In the 1960s African American artists, along with many white, Latino, Asian American, Native American and Caribbean artists, addressed the struggle for racial justice in works that were wide-ranging in aesthetic approach. Using gestural and geometric abstraction, assemblage, Minimalism, Pop imagery, and photography, these artists created works informed by the experience of inequality, conflict, and empowerment. Allied with but distinct from the rising tide of popular imagery that underpinned fundamental shifts in racial awareness as the decade progressed, these objects represent the distillation of ideas and actions into forceful emblems of American identity and liberation. This talk will be given in conjunction with the Brooklyn Museum’s “Art and Activism in the 1960s,” an exhibition of 75 paintings, sculptures and photographs created by 65 artists during the decade of the sixties, presented in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  

Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.