Review: "We Wanted a Revolution" a Radical Affirmation of Black Women Artists
"We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85" at the Brooklyn Museum is an eclectic watershed of vivid, glorious resistance and pointed political commentary. Curated by Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, the exhibit includes a broad array of work from artists, writers and visionaries, such as Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud and Lorna Simpson.
Standouts include Catlett's bronze bust of a black man's head staring into the crosshairs of a target, an interesting choice for an exhibit about black women given that the black male is often held up as a stand-in for the entire black experience. Also Dindga McCannon's "Revolutionary Sister, 1971," a mixed media piece on wood with Jacob Lawrence-esque blues and green, oranges and reds, is simultaneously militant and serene.
There's a whole print section in the exhibit that features articles and mixed media from the 1970s, including a New York Times Magazine cover story by Toni Morrison that surveys how black women feel about "Women's Lib," indicative, of course, of the decades-long debate about where and when black women enter, or are even considered in the feminist movement.
It's a lot to take in, and if you are looking for a linear walk-through, you won't find it here. There is audio presented as both art and commentary, and some seemingly tangential displays — letters written by various art figures and administrators in protest of a 1979 exhibition by white artist Donald Newman called "The N***er Drawings," are interesting to see laid out under glass, and it's sort of thrilling to see one that is cc-ed Romare Beardon. But otherwise, it feels misplaced in the context of the overall exhibit.
See "We Wanted a Revolution" for the ways in which black women have always created art, and how that art has always been both beautiful and political, provocative and fearless.
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