artscanada’s “Black” Issue: 1960s Contemporary Art and African Liberation Movements

Abstract

In August 1967, as the slogan Black Power burst the confines of African American subcultures and global anti-colonial movements began to circulate prominently within mainstream mass media, seven men from two countries met via a transnational telephone connection to talk about the colour black. Their conversation, and its subsequent publication in the arts journal artscanada’s October 1967 issue titled “Black,” provides this article’s focus. While the thematic issue indexes a rare intersection between elite art and racial politics, and while it is unlikely that any of these representatives of innovative contemporary art practices intimate with the radical countercultures of Greenwich Village and Yorkville saw any cloying taint of bigotry compromise their views about art and art-making, the issue nonetheless enforces covert racism sustained by ideologies of Whiteness. The result is that rather than embracing creative expression associated with black, Black-as-race is construed as alien to contemporary art’s mise-en-scène.