Influx of Black Presence in Art and the Environment

The Civil Rights Movement took place during the 1950s and 1960s. Black Americans were fighting for social justice and equity under U.S. law. Although slavery was abolished in 1865, Black people in America faced racial discrimination under the law and experienced legal and extra-legal violence. The heart of the movement was in the south, yet other places around the country were finding ways to get involved with the fight for social justice.

Architects of the Bowdoin-Morehouse exchange, David Bayer ’64 and Philip Hansen ’64, with four Morehouse students on the Chapel steps, April 1963. (Bowdoin Special Collections & Archives
Click the audio clip below for an excerpt reading of the text below.

During the spring of 1963, The Bowdoin-Morehouse exchange brought Bowdoin students to experience life on a historically Black college campus and Morehouse did the same on Bowdoin’s campus as pictured above.[1]

You see these Morehouse men in front of the Bowdoin College Chapel. I wonder how these Morehouse men felt to be completely immersed into a white male-dominated place during the height of the civil rights movement. Racial tensions existed, and they were now placed onto a campus that’s curriculum, environment and social life reflected whiteness. They were in and out of architectural spaces on campus, like the Chapel, filled with paintings of white figures. Not only were they surrounded by white people, but they were saturated in whiteness all around them.

 

“Museum of Art exhibit opening”, Local Call Number 6.1.13, Bowdoin College Archives, Brunswick, Maine

In 1964, Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) curator Marvin Sadik mounted The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, an exhibition featuring eighty paintings of Black people. This groundbreaking exhibition was the first exhibition focused solely on representations of black people at the BCMA, and one of the first in the nation to use art to document the history of Black people in the United States. Bowdoin College students were exposed to this historic moment and Blackness represented in ways they hadn’t seen before, which I believe started dialogue surrounding Black representation that had been unexamined previously. Although the exhibition provided the visual representation of Blackness that was lacking in the environment, this representation was not evident in Bowdoin’s curriculum during 1964.

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During his visit to Bowdoin, Dr. King visited the Bowdoin College Museum of Art to view the groundbreaking exhibition “The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting.” He is pictured here with Museum Curator Marvin Sadik.

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below

Coincidentally, students at Bowdoin had also organized for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to the annual Spring Conference in 1964.[2] The exhibition brought forth thousands of visitors to campus. Four years later, in 1968, The Art of Sub-Sahara Africa exhibition was organized by the museum. Exhibited in 1971, Contemporary American Black Artists was lent to the BCMA, organized by the Smithsonian Institution. The timing of these exhibitions is significant because I argue that these exhibitions served as a response to political and historical moments. Bowdoin is not an outlier in this moment, as an institution. They were grappling with the racial tensions in this country and how they could engage in dialogue and contribute to the fight for social justice during the Civil Rights Movement. As an institution, Bowdoin stands out for using art as a means to grapple with this historical moment, where other institutions engaged in dialogue but didn’t use the arts as well.

 

 

AFAM and The Arts

Click the audio clip for a reflection on the text and image below. 

An increase in the Black student population at Bowdoin and the emergence of the Afro-American Studies program, AFAM (The African American Society), and the John Brown Russwurm African American Center led to a surge in Black representation on campus that wasn’t evident previously.  Bowdoin’s first-ever Black Arts Festival happened in 1969. The Black Arts Movement started in 1965, centering Black musicians, artists, poets, and writers whose work reflected Black autonomy and this new Black consciousness.

“Black Arts Festival”, 1976 Local Call Number 7570, Bowdoin College Archives, Brunswick, Maine
Instruction:
Here is a collection of material from the Black Arts Festival found in Bowdoin College Special Collections. These files include advertisements of the events from the festival such as, art exhibitions, themed parties, guest speakers, and workshops that celebrate the Black experience and Black culture. Please look through the material below. 

 

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

The Black Arts Festival is the first time where the theme of Black students at Bowdoin creating space for themselves presents itself in the history of art at Bowdoin. Thinking about the ways that Black people have had to support themselves and supply for themselves at predominantly white institutions in order to succeed academically and socially, it isn’t the institutions doing, but the work within the Black community and on an individual level. They were creating the spaces that weren’t provided for them, but they knew they needed those spaces. This was reflected in society, but on a more intimate level attending such a small liberal arts college.

