In a Black Bind

It is 1991, the dominance of the Third World is complete, and as a gesture of cultural magnanimity the director of the Nkrumah Museum in Conakry decides on an exhibition with the oddly compendious title "White Artists in America." The organizer is black (the museum has never had a white curator) and all demands from artists for a white guest curator to give advice in this delicate area are rebuffed. So the museum's man spends a nervous year among the studios of East Hampton, Venice West and SoHo in an atmosphere of mounting agitation and distrust. By the eve of the show, a number of his chosen artists have angrily pulled out, and they include many of the best white talents. The exhibition is crippled. "That's honkies for you," sighs the perplexed director to the battered curator. "Give the mothers a wall, and you get nothing but grief."

A parody? Of course. But with colors reversed, a very similar scenario has been played out at New York's Whitney Museum around a show that opens this week called "Black Artists in America." Of 75 black artists chosen by Curator Robert M. Doty, 15 have withdrawn amid a gale of controversy.

Vague Deal. The initial attacks on the Whitney's show were, ironically enough from the museum's viewpoint, spearheaded by the group that provoked the exhibition in the first place--the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, an ad hoc committee chaired by Artists Benny Andrews and Cliff Joseph. The B.E.C.C. was originally formed to protest against the racism of the Metropolitan's "Harlem on My Mind," and now claims 150 black artist members. In 1969 it met with Whitney officials to demand a full-scale survey of living black artists.

The Whitney's director, John Baur, agreed "because black artists have been so neglected." To organize the show, the Museum appointed Doty, who is white but had directed three earlier one-man shows by blacks at the Whitney. The B.E.C.C. asked that "a black expert on black culture" be hired as guest curator along with Doty. In a prodigious diplomatic error, the Whitney refused. Its grounds were those of precedent. "Only three of our shows in the past forty years," a museum spokesman explained, "have been organized by guest experts." But Baur did agree to consult black experts "wherever feasible," an exquisitely vague phrase; the B.E.C.C., which gave the museum a list of black specialists, insists that this was not done. Curator Doty maintains with equal vigor that he did talk to these specialists, but it seems to have been a matter more of consultation than collaboration. Last January the B.E.C.C. announced a "massive boycott" of the Whitney show, claiming a breach of faith. Andrews himself barred Doty from his studio.

Aesthetics or Polemics? At this point a split became apparent among the black artists themselves. While the B.E.C.C. was protesting that the organization of the show was not black enough, some of the best-known black artists in the U.S. began to resent the prospect of being shut in a purely black context, as if they were anthropological specimens. They pulled out. Among them were Richard Hunt, Mel Edwards, Daniel Johnson, William Williams, Joe Overstreet and Sam Gilliam. Says Johnson, who happens to be an abstractionist: "From the outset of the show, we felt it was going to be disastrous because of the confusion of race and aesthetics." He sought out Dr. Ralph Bunche, Under Secretary-General at the United Nations, who sympathized with them. Bunche went with Johnson and Williams to confer with Baur at the Whitney. Was the museum, Dr. Bunche asked, specifically involved with aesthetics or polemics? Aesthetics, Baur replied. "Then why," Bunche inquired, "are you doing a black show?" William Williams puts the issue more bluntly. "We say any museum show ought to be about aesthetics, scholarship, quality. They say this one's about being a nigger. This is a denial of the basic principles of the art concept."

Either way, the Whitney has been forced into a power game whose rules are all written by the opposing players. This is the more unfortunate since the Whitney's efforts to reflect black American art have been demonstrably earnest. Says Dealer Reese Palley, who shows both Williams and Johnson: "The Whitney is in a totally unresolvable situation in which there can be no heroes. As far as I am concerned, the Whitney and Baur have been perfectly proper in all their approaches to the black community, and did everything in their power to make the show a success."

In the show that remains, there are distinguished works by such artists as Frank Bowling, Howardena Pindell and Alvin Loving. For these and other artists who stayed on, to be caught in the crossfire is rough. "The black community is completely split up over this," says Loving. "I'm black, I'm an artist, and I can't deal with all the circumstances of America's illness. I don't want to hide my art. The first mistake was going to a white institution and asking for something." But B.E.C.C.'s Benny Andrews disagrees. "We've made our point," he says. "I predict that within two or three years there'll be a black curator walking around the Whitney."

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