation of fine arts professor Mira Cantor. In Boston there was a panel discussion chaired by Edmund Barry Gaither, then the director of the National Center for African American Artists and an adjunct curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to myself, there were two other panelists. Patricia Hills was then a professor of art history at Boston University. She has long championed issues of social justice and wrote a monograph and curated an exhibition of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Dana Chandler is an artist and activist. His actions impacted changes at the MFA. Several years ago, one of his major works was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection. In 1974, he founded the seminal African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP) at Northeastern University.

Judith Wilson, then working on a dissertation on Bob Thompson, traveled from New Haven to attend and record the panel. With Thelma Golden, she was later co-curator of the Bob Thompson exhibition mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Two cassettes of that recording were among papers Wilson donated to the Archives of American Art. They were transcribed by the Lily and Earle Pilgrim Foundation through the initiative of its director, Peter Stebbins. I edited the following transcript for clarity and continuity. It was judiciously abridged.

Edmund Barry Gaither I think the first order of business would be if Charles could share with us his thinking in putting together the show, and his vision of its impact, and what his intentions were. So, you’ll share that with us, Charles.

Charles Giuliano This exhibition started in 1968, and I was reminded of that in a very curious way by Judith Wilson, who is in the process of researching a doctoral dissertation on Bob Thompson for Yale. She had found or resurrected two articles which I wrote in 1968. I prevailed on her to send them back to me and she kindly did so. I’m stunned, amused, and amazed at what I had to say about Bob Thompson.

I did two versions of Bob Thompson: A straight version for Arts Magazine, that has stood up fairly well, and pretty well identified what I felt then and now. In Avatar I wrote a gonzo journalism version of Thompson. It was in the fledgling stages of my career as a journalist.

In New York I knew Earle Pilgrim. He had been a good friend who, interestingly enough, shows up as an image in this show of Bill Cardoso. He (Cardoso) is considered to be one of America’s premier gonzo journalists, and a former editor of Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Bill told me about Earle as an important and dynamic person in the Boston subculture of the 1960s. He had a loft on South Street in the Financial District of Boston. He built sets. He designed costumes. Earle produced things that we would today identify as performances or happenings. He did a kind of art that would later be called psychedelic art. He made things with blacklight and Day Glo. He was an influence on the thinking of Tim Leary, who was then ingesting psychedelic substances. Leary used to come down and hang out at Earle Pilgrim’s studio. His wife, Lily, recalled that they used to refer to Leary as The Professor. You know, “Here comes The Prof.” And they would be going about their activities. Earle, by the way, never experimented with psychedelic drugs—I wanted to make that very clear—but Leary felt that Earle was a naturally psychedelic person.

Earle was enormously self-destructive and so, very little of the work has survived. What’s left is the collection of his widow in Washington, D.C. They moved a lot. It was a special pleasure to be able to bring his work to this exhibition because he’s an artist that basically nobody knew about, who was really an important presence for that generation of Black artists in Boston

(In the 1950s Earle had a small jewelry shop in Provincetown. He showed the work of young artists, including Lester Johnson and Alan Kaprow. When Earle gave up the shop it became the space of the formidable Sun Gallery. Earle studied with Henry Hensche whose approach is evident in works from the Provincetown years in the 1950s. In 2024 the paintings were shown, with selections of jewelry and metal work at in Truro Public Library.)

Benny Andrews I met a couple summers ago in Provincetown. We were both houseguests for a weekend at the home of Rhoda and Will Rossmore in Provincetown, and I immediately took a liking to Benny. He’s a forthright, amusing and witty, highly opinionated, extremely controversial, pungent artist. He’s a very flavorful individual in every sense. I think that his work has a kind of dynamism, power, and intensity. Benny is nationally known and respected as an arts administrator and a former visual arts coordinator for the National Council of the Arts and Humanities.

The sense you’re getting here–is a show of Black art, or Afro-American art that is different. There’s much less of the presence of the social and political context, and, much more of what I would call personal, visionary, or humanist context. One sees that evidently, particularly in the work of Bob Thompson, who I would describe as a visionary artist, and one of the greatest humanist visionary painters of his generation in American art. I think that he ranks with the very best figurative artists of the late ’50s and 1960s.

His work really took two tacks. I’m sure Judith Wilson has some things that she could add to this. There are two main directions in his work. One aspect would be inspired by European painting, and he spent a lot of time in Europe, in museums, looking at Poussin and the Old Masters, and then deriving variations of that. Also, in this exhibition you see another kind of personal, private symbolism. Images coming from Dante’s Inferno and that kind of thing that are more self-generated and derived. This is really the direction that we see in the work of Emilio Cruz, who has taken this kind of personal symbolism and expanded it. Emilio and Bob Thompson were close friends. The influence between them is direct and evident, and in that sense, it’s nice to bring them together in this show. Emilio represents the kind of continuation of that idea, right up into the present time.

EBG I will ask Ms. Wilson if she will agree to come in, perhaps, at a slightly later point. 

Let’s step backwards a little bit from your description of how this particular group of four artists came to be in this show, and to pose a broader question, which I would like both Dana and Pat to comment on, which I may also comment on. It’s one which really seeks to get a fuller sense of the larger context in which Black American artists were shaped. That will apply for this group of artists, as for many other artists, even though the particular experiences vary widely. There are elements of commonality that have to do with roots of Black American experience, and the kinds of manifestations in art that it’s taken. So, I would invite a couple of quite broad comments, just a sense of the source of these kinds of works in historical terms.

Dana Chandler You want a historical dissertation on that particular subject from me?

EBG Well, you have actually two things that make you good for this. One is you can speak, to some degree, from your own experience. It’s not unrelated, even though it’s a slightly later generation of people. But also, you have been very involved with the community of artists nationally over the last decade and a half, and you’ve distilled from that some salient observations, and we’ll hear them now.