 

The Afro-American Studies program was founded at Bowdoin in 1970 and coincidently, I took note of a language shift in an art history course description that is telling of the Euro-American-focused curricula in the Art Department.

1969-1970

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.
I encourage you to read it for yourself on page 110 of the digital catalog (page 98 in the book itself) underneath “American Art” taught by Mr. Beam

Course Description reads:

“To consider the main developments of art in America, with special emphasis upon painting and sculpture from colonial times to 1900, and a review of the principal architectural movements up through the time of Henry Hobson Richardson. Such outstanding artists as Gilbert Stuart Homer, Eakins, Sargent, and Whistler will be studied carefully. This course will conclude with a survey of the connotation of the American realistic tradition in painting in our own time”.[3]

 

1970-1971

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below
I encourage you to read it for yourselves on page 102 of the digital catalog (page 90 in the book itself) underneath “American Art” taught by Mr. Beam

Course Description reads

“To consider the main developments of art in America, with special emphasis upon painting and sculpture from colonial times to 1900, and a review of the principal architectural movements up through the time of Henry Hobson Richardson. Such outstanding artists as Gilbert Stuart Homer, Eakins, Sargent, and Whistler will be studied carefully. The contribution of Black artists to American art will also be studied. This course will conclude with a survey of the connotation of the American realistic tradition in painting in our own time”.[4]

 

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below

Language is influential and this added sentence isn’t handled in the same manner as the preceding ones. Rather than going into the “outstanding artists” that are Black and listing out their individual names, this description is short as it generalizes Black artists into one group. This alludes to the importance of instructors of course material. If one can expand upon the amazing white artists who have contributed to American Art, it appears that students will receive an intimate focus on them, yet Black artists are mentioned so briefly, that it appears as if that is a topic that will be touched on in short. Course descriptions are important because they lay out what main ideas, topics, and concepts will be discussed. It is an advertisement for students, that uses keywords to appeal to one’s interest. I argue that this additive language is a direct response to the political climate and made to appeal to students who were looking to study Blackness in their studies.

David C. Driskell and Julie McGee at Bowdoin College with some of McGee’s students David C. Driskell Papers MS01.11.01.P0699 Photograph 4×6 Circa 2001 Courtesy of the David C. Driskell Papers at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. Gift of Prof. and Mrs. David C. Driskell.

Visiting Professor David C. Driskell taught the first art history courses on African and Afro-American art in 1973. There have been around sixty years of formal art instruction, and this was the first time that courses on Blackness in art were offered. Dr. Driskell was also a visiting Professor who brought his own curriculum to Bowdoin when teaching these courses. The image above shows a photo of Driskell and Dr. Julie McGee with a group of Bowdoin students.

From 1950 to the present, there have been 35 total Art History courses out of 75 and counting that were taught on African and Afro-American art. There has been no course in Visual Arts that have addressed techniques that address African diasporic ways of art-making. Examining Bowdoin’s strides towards diversity, it is not okay to have this underrepresentation. This is telling of how institutions like Bowdoin look at the curriculum, how it can reflect an institution’s values and morals.

The 1970s also brought new architecture and the division of the Art Department into Art History and Visual Arts. Click on the link below to read about the next section, The Creation and Divison of Space.

[1] “Whispering Pines: Awakening.” Bowdoin Daily Sun. Accessed March 5, 2021. https://dailysun.bowdoin.edu/2014/05/whispering-pines-awakening/.

[2] “Whispering Pines: Awakening.” Bowdoin Daily Sun. Accessed March 5, 2021. https://dailysun.bowdoin.edu/2014/05/whispering-pines-awakening/.

[3] “Bowdoin College Catalogue (1969-1970).” Bowdoin Digital Commons. Accessed March 19, 2021. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues.

[4] “Bowdoin College Catalogue (1970-1971).” Bowdoin Digital Commons. Accessed March 19, 2021. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues.