Among the legacies of the political art of the late 1960s and early 70s in the United States was an expanded role for something that came to be called ‘community art’. Community art, in the sense of youth art workshops and neighbourhood art organisations, was not a new phenomenon. But its visibility increased with the production of large-scale public murals in US inner cities. These often unauthorised interventions into the visual landscape were inspired by the Mexican muralist movement and more immediately by Chicago’s Wall of Respect, a collective portrait of black heroes created in 1967 at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue on the city’s South Side. The Wall of Respect was designed and painted collaboratively by the Visual Arts Workshop of OBAC (Organisation of Black American Culture), a group of South Side African-American practitioners of music, visual arts, literature and drama. The mural represented black heroes and heroines in a variety of fields; it was itself an attempt at representing not a uniform and undifferentiated ‘community’, but an articulated collectivity. It reflected an ambition on the part of Chicago’s African-American artists that art might both refashion black identity and create models for coalition-building. The Wall of Respect spawned other murals throughout the United States, as well as a further experiment in collective artistic work, the group known as AfriCOBRA — the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. AfriCOBRA flourished in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 70s, amicably separating when members of the group moved to Washington, DC after 1970. New artists joined when part of the group migrated to the East Coast after 1970. Members continue working in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland and elsewhere, drawing on AfriCOBRA’s aesthetic precepts in their individual ways. 

Community has become a vexed term in art criticism. Since the 1960s, collaborations between artists and communities have emerged as a major component of the art world, sometimes grouped under terms like ‘new genre public art', ‘community-based art', ‘social practice' or ‘social cooperation'. Much of the community art of the 1960s and 70s was figurative and overtly political; directly challenging formalism, it has also, thereby, become a foil for more ironic, discursive and self-referential forms of postmodernism that have been prized by both the art market and the world of art criticism. As Eva and James Cockcroft noted in 1975, the artwork produced in the mural movement was disparaged on grounds of quality: ‘“Quality” is the code word for much of the criticism of the figurative community-oriented murals.’¹ In an article on the Cityarts Workshop in New York, they argued that ‘community murals cannot be adequately or properly discussed within the terminological confines of contemporary art criticism’ because the mural movement was a conscious protest against the elitism of the art establishment. 

From the perspective of the art critic, community art is typically perceived as being neither sufficiently critical nor aesthetically rich. Serving frequently as a euphemism for racial and ethnic groups, ‘community’ carries connotations of populism, participation and collaboration, but can also suggest an undifferentiated (if located) public with problematic representational politics. It suggests, that is to say, a grouping that speaks with, and is reduced to, a single voice. Miwon Kwon, following Iris Marion Young and Critical Art  Ensemble in their separate critiques of the term ‘community’, argues that community implies an excessive uniformity: put simply, ‘the ideal of community finds comfort in the neat closure of its own homogeneity’.² A related concern is that ‘community engagement’ or participation is merely a public-relations alibi for elite institutions. The assumption in much of this critique, however, is that the community is what or whom the artist works with — the community is not the artist. The community becomes the medium, material and support of the artist’s work. But what about when the community is the artist? 

When one community uses art to speak to another, somewhat different community? 

When community art has political contestation at its core, or manifests its own conflicts clearly? Such projects so rarely included in the canon of critical, political art. 

AfriCOBRA members used the term community (and indeed ‘commune’) at times, but they also referred to themselves as a family, and chose this theme for their first exhibition. Family is no simpler or less problematic than community (and particularly among politicised African Americans in the wake of the controversial ‘Moynihan Report', which will be discussed further on), and my point is not to glorify it. Rather, as a term that characterises this group’s structure, relationships and subject matter, it can enrich our analyses, helping us think in particular about the intersection of race and gender. 

How might we produce a finer-grained understanding of different kinds of groupings and collaborations, their internal dynamics and their forms of address? AfriCOBRA is not only of historical interest, but also contributes to ways we might think today about the structure and formation of collectives. 

The Wall of Respect was not finished when it was finished. It was repainted several times, reflecting conflicts within OBAC Visual Artists’ group, which eventually fractured under the strain of internal and external pressures.³ AfriCOBRA emerged from this experience in 1968 as a smaller group naming itself COBRA (the Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists). The artists soon became aware of the European group CoBrA and changed their name to AfriCOBRA. As AfriCOBRA, the founding group included five artists, Jeff Donaldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu (then Barbara Jones), Gerald Williams and Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell. Eventually it included as many as five more artists in Chicago; East Coast members joined after Jeff Donaldson took a position as chair of the Art Department at Howard University, Washington, DC in 1970. 