DC The catchword, I guess, these days in terms of being active, is being proactive. It’s proactive, and one doesn’t react to what is going on around them. I would say that much of what has occurred in African American art over the last 25 years has been reactive rather than proactive in terms of those artists who spoke socially about the kinds of things which were happening to African American people in America. Certainly, in my own work, that has been my direction, and still is my direction, largely, to be more reactive to the kinds of oppression that one finds still in the United States and funny little acts of racism which occur every day to African American people.

There are some things which were occurring lately which make me feel really good about what’s the result of all of that striving of so many people who have been able, I think is the word—not allowed, but more able—to come to intellectual and, what’s the word I’m looking for, skills, maturity, I guess. An example of that was that on my way here I had the occasion to see Don Still, who was standing in front of a new Ruggles Street T extension. And it just amazed me and thrilled me to see so large an example of the works and the creativity of an African American architect. Clearly during the ’50s and the ’60s one could not expect any of those kinds of things to happen, or for Blacks to take those kinds of positions in development of architecture in the United States.

So, it was also true that one could not expect to see the works of African American artists anywhere in the museums and galleries of American, unless perhaps they were part of a collection, and then only if the works were not necessarily reflective of the Black experience. I mean, you might see them appearing in an exhibition. I’m particularly speaking to a print exhibition that was in the Museum of Fine Arts in the ’60s, some years back, with both Calvin Burnett and John Wilson pieces. I’m really not sure how I want to comment on this exhibition, except to say that I’m delighted to see the works of people I don’t know. I don’t know Earle Pilgrim’s work, and I don’t know very much about Thompson’s work, and so it’s exciting for me to see so many examples of their works which I have never seen before. And I certainly don’t know any of the recent works of Emilio Cruz. And they’re—to me, they’re quite astounding. I’m very happy and pleased to see them.

Patricia Hills Well, first of all, Charles is to be commended for actually putting together a very exciting show. When he asked me to be on the panel, he assured me that there wasn’t going to be any political art, as if he automatically assumed that I would expect more overtly political art. I think you’ve done a rather daring thing to, in a sense, not emphasize the overtly political art of many Black artists. I mean, it’s almost as if we’ve sort of gone full circle, and that we went through a phase where—I mean, “we”, I mean the art world; I mean the sort of visible art magazine, art world; I don’t mean real art world, which consists of a lot of artists, but the sort of art world of the art magazines and the major galleries. We went through a period where you saw no Black artists, and then in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, artists were making demands of the institutions to be shown. A lot of the art that was expected of Black artists was art that was very angry. And there was a lot of really good angry art.

DC I’ve seen a lot of really pungent, angry work that he has done. And then there was a period—and I think that the Women’s Movement used this phrase: the personal is the political. And I think what you see—at least what I get from these kinds of works—is that maybe that phrase, “the personal is the political,” can be applied to what’s going on here, that these are, in many ways, personal statements. But I wouldn’t say that the political is really removed from them, and I think that the question of what is the relevancy of that phrase, “the personal is the political,” in terms of this kind of art, and what is the element of politics in works like this. I maybe, I can certainly think of Benny Andrews where, you have one called Oppression, which I think is very obviously making a political statement about the oppression of a man who is wounded, with a chain over there on the side. The figure back there called Ecstasy, with the child that’s being born, that one might be able to maybe read something into it. There’s something rather disturbing as a image of that baby that’s being birthed, perhaps, that doesn’t have any legs, you know. It’s sort of truncated. I mean, one can read a certain amount of symbolism into them. I think that that’s the kind of the question.

In Cruz’s work, you have images that kind of come out at you, that relate, at least in our minds, to all kinds of early Northwest Indian art, and then also the eagle. Now, the eagle, of course, is an image that is—relates not only to Northwest Indian art, but also one thinks of the bald eagle as sort of America. Again, I think maybe you have to sort of unravel these pictures, and maybe not put too much—I mean, not read too much into them. But there are other qualities. I mean, certainly they share a lot of qualities, but they have a great number of differences.

EBG Now I get to comment before posing the next question. I think that this particular set of works allow us to pose a question that really has to do with existential freedom, which is ultimate personal decision-making. I think that, when we look at artistic production, we’re looking at at least three elements that are accounted for in one wise or another, not necessarily in a fixed relationship one to the other. They are the context in which things happen, and it’s the context which is the essential forge, as an external pressure on the shaping of American experience, and Black American experience within American experience. I think it’s impossible to be born black in America, and to be socialized in America, and be black and not know it. And it is not newly that way; it has been that way for a long time. So, I think the concept of identity, in fundamental racial terms, is virtually a foregone in the context of American experience.

The next consideration becomes what’s done with that. What’s done with it really has to do with the arena of personal decision-making, with how the individual forms a self in dialogue with the context. And it’s that formation of self, and the struggle to form a self in a shifting set of circumstances, that is, in a certain sense, the catalyst for creative activity, not just in the arts but in music and any area that you find yourself directed towards.

I think the third factor is that there are preexisting technologies and traditions in the arts. These men have taken, appropriated to themselves, technologies for making pictures, which already were there before, whether it’s canvas and brush, or, in the case of Benny, who has been more inventive, collage techniques, still utilizing approaches to existing materials.

So, I tend to look at the show and to say, what does it tell us about how, three different—four different, men, in slightly different contexts, but with a shared root context, responded to the problem of becoming themselves, where they were. For some people, like Benny, the process of being self is an actively political process, and Benny organizes other artists. Benny challenges things straight ahead. Benny works with themes that are charged themes, with sexism, racism, militarism, with the great isms of our times, and that is a mode of involvement which he has both manifested in his public person and expressed in, in his artistic person.

It seems to me that in the case of Bob Thompson, that he has a closer parallel to what a number of Black writers and musicians have done, which is to, in a certain sense, create an identity that belongs to a smaller concentric circle, to a kind of circle of people of very similar ideas and passions.

And in your discussion of Pilgrim, and we’re talking about this world in which Tim Leary came, it’s a little bit an ultimate kind of world that’s created, in which you can define, on personality, a reality which is within the larger one, but not entirely dictated from the larger one.

So, I think in that context you’re looking at very personal resolutions that are expressed, more essentially in the person as artist, than the person as politician. I don’t, myself, have a fear of mentioning politics, because I think to be alive is to be political, and we are all involved in promoting one thing or another, if nothing more than ourselves, as a condition of terms of survival. So, we’re all involved in prejudice in things, in ways that are affirmative to us. So I think that that kind of issue is also, uh, raised, and in the case of Mr. Pilgrim’s work, I really don’t know him, and I’m grateful to be introduced to him, because I’m, of course, interested to know everybody who belongs to the story, and not knowing him before, and, in fact, not having encountered in Boston, among the artists whom I know very well, anyone else who has mentioned him, he comes like a vision, that was both there and not there in the same setting at the same time, and that is itself worth a little bit of thought and exploration, because Boston is not a large city and is not a large community of people involved in things.

The work of Emilio’s, which I actually knew best, were the works similar to the ones that I presented in 1970, which were less profoundly expressive than these. They were more controlled works. In fact, I think that the works which I showed in ’70 were large, hard-edged works, and very precise. They were not this gutsy work. In this work, the two things that stood out to me were, one, that they have an immense vigor in the surface, in the actual working of the medium, in the turn of the material, and the globs of the color, which I take to be part of the kind of passion that he himself has. So, I take it to be a very directly expressive—you might say a mode of expression of internal energy. The iconography, the symbols, are interesting to me, but I have not studied them sufficiently that I would assert what they mean. I have a response to them, on what they present. The response to the eagle, I think, is inescapable. I don’t think it’s very possible to encounter, such a brave eagle without it, being interpreted to reference to American experience. So, I think that unless Emilio’s saying you absolutely got the wrong thing, I would stand by that.

Well, you can’t always believe what artists say, anyhow, you know. The first thing you have to learn is to always take what artists say with a grain of salt, because if there’s anything that speaking about yourself has built into it, it’s a certain personal vision of the best light in which you ought to be seen, which is not always—not the job of the critic. The job of the critic is really to try to see in a larger light, and to be informed by the thought of the artist, but not governed by it. The second work, which has the Pacific Northwest images in it, calls to my mind the rather considerable interest in ritual that has been a large feature for a number of American artists over what is now at least a half decade, both from, performance arts people, who want to recreate rituals, and other people who want to create masks of various sorts. And I think that interest is related to spiritual vacuum, I mean, at a larger level, because I think there is a general feeling in American life that we don’t always touch base with the heart of things, and still a certain tendency to think that other people, who are especially non-Western, have done better at it than we have. It remains to be seen if that’s true. They certainly haven’t made any atomic bombs to get rid of us.

PH As you were describing these four men, what I’m hearing, although you’re not using these words, is that somehow you don’t consider them, quote, “mainstream,” end quote. Maybe it’s a word that’s not terribly relevant, but on the other hand that’s what I’m sort of getting from what you’re saying, that Thompson is working in smaller and smaller concentric circles, a sense of personality. What I’m hearing is that you’re saying that they’re not mainstream, and does that—is that what you’re saying?

EBG Well, no, that is not what I’m saying. I’ll respond, because it’s a nice question. No, it is not what I mean. I, I don’t generally refer to mainstream. I don’t think that it’s a particularly meaningful context. (break in audio) one and the same as the sum of what is creatively vital and important at any particular point. So, I wouldn’t, have raised it in terms of the mainstream. I would talk about the works in two ways. One, I think that people do, in fact, belong to communities that ultimately support them, and that are small. So, to belong to a community that is a community of artists, let’s say, which is a necessarily small community, does not reduce you or take you out of anything; it merely says that there is a community of substance based around some idea or motivation or set of experiences that people pull together around, and I think that that is a vitalizing factor. 

The question of mainstream, I think, does not matter so much, because I can’t imagine who would want to think of his work or her work as secondary. The fact of producing the work and putting it forward is the affirmation of the work as having a central value that then may not be stratified. So, I would reject thinking of works in terms of mainstream and not mainstream, and consider those as unfortunate devices that have done lots of damage to the contemporary discussion, not only of work of Black American artists but of the work of any artists who have not found themselves at the top of discussion and dominating the marketplace.

CG I’m interested in the notion you brought up about subcultures, or cultures within cultures, and your whole point about personal decision making, and how that relates to these artists. When you said that you feel that you have kept up on who’s who in Boston, in terms of the Black art community, and that—

EBG I said I try to.

CG Or you try to, and then everyone you talk to, everyone has said that they didn’t know Earle Pilgrim. That raises an interesting point, because Earle was a celebrity in Boston, an absolute celebrity, but he was in a subculture that was not necessarily the main body of what you would consider the Black community. Bob Thompson and Earle Pilgrim would be examples of Black artists who were really in the kind of subculture we call a hipster jazz literary subculture, in the sense that I think it’s very important to realize that Bob Thompson’s world was almost fluidly equally a jazz world and an art world; and the jazz world was not talking to the art world; and the art world is not talking to the jazz world. They’re two entirely separate entities.

