Black Power in Art

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;

Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll

In characters of fire.

High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky

Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,

And truth shall lift them higher. --Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

In white America the black artist has worked largely in a vacuum. He has been able to say, with the protagonist of Ellison's celebrated novel, "I am an invisible man...simply because people refuse to see me." But recently he has begun to be seen, really seen. In October, the City University of New York mounted a stunning and well-attended exhibition of 55 Negro artists spanning a century and a half. This month, a Manhattan gallery has offered a one-man show of 49 paintings by the late Henry O. Tanner--who was, however, able to find freedom and recognition only abroad.

In Boston, the work of members of the four-year-old Boston Negro Artists' Association has lately been exhibited in Roxbury, the Old South Church, and elsewhere. Currently on view is a large one-man show entitled "Black Power Revolution in Art," which consists of nearly a hundred works by Dana C. Chandler, Jr., one of our area's most forceful artistic spirits--and, at twenty-six, one of its youngest.

Chandler, an ardent Black Power advocate, is a man with fire in his belly; but he chooses to channel it into art rather than arson. He says art can be as effective as destruction in bringing about social change, thereby allying himself with such potent practitioners as Orozco, Kollwitz, Grosz, and Shahn.

He is out to show how he feels "about being black in a racist society," and to preserve "a picture of our struggle for freedom." Much of his work portrays aspects of violence, including riots at home and the Vietnam war abroad. One enormous diptych called "Vietnam/Genocide/America" points up the Negro's ironically similar position in both. In the background of "The Manipulators" (placed in the window facing the street) we see President Johnson and Premier Ky with their arms around each other; and Johnson has to himself one painting titled simply "Killer." Among other paintings of protest are "Grove Hall Nightmare," "Roxbury Rebellion," and "Riot Victim."

Thou hast the right to noble pride,

Whose spotless robes were purified

By blood's severe baptism.   [Dunbar]

Chandler is aware of history too. A Crucifixion scene is titled "For What!?" "Forced Integration," showing a white man raping a Negro woman, is meant to recall the origin of our lighter skinned colored Americans, and an eerie picture of a spiky branch-qua-hand is called "Hanging Tree." An eight-foot-high painting of a bearded Negro holding up a Black Power sign bears the title "Moses Brings the Word to His People."

The painter looks to the future, also. The most striking thing about "Black Prediction" is the burning fury emanating from the eyes of its subjects. Says Chandler, "The Black Revolution is going to get worse before it gets better. Many blacks will die--perhaps myself among them." He believes blacks must be left to settle most of their own problems and that it's the whites who need help. Painting is his way of helping, for his art is "based on facts, on truth."

He does not "hate" whites, however; "there's no time for that." And, unlike many creative Negroes past and present, he wants to remain in this country. "I'm not against America; I'm against the American philosophy." If Patrick Henry is a legitimate hero to whites, blacks have just as much right, he feels, to idolize such men as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Rap Brown.

Chandler favors loud colors, even garish ones, and sometimes employs intentionally rough and unsubtle comic-strip techniques. His broad-stroke work often recalls Rouault. He himself especially admires and acknowledges the influence of Picasso, Rivera, Braque, Beckmann, Buffet, and the Negro muralist Charles White.

Another body of his work exhibits concern with black dignity and traditional beauty. Here his colors are more restrained, his lines more elegant and refined. The paintings "Black Family," "And Still the Champ" [Muhammad Ali], and "Nude in Black" even suggest Modigliani. And several of his sculptures in the show are exquisitely crafted, such as "Black and Beautiful" and the delicately slim "Lovely."

Like a fair but fragile vase,

Triumph of the carver's art,

Graceful formed and slender,--

Thus thou art.   [Dunbar]

The son of a longshoreman and one of ten siblings, Chandler was born in Lynn but raised in Roxbury. He received the degree of B.S. in Education from the Massachusetts College of Art last June, and now supports his wife and three daughters by working as community coordinator of the Jamaica Plain Area Planning Action Council, Inc.

This job takes some 40 or 50 hours a week, but painting is his true love and he devotes his weekends to it. He works fast (most of the ninety or so paintings in this exhibit were done since June), but would welcome a more relaxed pace. Trained in all media, he makes use of whatever he gets his hands on--canvas, beaverboard, masonite, linoleum, oils, watercolors, acrylics.

He is stocky, has a handsome bearded face, and chooses to wear a symbolic slave bracelet. He is extraordinarily articulate verbally, and, by funneling his anger into his art, can afford to be genuinely warm and personable in face-to-face dealings with whites. There is, thus, a division in his work between violence and restraint, and a division in himself between anger and cordiality.

This schizoid sort of position is one in which more and more young Negroes are finding themselves these days, and the situation is reflected in several of Chandler's pictures that carry the title "Split Personality." Particularly impressive, too, is the small, subdued painting called "Many Faces of the Black Man," which calls to mind a poem of Dunbar's:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties....

Dana Chandler's exhibit has already stirred up controversial reactions from its viewers. Some have been moved, some have been scandalized. I guarantee that no-one leaving the show, black or white, will emerge the same person he was on entering. And this, of course, is precisely the artist's aim.

Assuredly, Chandler doesn't plan to be another Invisible Man. And on being asked what his longterm ambition is, without an instant's hesitation he shot back the proper answer: "To be the best black artist America has ever seen."