Already in 1962 Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell had discussed the idea of ‘a “negro” art movement based on a common aesthetic creed’. It was just a ‘daydream balloon […] we let it float […] the “negro” sky was pregnant with optimistic fantasy bubbles in those days’.⁴ In 1968, with fissures in the Civil Rights Movement and a series of assassinations of public figures, many political bubbles were bursting. It was in that moment that Donaldson and Jarrell came together again with others to form a ‘family’ of artists. 

‘Family’ suggests an acknowledgement of different roles and identities among members. The OBAC Writers Workshop had organised itself similarly, but the writers described their project in somewhat different terms, as a submersion of individual identities. In an interview in the Chicago Defender, don l. lee (later Haki Madhubuti) said of the Writers Workshop, ‘We give to each other. My vacuum might be filled by Carolyn, Kathy or any one of the others’; another (unnamed) member adds, ‘we are no longer individuals’.⁵ In contrast to the writers’ circle, AfriCOBRA’s rhetoric does not suggest a total merging of the individual into the collective. In initial meetings, artists showed their work to one another and identified particular aspects that would contribute to the collective aesthetic. While their styles converged, they remained cognisant of the qualities each had brought. As Jones-Hogu described their shared aesthetic principles in 1973, they involved ‘Black, positive, direct statements created in bright, vivid, singing coolade colours of orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime and grape […] Black positive statements stressing a direction in the image with lettering, lost and found line and shape’.⁶ As Donaldson wrote in the magazine Black World, emphasising that group and individual identities were not in conflict, Superreal colour for Superreal images. The superreality that is our every day all day thang […] Coolade colours for coolade images for the superreal people. Superreal images for the SUPERREAL people […] We are a family. Check the unity. All the rest must be sensed directly. Check out the image […] We are a family of image-makers and each member of the family is free to relate to and to express our laws in her/his individual way. Dig the diversity in unity. We can be ourselves and be together, too.⁷ 

The ‘super-real’, as they imagined it, is a form of surrealism that is not distortion but reality-plus. AfriCOBRA did not remove figuration but adds to it in colour and luminosity, in the use of text and in what the AfriCOBRA manifesto refers to as ‘syncopated, rhythmic repetition’ — inspired stylistically and sometimes in subject matter (especially in the case of Wadsworth Jarrell’s work) by music.⁸ Within these shared commitments, members were free to define their own subject matter, media and stylistic orientations. 

In the above quote, Donaldson refers to the group as a family, a theme that also emerged immediately within the group’s subject matter. AfriCOBRA’s first exhibition, ‘The Black Family’, was held at WJ Studios (Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell’s studio on 61st Street in the Chicago neighbourhood of Woodlawn) in 1969. ‘Family’ had multiple resonances in this moment. In a specific sense, the choice to emphasise family was a response to the stereotype of the dysfunctional black family presented in the widely read Moynihan Report. 

This 1965 report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, was produced for President Lyndon Johnson by then- Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who was later to become a US Senator). The Moynihan Report, as it came to be known, asserted that matriarchy was prevalent among black Americans and judged this situation a pathology that ‘imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male’.⁹ On a very basic level the exhibition title might be seen as a direct riposte to Moynihan: ‘The Black Family’ rather than ‘The Negro Family’ implies a more politicised and proud identity. 

But what kind of family was it? On the one hand, Wadsworth Jarrell’s painting Black Family (1969), his first acrylic painting and one of his offerings for the ‘Black Family’ exhibition, depicts a paradigmatic American nuclear family. The male figure is dominant — standing, with his long arms enclosing the woman and children. 