And one of the things that are quite amazing is that there has always been a lot of racial contact, interaction and crossover in the jazz world. I grew up in Boston going to jazz nightclubs, and having integrated experiences in a city that is notorious for its racism, and yet, if you went to Storyville, a diverse audience came to hear the music. My uncle took me to see Duke Ellington when I was 16 years-of-age, and I remember that room in the old Copley Plaza Hotel that was painted in black, brown, and beige, which is the theme of a very famous composition by Ellington. They had black waitresses and white waitresses, black couples and white couples, as well as interracial couples, and that was something that was very striking, and natural if you were involved in the jazz world, as opposed to the art world, which had a huge rift between the white art world and the Black art world, which had not had any confluence or crossover at all.

Bob Thompson was such a celebrity in the jazz world, that when he died, isn’t it true that albums were dedicated to him, and, and record jacket covers? By the same token, the artists that were part of his entourage were not capable of making the crossover into his jazz world. It was almost a schizophrenia of working in two worlds. One world was the drug hipster subculture world of musicians. If you see that wonderful painting in the Wadsworth Athenaeum Garden of Music, which has the whole cast of characters in there —John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden and, different kinds of people. People in the jazz world weren’t looking so much at color of skin. Charlie Haden, (a white bass player) for instance, was in that painting. He was a friend of Bob Thompson’s, and an intimate friend of Jackie McLean. They were part of the bebop culture.

A play that encapsulated that feeling for me wonderfully was Jack Gelber’s play at the Living Theatre in the 1960s, a play called The Connection. It was all about that kind of subculture. So, I’m not surprised that you’re not aware of Earle in that sense, because Earle’s world was not the world of the Black community or the White community. 

Benny Andrews commented to me this summer that he felt that artists like Earle Pilgrim and Bob Thompson, Sam Gilliam, and Ellen Banks, a Black artist here in Boston, that those artists have suffered for the fact that their work was not identifiably Black. Bob Thompson’s work was not identifiably Black art during the social protests of the 1960s. And it’s very interesting that you did not put Bob Thompson in your MFA show in 1970. (Gaither deaccessioned the one Thompson painting Nativity in his museum’s collection, as I found out when requesting a loan for Kind of Blue.) What we have here is an interesting question of: What is Black art? Is Sam Gilliam (an abstract artist) Black art? Is Bob Thompson Black art? Is Emilio Cruz Black art? is Earle Pilgrim Black art?

EBG That certainly is a question, but I think that you, misframe it a little bit. The comment that you made, vis-a-vis, the difference between the jazz world and the art world. I think that the difference is really very—the structural difference, which is not to say all of the elaborations, but the structural difference, I don’t think it’s too hard to put a finger on. The structural difference was that in the visual arts world there were not institutions giving a focus to the people who were working. So they were mainly working as individuals where they could find an alliance with a particular supporter, and then they were with that supporter, and they were introduced into that supporter’s circle. And people were trying to find a gallery, hit or miss, on various terms, some fair and some quite compromised. But essentially, they were working more as individuals in a sort of linear way.

If you looked at, in Boston, a career like that of, for example, John Wilson’s career, which is a career starting in the beginning of the ’40s, I think you would tend to see that it goes that way, and the absence of an institutional support to create a forum that would have pulled together groups of people was the central absence. In the case of the jazz world, it is also a commercial world. It’s pulled together around the nightspot where the event happens and the money is made, and much of it spent. So, in a certain sense, it is its own patronage, and that’s the difference. The difference is a question of patronage—because patronage is fundamental to what things belong to. Jazz is entertainment. Well, that it’s entertainment is fine, but, it’s commercial.

DC You go where you get fed. Okay, now let me explain what I mean by that. If you’re a visual artist, and your ego is such that you want what you do to be seen, then there are two determinations that you make: Either you make a world where you get fed, or you go where you get fed. And if you go where you get fed, then very largely what you will do will reflect the world in which you travel. And if the world in which you travel has institutions that will allow your work to be seen, then perhaps you will create things that you think will be acceptable to the world that will allow your things to be seen.

If, however, your ego is such where you do not intend to create works that will reflect the world in which you travel that will allow you to get fed, then maybe you have to work on creating that world. Maybe you have to struggle and strive and push and challenge everything that goes on.

I think that Benny belongs to the category of people who created a world in which he could be fed. And I cannot speak to the other people, because I don’t know enough about their works to comment on that, but I do know that an example of what I’m talking about sits presently over in the Museum of Fine Arts, and is called Boston Collects. And when you wander through that exhibition, you don’t see the works of a large number of African American artists. I think there’s one. There’s one piece by an African American. I’m trying to remember the man’s name now. He recently had a very excellent article in the Globe. He usually painted in black and white, does black and white paintings. But that’s not the point that I’m trying to get at. What I’m trying to get at is that you don’t find Benny Andrews as part of a collection. These are not just Boston painters. These are painters that have been collected nationwide, and you don’t find Emilio Cruz’s work, and you don’t find Bob Thompson’s work, and you don’t find a number of other people’s work, and that may be a reflection of the people who curated the show; it may be a reflection of a lot of things.

But the point that I’m trying to get to is that artists, like most other people, want to be recognized for that which they do. And if you take a particular tack in your work, which talks about reflecting the imagery of a people who have never been, and are not in the near future likely to be, in the economic position where they can create the institutions where the things that speak to their own culture can come about in a large and visible way for the entire community, then you go somewhere else with your thing. And what I’m seeing a lot of what African American artists do is go somewhere else with their thing. I think of people like (Jean Michel) Basquiat and some other folks whose work I don’t think reflect the Black American experience, but do reflect a larger experience, and I’m not really sure whether that larger experience is real or contrived, you know, to fit or suit whatever is necessary to get food in one’s mouth.

EBG What is your response to artists like Sam Gilliam or Ellen Banks, vis-a-vis the question of—Black artists?

DC I think I took some umbrage at the statement that they suffered because of their choice to not really work in a Black American vernacular. That’s what I heard.

EBG Bear in mind that I’m quoting Benny Andrews.

