Art
Black History, Alive in Washington
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times
A quilt, part of the exhibition “Jubilee: African American Celebration,” at the Anacostia Community Museum.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: January 15, 2009
In 1957 Washington officially became the country’s first city where blacks were the majority. But by then, artists, writers and performers of African descent had been flourishing there for a century and a half or more. Seeking out their traces makes for a lively city tour, and one very much of the moment as an African-American first family makes Washington its home.
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Addison Scurlock/Courtesy of Archives Center, NMAH, Smithsonian Institution
Marian Anderson performing at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.
But before the tour, a shout-out of names you’ll be looking for: Alma Thomas, Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sweet Daddy Grace, Lois Mailou Jones and Marian Anderson, not to mention Marvin Gaye and the godfather of Go-go — the D.C. version of funk — Chuck Brown. All long-term or short-term Washingtonians; all in spirit or person still here.
Historically speaking, the place to start is outside the city center in the hilly, wooded Anacostia neighborhood. Established in the early 19th century as a working-class suburb, it was initially segregated: no blacks or Irish allowed. In 1877 the abolitionist writer Frederick Douglass moved in and broke the color barrier. The house where he spent his last years is still there, a National Park site open for tours.
Gradually the neighborhood became mostly black. In 1967 the Smithsonian Institution set up a satellite exhibition and research center here, the Anacostia Community Museum, which defines community in a nonlocal way. Its present show, “Jubilee: African American Celebration,” is national, even international, in scope and, needless to say, couldn’t be better timed.
Organized by Portia James, it is an exhibition primarily of artifacts and documents, but has things to please the art-hungry eye. Traditional holidays — Thanksgiving, Christmas — are accounted for, but so are vanishing celebrations like the Afro-Christian “Easter Rock,” which survives in a single church in a single Mississippi Delta town.
And there are memorable sights: a Shaker-simple white 19th-century wedding dress; a jukebox from the 1950s, selection labels intact; Zora Neale Hurston’s films of children’s games; a pieced, painted and computer-assisted family quilt, dense with faces and words, by the artist Lori K. Gordon; and an 1898 photograph of a White House Easter egg roll. Technically, African Americans were invited to participate. In reality, the mood was so unwelcoming that few ever did.
The museum itself is very welcoming, though not easy to find. There’s no Metro stop, and I’ve occasionally had trouble finding cabs willing or able to go to the neighborhood. But the show is worth the effort. It’s dense and rich with an on-the-ground image of life rare in other museums.
You can find that life, however, in the vicinity of Howard University. One of the country’s leading historically black universities, Howard has a gallery in its Fine Arts building. And a survey of work by Starmanda Bullock, an alumna and faculty member, is there: 40 years of paintings and prints that are largely abstract but still reflect the social traumas that shaped the city and America during that time.
The surrounding U Street district, at once gentrified and down at the heels, has jazz bars, student cafes, Ethiopian restaurants and Go-go clubs — the irrepressible, 70-something Mr. Brown played the Howard campus Christmas party in 2006 — as well as an African-American Civil War museum. Ella Fitzgerald hung out here, and Duke Ellington lived here, as did the abstract painter Alma Thomas.
The first graduate of Howard’s fine arts program in 1924, Thomas taught high school art for 35 years. Then, in retirement, she went back to school, set up a studio in her kitchen and started producing bright-colored, mosaiclike abstractions inspired by the garden behind her house and the street out front. “Color is life,” she said, and she painted as if she believed it.
There’s a beguiling Thomas piece from 1976 called “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, along with paintings by her contemporary Lois Mailou Jones. Jones taught at Howard from 1930 to 1977, but wasn’t the hometown type. She made frequent trips to Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and brought the flavor of each to her eclectically cosmopolitan art.
She would have delighted in a United States president with African ties as direct as Barack Obama’s. And those ties are, quite naturally, being advertised at the National Museum of African Art, where objects from Kenya, the homeland of Mr. Obama’s father, have been brought out, along with East African textiles of a kind traditionally printed in honor of esteemed leaders. Jomo Kenyatta appears on one, John F. Kennedy on another, Mr. Obama on a third.
The National Portrait Gallery also has portraits of, if not necessarily by, African-Americans, none lovelier than Georgia O’Keeffe’s youthful likeness of the painter Beauford Delaney, and none more familiar than Shepherd Fairey’s ubiquitous Obama campaign poster. But few pictures are more moving, and revealing of character, than those of Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 taken by the Washington photographer Addison Scurlock.
Anderson had been denied the use of a whites-only concert hall, so an outdoor date was set, and 75,000 people heard her sing Schubert and “Gospel Train” free on Easter Day. Her poise, and Scurlock’s images of it, are indelible. Both will be evident in “The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise,” which opens at the National Museum of American History on Jan. 30. And the coat Ms. Anderson wore on that brisk spring day will be in the show.
The Lincoln Memorial, with Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of Lincoln, brooding and gentle, has seen a lot of political history. Here the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream,” a great aria of liberation, in 1963. And here in 1968, shortly after his death, the Poor People’s Campaign built the encampment of plywood A-frame shelters called Resurrection City. For weeks a few thousand squatters lived under Lincoln’s gaze, in a protest as much about class as about race: we the poor are always with you, the message was, but now we are right here on your front lawn.
The event is one of several documented in “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement 1956-1968” at the S. Dillon Ripley Center. First seen at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the show was brought to Washington by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open on the Mall in 2015. It is a wrenching trip to the past, guaranteed to temper excessive Inauguration highs.
No matter how many times you see those images of Elizabeth Eckford being taunted in Little Rock in 1957, or of protesters being hosed in Birmingham in 1963, the shock remains raw, at least if their history overlaps with your own.
But what if it doesn’t? It’s a question well worth raising — after all, Mr. Obama was only 2 in 1963 — and two exhibitions do.
For one, installed in the lobby of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the British artist Matthew Thompson (born in 1966) has recreated a Resurrection City shelter but presents it as an example of stripped-down modernist design, thus linking two strands of utopian thought, political and aesthetic, usually often found incompatible.
Back at the Ripley Center, in “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” a half-dozen youngish African-American artists consider a political era they didn’t experience but nonetheless carry as a weight. Some of them — Deborah Grant, Leslie Hewitt, and the excellent Jefferson Pinder, a Washington native — borrow from that past and bring its images of heroism and terror down to manageable size through indirectness and distancing.
Nadine Robinson takes the opposite tack. Her “Coronation Theme: Organon,” made of black stereo speakers stacked up to the ceiling, sends dirgelike royal fanfares laced with the noise of shouting crowds shuddering through the room.
Next week Washington will stage its own American-style coronation, and offer all manner of jubilation, the biggest being the pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday. The list of performers — Beyoncé, Bono, Renée Fleming, Shakira — reads like a shout-out of a new kind: interracial, post-struggle, culturally diffuse, with little connection to Washington at all.
Then, on Tuesday, the action will move to the other end of the Mall, to the Capitol, and the spirits of Washington will have the Lincoln Memorial to themselves. Alma will note with gladness the flicker of leaves in winter trees. Martin, as ever, will ponder the future. Marian will hum an old church song; “O, What a Beautiful City!” might be the one. Then at a certain moment, they’ll all look toward the Capitol, where a swearing in is about to happen. Of course it’s impossible to see anything from such a distance, and with so many obstacles in the way, but some eyes can.
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Slide Show 
Patti Sapone/The Star-LedgerEighth-grade student Armondo Lopez assists in the display marking events in the life of Barack Obama, a class project at Marquis de Lafayette School in Elizabeth.
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