It represents the Jarrell family only in part: Jarrell based the mother and son on Jae and Wadsworth, Jr, but used a photograph taken of a man on the street for the father and invented the small girl.¹⁰ 

This form of the family was only one of multiple possibilities for the group. Jones-Hogu has said on the one hand that ‘Family is the foundation’, but also that the group sought to present ‘relationships among all members of families’, meaning extended families and other forms of social organisation.¹¹ For Donaldson, the rationale for the exhibition’s theme was that the black family was under attack. Moynihan had just written that book that talked about the black family being fragmented as if there had been no slavery. […] So that was something we dealt with. Because we, we saw the black families being more than a man and a woman and a child. But families can be distant cousins and surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers and the guy who delivers the ice. The extended family thing was very much alive in the communities in the South and in the North when I was growing up.¹² 

This might indeed be extended still further such that ‘the black family’ refers to the entire community of black people, or at least African Americans, just as ‘the human family’ sometimes refers to all human beings. And as we have seen, AfriCOBRA itself identified 

as a family. While it contained one married couple with a child (the Jarrells), it was an extended sense of family that was primary in the group’s self-understanding. Jae Jarrell said in a 2010 interview, ‘Once you’re in AfriCOBRA you’re always in AfriCOBRA. It’s a brotherhood, a sisterhood — it’s a bond.’¹³ 

Part of what is striking about AfriCOBRA in Chicago is the prominence of female members. This followed on the contributions of women — Sylvia Abernathy, Myrna Weaver, Carolyn Lawrence and Jones-Hogu — to the Wall of Respect. Though the initial vision for a black art group had emerged from conversations between Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell in the early 1960s, many early members were women. Jae Jarrell created provocative fashion designs, such as the Revolutionary Suit (1970) that appeared in the pages of Black World. Jones- Hogu’s expertise in printmaking helped define the group’s visibility beyond art venues. Among the most visible and lasting works of AfriCOBRA were screenprints, which represented a push toward a broader community audience. Both Jones-Hogu’s own work as a member of the group and the prints designed by other members and produced collectively drew their visual rhetoric from black revolutionary ideas like those of the Black Panthers. 

Many of the prints also reflected particular concerns of black women. AfriCOBRA’s approach to gender and family issues challenges (white) feminist sensibilities in that the group often — very assertively — promoted the paradigmatic role of men in the movement. As an example, we can look to Carolyn Lawrence’s Uphold Your Men, Unify Your Families (1971). 

A lone woman, arms crossed, stands in the foreground. She faces forward, wearing a long dress and an Afro; her cheeks are painted with stripes and her forehead with a spiral inspired by African design. She looks resolute. The text surrounding her, blending into the more abstractly patterned background, reads ‘Uphold Your Men Unify Your Families’. Uphold Your Men seems to hint that the woman must patiently act in a supporting role for the sake of keeping her family together. 

This position may be troubling to feminist sensibilities today, but it responds to a specific historical situation. Black revolutionary rhetoric was itself diverse, but a powerful strand, particularly in cultural nationalist and Black Muslim contexts, prescribed subordinate roles for women. In this way militants joined up with black middle class ideologies, according to which it was an expression of status for women not to need to work but rather to stay home and cultivate domesticity. These views responded to Moynihan defensively, but they also responded to a racist society that harassed and disparaged black men and denied them chances at jobs. At the same time, black feminists argued that simply shoring up black masculinity was not an acceptable response to that situation. In the anthology The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara), several authors identified a pernicious acceptance of Moynihan’s terms within the black community. Gwen Patton, critiquing this acceptance, spoke of a prevailing ‘Victorian ethos’: Moynihan, she wrote, ‘invisibly became the guideline’¹⁴ and fuelled an imperative to recalibrate gender roles to emphasise black masculinity. In her own essay Cade wrote that women in some quarters of the movement were being asked to ‘cultivate “virtues” that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves’.¹⁵ Cade argues that rather than sacrificing the personal element of politics to the urgency of the moment, on the assumption that it could be taken care of later, ‘We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships.’¹⁶ 

Given that family bonds were destroyed and prohibited by slavery and the sexual abuse that went along with it, to create a ‘black family’ was a constructive act, building from the ruins of African families. The question was what kind of family this would be. 

For most black movement women, coalition with white feminists was not viable: most white feminists at the time had difficulty recognising their own racial privilege, and could not see gender as a key vector for the oppression of black men.¹⁷ For many black women who were sensitive to gender oppression as well as racial oppression, to join with white women risked trading one oppressor for another — a risk many white women could not understand. That white women might not be friends, but rather rivals or even enemies, is central to Jones-Hogu’s Black Men We Need You (c.1971). The print contains the title text but also (in smaller lettering that is harder to make out) the words: ‘Black men preserve our race. Leave white bitches alone.’ The main figure and apparent speaker is a black mother with two children. 

Jones-Hogu’s focus on women in this print and others emerged after she joined AfriCOBRA. Her earlier series of prints titled America, America II and America III condemned American culture at large, and featured mostly male figures. Jones-Hogu incorporated in the print elements of the US flag — its overall striping punctuates the composition more or less innocuously, but its fields of stars are composed of armies of white-hooded KKK-like figures, their forms simplified into five-pointed shapes. Juxtaposed with these geometric elements are angry male faces and skeletons that evoke violence. 

Jones-Hogu’s Unite (1970) represents a turning point in her own work that came through her involvement in AfriCOBRA.¹⁸ Following the group’s aesthetic creed, she began to emphasise ‘positive images’ of black power and to create prints that made specific demands on black viewers. Unite was inspired, Jones-Hogu says, by the Black Power salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, and by Elizabeth Catlett's sculpture Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), which Jones-Hogu saw in Catlett's studio while on a visit to view Mexican murals in 1968. 

Unite shows a V-shaped group of black men standing, each with one fist raised, their relatively undifferentiated faces (unified in the spirit of the print’s command) lit from the left.¹⁹ They appear against a backdrop formed by repetitions of the word ‘Unite’. 

This single word is shaped into wedges of colour and repeats (in different colour combinations) in full and partially about ten times. The handling of bodies, too, establishes a mid-point between the pictorial detail and drawn lines of Jones-Hogu’s own earlier work and the geometric blocks of colour and more simplified and abstracted (though still quite legible) bodies and faces of her AfriCOBRA prints. Colour is also in transition, from the flag’s colours (plus muted blacks and browns), toward what AfriCOBRA called ‘coolade colours’ (after the fruit drink Kool-Aid). 

Unite inaugurates a series of prints whose purpose is not to critique the state of affairs but more directly to motivate action. Others include Rise and Take Control (1971) and Nation Time II (1971). Both titles are inspired by poems: Margaret Walker’s ‘For My People’ (1942) (‘let a race of men now rise and take control’ — in her reprise of this line in the lettering on the print, Jones-Hogu notably changes ‘race of men’ to ‘black race’) and Amiri Baraka’s ‘It’s Nation Time’ (1970). The cultivation of ‘positive images’ to combat a racist visual culture was a strongly shared and clearly articulated goal for the Black Arts Movement, in which both these poets also participated. In his account of AfriCOBRA’s founding and early years, published in Black World in 1970, Donaldson echoes the language of the ‘positive’: AfriCOBRA created ‘images which deal with concepts that offer positive and feasible solutions to our […] problems’.²⁰ The legibility of the single command Unite in Jones-Hogu’s print, and its affirmative, militant message and content — the idea of the formation of a collective — are characteristic components of the ‘positive image’. One aspect of AfriCOBRA artists’ work that has received little attention is the way in which formal and technical strategies express not only individual meanings but also the structure of the collective as collective. In Wadsworth Jarrell’s Revolutionary (1972), the effect of small blocks of colour (mostly made up of text) is nearly pointillist. The first impression is one of a bright uniformity; the figure, Angela Davis, is accessible to the viewer as a recognisable face, but the text that makes up her image is much more difficult to discern. The viewer is drawn in and then has to puzzle out the meaning — an effect that might be analogous to speaking in code. This aspect of AfriCOBRA’s collective style can be called kaleidoscopic: its multiple discrete small blocks of colour alternately define and cut across representational forms. 

In the use of blocks of colour that are discrete but which combine to an overall effect, AfriCOBRA’s works speak to the production of the collective, expressing chromatically the new form of collectivity that members were fashioning. The printmaking process is one demonstration of this. Each artist created his or her own design for a print, and Jones-Hogu, the only expert printmaker, oversaw the creation of the screens and the printing of the sheets. For large blocks of colour, the artists mounted hand-cut stencils made from Rubylith film on the screens, one screen for each colour. They created finer detail and tonal variation by photo transfer.²¹ Then, members worked in groups, mostly without regard to individual authorship, printing about fifty sheets (the capacity of their drying rack) per session. With their multiple colours, each print required several screens and careful attention to registration. The multi-part process of printing, pulling and hanging each sheet reflected the complexity of a collaboration in which members retained individuality while working together on a shared project. With minimal financial resources, the group pooled their labour out of necessity. The process itself generated and re-generated the collective. Collectivity as form was not separate from the work of art — indeed, it was itself a work of art. Whether or not members were shaping (in Cade’s terms) revolutionary selves and lives, they were, as a group, shaping revolutionary relationships. 