DC Fine, and I still take umbrage. I take umbrage to the statement.

EBG I think—I think that he meant in the sense of whether he was (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)—

DC What I’m saying is that we all suffer, and artists in general in this country suffer because this is not a country that’s about art, you know, at least not for anything that I have seen. I think it’s a country that uses art for one purpose or another, as decoration, or to make people look good, but I don’t see it as being as important as it being an integral part of the cultures out of which it comes, like in Africa and, as a matter of fact, in Europe and places like that. So, I think everybody suffers when they choose visual arts as a field, generally speaking, and I think that some people suffer more than others, and I know, in terms of, of noting artists trying to survive off their own work, I note the Black American artist has suffered more than most. I note that the Black woman artist has suffered more than most women artists, and they’re still suffering in terms of the whole idea of finding their work acceptable so that it comes into the purview of the whole American economic thing. I guess what it really boils down to is that, while I can feel great delight at seeing an exhibition of works such as one sees here, one knows that it is an exhibition of the works of Black artists, and one also knows that we cannot expect to see it as part of what the mainstream is, which, of course, is what exactly is over at the Museum of Fine Arts right now. That is the mainstream. And the mainstream, that word really connotes just one thing: acceptable. Okay? And, we have not managed—if we have an interest, which I don’t, in becoming acceptable in the larger American context. And that’s really what I’m commenting on.

PH I just want to be clear. You’re choosing to be outside. That’s what you’re saying? Outside of a group, mainstream, i.e. the show of contemporary art, at the, MFA. Choosing?

DC No, I’m not choosing to be outside. I just don’t see how many of us will get inside without pushing through.

PH Well, what about the word “compromise”? I mean, it’s not just. You know, one goes where there’s something to eat. You made the comment that you go where you get nourished, that you can get food, you know, where you can get fed, where you make a world, where you can get seen. I mean, isn’t there a time when one chooses not to eat in order to make certain statements.

DC I think it’s exactly what artists have done, and I’m particularly speaking of artists of color, who have chosen not to eat very often in order to make the kind of statements we thought were pertinent to what was going on around us, because we’re artists, so artists are largely affected by what’s going on around them, and often react proactively, and interact, as well. Most of the artists I know who work in a social vein don’t only just do social things, okay, and have found that whether or not they do social things, of course, or things which fit into the larger American picture, still find themselves in the same position. I don’t see how artists who have done things which are socially relevant have done any worse or better than artists who have not. You know, I just haven’t seen it yet.

EBG Yeah, you know, vis-a-vis this business of the mainstream, that two really big points I think ought to be made, because it can be a recycling discussion, but it’s not really useful. From my point of view, the fundamental obligation of an artist in shaping creative expression is to be personally honest, and to feel what is to be said. If nothing is felt, there’s nothing vital that’s going to be said. What is felt is not the function, at least, I don’t think should be the function, of a calculation of how to be viable, in one place. I think there has to be some internal strength and reason and community. I think when that’s missing; you experience it at missing in the work that is finally entered. So, I think that there’s a passion that is fundamental, and that relates to the observation I made at the beginning about existential freedom, because you cannot become your own person, and have your own voice, and put something out that people can respond to as real, unless it, in fact is real, and comes from within. That is a separate issue than the issue of mainstream.

The issue of mainstream belongs to the world of curators and critics and journalists and writers and galleries. It belongs to the world that is about the thing and not the thing itself. It is a world that is orchestrated, that is like any market, an orchestrated item. So, to work with a sense of how to belong to the mainstream, I think from the point of view of where the artist must come from, is a wrong position. I think the obligation falls to those of us who don’t necessarily produce art, but are in the business of talking about it and presenting it, to try to put forth the visions of what we believe are the works that are important to be seen, and to try to generate the maximum impact that those can generate, and try to demolish the tendency to close the doors of what things are appropriate at particular points in time, and who is valid and who is invalid. Those are not meaningful notions, and if you accept them as categories, you accept having a great uphill struggle, which is the acceptable, and then having everybody else in some kind of basement. And whoever has made a valid creative statement belongs to this level, no matter whether a critic says so or not, no matter whether a particular institution puts them there or not. They belong there, because they spoke truthfully. They found the right container for the thing contained, which is the job of the artist: to make the picture right to contain what it has to contain. And when we see it, we will have a dialogue with it. The language around the art, which is—I mean, the language is, in a certain sense, almost superfluous.

I remember when I was in graduate school, if I can be tolerated one short story, I had to do a paper on criticism. And I think we got issued an ashtray, a quite simple little glass ashtray, like millions from all over the place. Well, you could write 12 pages about it. All you had to do was posit a starting point, and make it. It’s like law: it doesn’t have to do with the correctness. You posit a position, and then you extrapolate from the position. And that is detrimental to the meaning of things, but it is, unfortunately, often the case in criticism that you wonder if the person really saw the work, because it’s about the language, not about the thing, Charles uses language because he’s a journalist.

CG This is a mainstream exhibition, and it was curated by a mainstream critic, a wheeler and dealer, a powerbroker in the art world. I think that’s an important point. I’m honored to have Pat here with us today, because she a mainstream powerbroker, heavy-duty wheeler-dealer in the art world today, vis-a-vis the fact that the New York Times went through the trouble today to review the Sargent exhibition that she curated for the Whitney Museum of American Art, is bringing 7,000 people a week to—

PH A weekend.

CG A weekend—to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Pat Hills is such a powerbroker in the art world that the New York Times, in their review in the Sunday Times today, went so far as to take the trouble to completely leave her name out of the review. That’s power. (laughter) When they’re so afraid of the threat that she represents to their assumptions, that they had to go to all the trouble to disinvite you from the review, then I think that’s a comment. I think it’s a very important comment that people like Pat and myself, who are part of the White power establishment of the art world, each in our own way, make the commitment to doing exhibitions like this. Consider Pat’s involvement this summer with the traveling exhibition of Jacob Lawrence, and contributing a catalog to it. It’s efforts like this that make these issues part of the mainstream, and increase the likelihood that these works get into important collections.

This past summer, for instance, it was tremendously important that the Wadsworth Athenaeum included Bob Thompson in its Matrix program, and the work was, reviewed in the New York Times, which said, in effect, that he was a very important artist. Art & Antiques, in the current issue lists Bob Thompson among 25 most neglected, undervalued artists in America. I think it’s a matter of time before the art establishment wakes up to the fact that these are important artists that are existing under their noses, and that they’re unaware of them,

EBG I want someone to tell us what the other stream is? I mean, you said the mainstream. What’s the other stream? This is like people that say “the third world.” What’s the other world? This is one world. So, again, I want to hear what the other one is.

DC I would also want to hear, what exactly is meant by “compromise.” Compromise with what? With whom? Under what circumstances? To what purpose? Just for some clarity.

PH When I use the word “compromise,” compromising in terms of not being so concerned about getting fed—I mean, getting fed. And when you were talking about getting fed, I think you meant getting fed in terms of, you know, getting rent money and getting food to put in your mouth. I mean, there’s other ways that one is being fed, and, you know, and maybe you, make when I talk about, compromise. Well, okay, when you talked about “you go where you get fed” or “you make a world where you get fed,” are you talking about getting money to feed yourself and your family, or do you mean that kind of spiritual food that sustains you?

DC Well, absolutely because one can’t. There are a number of artists who are here presently, who have spent many years making sure that they are physically fed, and have done very well at it. That was not necessarily the reason for them remaining artists, visual artists. It was a spiritual feeding and a social feeding, perhaps a community feeding that we are more interested in. Also, there’s a feeding that has to do, in a sense, with ego in its place, and its context with culture. That is to say, when one finally comes to understand that one comes from a culture that values art as part of an integral part of being on the earth, and then comes to a culture which does not value art, there’s an integral part of the being of the world. And I don’t mean value in the sense that everybody in the culture doesn’t value art. I mean the larger culture itself doesn’t. It’s a very difficult place to be.

But if you are a survivor, then of course you find the things that are necessary to feed you, physically, and if you’re also a survivor, then you begin to work on creating the places where you can be fed, in all the other ways that you can be fed. And I’m saying that the struggle is an intense one, it’s a long-term one, that sometimes it’s a life-lasting one, where you finish up and you haven’t gotten that emotional thing happening for you. But then, all of a sudden when you die, which is one of the major American things for all artists is, when we die, your work suddenly achieves some of the importance that it never had when we were living, which can be hilariously funny if you’re not the one that died. So, I’m speaking about all of those kinds of things. It’s obvious that I have gotten myself fed. You know, I mean, no one can deny (laughter) that, you know, all l my life I’ve been about this size. I was a chubby little boy. I grew up, and I’m still chunky, so that’s never been the problem, but there has been an ongoing struggle to make sure not only that I was fed spiritually, but that I was of some resource to other artists to help ease that struggle for them. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was always appreciated or seen in the right way, right? That was part of that struggle. That’s what I’m talking about. So, I’m curious of what we’re talking about in the word “compromise.” That’s why I asked the question.

PH Maybe I’ll get back to this, but I want to raise another issue that has been a kind of a pet peeve of mine, and that is that I see—I’ve talked to a lot of artists who are involved with political art and social art, art that makes a social statement, and it always strikes me as really strange. And I have one particular artist in mind. I won’t mention his name. He’s a Boston artist who does these political paintings, year in and year out. (laughs) Not you, Dana, but,…

DC I know, and that leaves one other choice. (Arnold Trachtman.)

PH Year in and year out he does these enormous political paintings, and then he puts a price on them of about $5,000, $6,000, and I’m not saying that they’re not worth that much, but the people who have the money are not going to buy those pictures, because they don’t like the message. The rest of us, who like those paintings, can’t afford them. So, I said to this one particular artist, “Why don’t you do silk-screens?” Because he does a kind of art that would translate very well into silk-screens. “Why don’t you do silk screens, and then sell them, you know, in an edition of 70 at say $50. Something that maybe somebody can afford?” And he said no. He says what he wants to do, he wants to do in paint; he’s not interested at all in the silk screen. So, there’s a puzzle. I mean, if you want to reach people with a certain kind of message, or have an audience, then why not do something that people can afford?

DC Adjust to the needs of the audience.

PH Of the audience that you’re looking for. So, you find, I mean, this is a kind of problem. There’s another artist, a New York artist (Hans Haacke), whose show was canceled at a large museum (Guggenheim) because of the political content. It had to do with New York’s real estate (Shapolsky), had to do with political content. So, I suggested to him, “These are nice pictures. What you’ve done is terrific. Let’s set this up outside, you know, on Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. You get a lot of people walking by who might be interested in the way you relate real estate interests and the Rockefellers and the United Baptist Church.” He wasn’t interested at all. He wants to have his work shown in a museum context; otherwise, he’s a political artist. He’s been a political artist for many years. So, these two incidents stick in my head as to who do artists think their audience are, and how can they really reach them? And you can’t reach them if you’re going to make that art inaccessible to them. I mean, that’s one of the nice things about a university art gallery, you get a lot of students here.

DC But, you see, most of us, you’re saying “artists”—most of the artists that I can think of have exhibited in all the places that you’re talking about: On the street, in churches, in Y’s, parks, basements, and attics. We’ve exhibited everywhere that was open for us to exhibit, and when there weren’t places open for us to exhibit, we created the places, okay? AAMARP is a creation. (African American Master Artists in Residence Program at Northeastern University) You know, and that says, okay, we’re going to create a space for people to exhibit where there was none before, you know, and one does thank God that there were some people who were men—who were amenable to it.