The relationship of group and individual is expressed in a more iconographic way in Jones-Hogu’s Black Men We Need You and other prints in which blocks of colour work in especially meaningful ways. While Black Men represents one mother with her children as the origin of the title’s demand, the recipients of the utterance are also represented in a series of profiles on the upper right and lower left that suggest a more generic larger group, reflecting the double impetus to individualise and collectivise. 

In other work, colour blocks create a geometric dappling effect over embedded text and depicted figures that both separate and unify them. In To Be Free (1972), Jones-Hogu connects past, present and future, with a main family group of mother and child in the left foreground surrounded by figures representing past and future. Colour attaches in specific ways to the figures. For instance, some figures are radically altered by the passage of circular bands of colour that radiate outward from a sun-shaped abstracted face, inspired by African imagery, in the upper right corner. But the artist explicitly does not allow the colour black to be affected by the colour bands. Unlike Unite, in which red and purple were printed over the black outlines of the raised arms, the printing of this multi-screen print does not involve any blending of colours. The imperviousness of black here might just reflect the chromatic behaviour of the pigment. The colour could also be read in symbolic racial terms: black possesses a power and steadfastness that the other pigments don’t. 

The behaviour of black as ink colour also affects the gendered depiction of bodies in To Be Free. All the male figures are rendered entirely or almost entirely in black — we might say they ‘represent the race’ — and are thus unaffected by the bands of colour. Their upright, black forms punctuate the print’s overall colour. At the same time, they thereby appear more generic. The other figures, and the text, made up of bright coolade colours, are striped wherever the concentric circles of sunlight meet them. Within this general rule, one figure stands out distinctly: the woman in the foreground, leaning over her child, clad in black trousers and a black vest. Because she is dressed primarily in black, the effects of the colour bands on her form are minimised. 

The background woman and her children emerge out of (or recede into?) the sun’s bands of light. They appear insubstantial in that they are subject to this schematic sunlight: the outline of the bands of colour cuts through their forms and alters the colour of their bodies and clothing. The difference between foreground and background is a matter of past and present. The print’s text reads ‘To be free know the past and prepare the future’. The woman in the foreground, with her single child and modern dress, suggests the woman of the present, to whom the statement is directed. The woman in the background, with her African dress and three children, seems to represent the past, emerging from the African sun. The woman who stands between them is a mediating figure, holding a piece of patterned African cloth that connects present to past. 

Only a close look reveals that this mediating figure carries a rifle. It’s not obvious what this black form signifies, as the rifle’s barrel points directly upward over her rounded back, but her bandolier establishes that it is her gun. As with the Panthers’ ideology, the print proposes that women’s role in bearing and teaching children is indeed revolutionary. They embody the passage from one generation to another; they also suggest a sense of individuality with respect to the group. But women’s role is double: they also have to prepare to fight. With the modern, foreground figure — whose masculine dress is printed in the steadfast black pigment of the male figures — and the contrasting bright colours of the ‘African’ women and children, Jones-Hogu implies that it is on the body of this female figure, addressee of the image’s message, that past and present, male and female norms, and individual and collective come together. The question remains whether this position constitutes too heavy a burden (conceptual, or actual) to bear. 

‘Family' allows for a specific description of relationships and structures that ‘community’ leaves vague. It may be no less problematic than ‘community’, but perhaps one advantage is that it is not obviously a utopian term. Jones-Hogu herself stayed in Chicago when other members left, and eventually slowed her printmaking career to care for her young son, illustrating the fact that symbolic forms of family may come into tension with the personal obligations of specific families. Still, family might, in combination with other terms, allow us to think of collectivity differently, to begin to proliferate different constructive and analytical models for groups in general. While the artworks produced by AfriCOBRA should take a more prominent place than they have so far in histories of twentieth-century art, the group’s creation and articulation of new practices of collectivity are important artistic contributions in their own right, and should be counted as a significant legacy of the group.