CG Leonard and Ann Marie Lewis are leaving and I want to make a comment before they go. To acknowledge them because they loaned works to this exhibition. I apologize to Dana for interrupting, because I know that they’re leaving, and I wanted to catch them before they went. But I think they represent a very important point.

They have over 30 works by Emilio Cruz in their collection. They have a very representative work by Benny Andrews. They loaned five superb Bob Thompson paintings that we see here. They have been deeply committed to figurative expressionist artists over a long period of time. They are committed collectors, and have joined us here today as a part of that mandate. They were among the 90 collections that were seen by the Museum of Fine Arts. The Lewises, who I consider to be among Boston’s most unique collectors, in terms of having a very specific point of view and not just picking up art magazines and acquiring what they see. I think it’s very important that there be more interaction and networking of people that have mutual interests. That’s part of what it’s all about if you want to see these artists in the Museum of Fine Arts. If you want to see progress, there has to be more interaction between people like the Lewises that are committed collectors, and more exchange between people like Barry, Dana, Pat and myself, and colleagues, in terms of making more visible and raising these issues, and, and making more of an awareness and presence. It comes down to the question: why is the mainstream—if, in this case, we mean the Museum of Fine Arts—why are they simply not interested in artists of this kind?

DC Let me do a quick—let me do a quick commiseration, because, I mean, I really do understand how you feel, because there was a recent exhibition called Boston Expressionists (DeCordova Museum), of which I had been one for more than 20 years, and exhibited all over the country, and I wasn’t in it. I’d like to make you an offer, in terms of your (Lewis) collection. When AAMARP opens, we’re going to have a total of five galleries, and I want you to go over and just take a look at the gallery spaces, and if you think they’re interesting enough, and you want to have an exhibition of the works that you have in your collection, you got it. Check it out.

PH The first thing you think of when you look at these Cruz paintings is not the formalism, but the message, the intensity, and, as you say, the vigor, and the passion. Afterwards, you begin to look at the formal qualities, whereas over there (MFA), there’s something very correct. Even in that room, where you’ve got the Clyfford Still and the Mark Rothko, with the black and white in between, I don’t think of those paintings, I think, oh, this is a wall that has black and white in the middle, and sort of yellow-ish paintings on either side, (laughter) you know, and then this wall. You think of it in terms of the wall rather than these individual works.

DC Which is probably how it was hung.

EBG I would like to ask Judith Wilson if she would like to make some comments, vis-a-vis her advanced degree on Bob Thompson, and, her thinking about him.

Judith Wilson One thing I want to throw in, and I’m saying all this, and I would like to make clear very conditionally, I’m in the middle of my research and middle of my writing. I’m sure that this time next year I will look back on many of the things I am saying and, you know, with great distress.  I’m struck with this show, in the way that it bridges certain known and unknown, or known and less known, phenomena in recent art. I’m thinking of this in terms of how I think we have generally conceived of the recent history of Afro-American art, as well as the recent history of American art across the boards. I think a show like this is filling in the gaps in both of those histories, and raising questions about our understanding of both of those histories. I think, there’s room for revision on every level, and on all sides.

I’m struck by what Charles was saying a while ago about Bob Thompson, and this question of operating in more than one world. And I’m also struck with what Mr. Chandler was saying about this issue of going where you get fed, or making your own place to be fed. I think that’s a real valuable distinction between what has happened in Afro-American art in, say, the past 20 years. I also, though, feel like a word needs to be put in edgewise for a kind of historical context in that I would just want to maybe throw in that perhaps before the mid-1960s the conditions weren’t there for most Afro-American artists to have quite those options. That before, say, the mid-’60s—before the Civil Rights Movement coming to a certain kind of peak and pressure, you might have wanted to make your own place to be fed, but it would’ve been a whole lot harder. I think that’s something that makes the character of what Black American painters have done since 1965 very different.

And, for me, part of the reason why I chose Bob Thompson was because I wanted somebody who was very close to that critical moment, that what to me is a turning point, in the history of this tradition, and I do see it as a tradition. For me, his career is right before that moment, and yet one of the real excitements for me of my research is that I’m finding out how much earlier things were starting to take off than I had previously realized. Bob Thompson, some of you may or may not realize, was very close to Amiri Baraka, the writer and poet. He was close to Archie Sheep and Ornette Coleman. Some of these literary and musical figures had, by the early ’60s, begun to become concerned about issues of Black consciousness that, in the rest of the culture, we think of as not emerging until the late ’60s. He was in contact with all of that, and yet, from what I’ve been able to hear so far, he refused to take a certain kind of position. He refused to take an activist position. He supposedly said that his feeling was that he wanted to be about the painting. That was his activity. He didn’t want to be about the politics. At the same time, I feel like there’s a real struggle, an attempt, perhaps not fully realized—’cause we’re also talking here about an artist who died very young—he died a month away from his 29th birthday. I think that there was a struggle to begin to bring his own ethnic experience into that work, at the same time that he’s using traditional Western themes, Old Master compositions, et cetera. That time with the jazz world, that time with some of these younger generation of Black poets, was an attempt to pull something out that was uniquely his own as a Black American artist, and inject that into this other tradition that he had learned in art school in Louisville, et cetera. That’s probably my two cents for the moment.

DC Becoming what I became as an artist was directly related to people like Malcolm X, and the whole movement of the Black Islamic movement in the United States, and what was going on at that time; and my inability to really deal with the fact that although I was —had a leaning towards Martin Luther King, and what Martin Luther King was trying to do, there was so much opposition from people who didn’t look like me towards that whole idea of not so much integration, as people were calling it at that time, which simply meant the assimilation of Black culture into White culture, so that there’s some, some sort of smooth brownness rather than differences. But the whole idea of the integration of cultures, of the joining of cultures which could sit side by side, and exist as themselves, and be seen as being as valid as anything else. And, I mean African American culture, Asian American culture, and so on.

 It still reminds me of the of the travesty of an exhibition (A New World: Masterpieces of American Art, 1760–1910, 1983, curated by Ted Stebbins) that recently was at the Museum of Fine Arts, that was supposed to be about American painting, in which there were no Asian American artists, and no Indian American artists, because their imagery didn’t fit into a European American ideology about what imagery was supposed to be about, and it was as though they didn’t exist at all. It was bad enough that there weren’t African American artists, but there were no Asian and no Native American. It’s just incredible. So that a whole lot of that stuff has not yet ceased, but that—the recognition, of the visualness of the struggle of Black folks being Black folks began very early, you know. It began around 1959 and ’60, I mean, in terms of being public within the Black community. And then it became public largely through the efforts of the Nation of Islam, because of Malcolm X. But there were whole bunches of folks who were not connected to the Nation of Islam who were raising their voices and, and making a lot of noises about the validity of the Black experience during that time. So, I can understand why Bob found himself leaning towards that, and a whole lot of artists found themselves leaning towards that.

And I can remember sitting with Sam Gilliam, and have him tell me that he was very insulted because people who were Black didn’t think that he was part of the Black experience; it’s just that he chose to do with his work something different than what they were doing, and they didn’t understand it. And I knew how he was feeling, ’because I was one of the people who told him I didn’t think he was doing anything that was related to the whole Black experience until I came to understand that everything in this country relates to the Black experience, and it’s all one experience. You know, it just happens to be all one experience from a different perspective. So, it’s all one experience for me, and it’s all one experience for Charles, and it’s all one experience for everybody that’s sitting in here. It just has a different perspective, and we’re all part of that oneness, and I’m still waiting, you know. But at the same time, I think it’s important and it’s valid for us to have our own—be within our own cultural context within this whole sphere, and there’s nothing wrong with it, you know, and I think I’ll still be waiting when I’m gone, and my children have gone on to their grandchildren. I think I’ll still be waiting for that sort of thing to happen, but I have some hope. That’s my statement.

CG I’m glad that Judith made the comment about Bob’s decision, which was a controversial one when he made it, to concentrate on the art, and to basically not deal with the social and political context of trying to necessarily make a direct statement about being a Black person in America, in the sense that we have discussed Benny Andrews as an example of an artist who is totally socially, politically connected in every breath he takes through the day to everything that he puts on the canvas, every act and statement and movement that he makes as a person and a humanitarian, as opposed to, the artists who are Black that, that pursue a more personal muse. And I think that every artist should have the right with impunity—to pursue their own personal vision, and that’s what I think Dana’s talking about in terms of Sam Gilliam. What I meant when I said that artists like Sam Gilliam and Bob Thompson suffered because they were not identified with the Black community, with that struggle, in terms of what it meant politically in the 1960s in the Civil Rights era. When Barry mounted an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1970 that was an enormously important political statement. When one saw “Black art” shows in the 1960s, they were primarily emphasizing the political context and the social context, and there was a mood that was very confrontational about those exhibitions.

DC You didn’t relate the history correctly. You said that, that Barry mounted an exhibition in 1970, but that exhibition came about because of a document that was delivered by me, that talked about the eradication of institutional racism at the Museum of Fine Arts, Have the historical context correct, and then we can proceed.

EBG You (Charles) said that the exhibitions mainly had to do with political and social themes, and the point I wanted to make was that that reflects the perception of the shows, because if a show was 90 percent nonpolitical work, and 10 percent political work, it was discussed in terms of the 10 percent, as if the 10 percent were the 90 percent.

So, if you look at the discussion, it has no relationship, really, to the balance between these groups of works, so I just wanted to alter your statement to say that it was discussed against that perception, rather than that fact. Because it was not always true that that was the fact.

CG I would fully concede that, but there was a political exigency that, that caused those shows to exist.

EBG Yes, there certainly was.

CG The point that I’m trying to make is, basically, what I would see as a kind of sophistication and growth and change, in the sense that in 1986 it’s possible for a White curator to do an exhibition on Black art, and to not do it to raise a social, political comment, so much as to make an important aesthetic comment. My whole purpose of curating this exhibition was that I think that this is first-class art. It deserves to be looked at as art, and to be looked at for its quality, its beauty, its expressiveness. In that sense, what we’re talking about is perhaps a modification of how we look at Black art. This is something to consider as we move into the ’80s and ’90s, in terms of what we’ve been struggling with today, of coming into the mainstream and having these artists take their place in the museums, its collections and the full history of what has happened in America, not to be pushed off, isolated, and marginalized into, a kind of packaged notion of what Black art is supposed to be and supposed to look like.

PH Well said. I don’t have really very much to say as a sort of windup, except that I think what Dana was saying before, that there is a great deal of racism in our society. There is sexism, also, and that’s important, but the racism I think is very fundamental. And I think whatever people can do to eliminate that is all for the best. And I think that constant pressure needs to be brought on the Museum of Fine Arts. It was good when we mounted that protest about The New World exhibition for not even including Henry Tanner, a major late nineteenth-century American painter. People saw that exhibition, before the insertion of Tanner. Not only did it not have Afro American artists, or American Indian artists, but there weren’t any images of these races. There were no Black faces. There were some Indian faces in the bushes.

EBG In the Cole.

PH In the Thomas Cole mountains. A woman who is a librarian in New York said she’d walked through that exhibition and saw no Black faces in a show that was supposed to be called The New World. Constant pressure needs to be brought against these big institutions. They probably are never really going to change, but at least let’s strive for as many concessions as you can get.