Art of the Civil Rights and Black Power Era

Civil rights era art, made roughly between 1955 and 1975, ranged from muralists and newspaper illustrators who wanted Black art to be legible and useful to the movement, to painters who argued that freedom included the freedom to make work with no message attached at all. Both sides thought they were fighting for the same thing. They just disagreed, sometimes bitterly, about what winning would look like on a canvas.

That argument doesn't get told very often, mostly because it complicates a period people prefer to remember as unified. It wasn't. Painters who'd known each other for decades split rooms over it. A mural in Chicago spawned a whole aesthetic movement. A Black Panther newspaper became, by accident and by design, one of the most widely distributed pieces of American graphic art of the century. None of it was decorative. All of it was an argument about what Black art was actually for.

When did this period actually start and end?

Most historians bracket civil rights era art somewhere between 1954 and the mid 1970s, running from the early organizing years through the Black Power period that followed Malcolm X's assassination in 1965. It's a rough frame, not a hard line. Painters kept working the same questions well past any single court decision or march, and some of the most important flashpoints, the founding of Spiral in 1963, the Wall of Respect in 1967, AfriCOBRA in 1968, land closer to the back half of that window than the front.

What holds the period together isn't a style. It's a shared, contested question: does Black art serve the movement directly, in image and message the community can read at a glance, or does it serve Black artists' right to work in any mode they choose, abstraction included. That question runs under almost everything below.

What was Spiral, and what was the actual fight inside it?

Spiral was a collective of Black artists in New York, founded on July 5, 1963, by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff, who began meeting weekly to work out what role Black artists should play in a civil rights movement most of them supported but weren't sure how to paint. The group grew to include artists like Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon, and Merton Simpson, and it staged exactly one exhibition, "First Group Showing: Works in Black and White," in 1965, a scholarly account in the journal Nka on the group's three-year run makes clear, according to Duke University Press's Nka journal essay on Spiral.

The real story is the argument the group never fully settled. Some members wanted work that read clearly as protest and portraiture, images a march organizer could point to. Others, Norman Lewis chief among them, argued for abstraction as its own legitimate mode of Black expression, not a retreat from politics but a different way of holding it. ARTnews published the group's own 1966 roundtable on exactly this tension, titled "'Why Spiral?': Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Others on the 'Contradictions Facing Them in Modern America,'" a document that still reads as unresolved, according to ARTnews's account of that 1966 discussion. Nobody in that room won the argument outright. It just kept moving to other rooms.

What was the Wall of Respect, and how did one mural start a movement?

The Wall of Respect was an outdoor mural painted in 1967 on the South Side of Chicago by artists working under the Organization of Black American Culture, known as OBAC, covering the side of a building at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue with portraits of Black musicians, writers, and freedom fighters, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, among them. Fourteen artists worked on it. The building had housed a bar and a TV repair shop before the mural turned it into something closer to a gathering place, drawing crowds for music, poetry readings, and political rallies, according to Northwestern University Press's history of the project.

A fire gutted the building in 1971 and the structure came down soon after, taking the mural with it. That loss didn't end anything. More than a thousand murals following its lead went up around the country within the following decade, and two of the artists who'd worked on the original wall, Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell, carried its argument directly into a new collective the following year.

What was AfriCOBRA, and what did they mean by "relevant"?

AfriCOBRA, short for African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, was a Chicago collective founded in 1968 by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams, built specifically to develop a shared visual language, saturated color, integrated lettering, heroic Black imagery, aimed at Black communities rather than gallery audiences. Tate's own overview describes the group's goal as developing "their own aesthetic in the visual arts in order to empower black communities," treating the work itself as a form of organizing, according to Tate's entry on AfriCOBRA.

The name was a deliberate joke aimed outward, needling the art world's assumptions about what counted as good and what counted as relevant. It answered Spiral's unresolved question with a flat verdict. Art could be both legible and beautiful, made for the block rather than the gallery, and color itself could carry political weight instead of just decoration. We've written a full piece on how AfriCOBRA built that color language, what the group called "Kool-Aid color," in our article on AfriCOBRA and the case for bright color in Black art, if you want the deeper argument.

How did the Black Arts Movement fit into all this?

The Black Arts Movement is generally dated to February 1965, the month poet LeRoi Jones, soon to take the name Amiri Baraka, left downtown Manhattan for Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School following Malcolm X's assassination. Poet Larry Neal, who named the movement, described it as running alongside Black Power politics, self-determination in culture instead of policy, according to the National Gallery of Art's overview of the movement.

Where Spiral argued in painters' studios and AfriCOBRA organized in Chicago, the Black Arts Movement worked mostly through poetry, theater, and small presses, though its basic premise, that Black life needed no translation to be worthy subject matter, ran straight through the visual art being made at the same time. It's the connective tissue between a mural in Chicago and a poem in Harlem, even when the people making them never shared a room.

How did the Black Panther Party turn a newspaper into an art object?

Emory Douglas served as Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 into the early 1980s, redesigning The Black Panther newspaper and producing the graphic style, bold linework, saturated color, images of police as armed threats to the community, that became visually synonymous with the Party itself. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles built a full exhibition around this body of work, describing it as "searing graphic art" produced from inside the organization rather than about it from the outside, according to MOCA's exhibition record.

The newspaper ran in the tens of thousands of copies at its peak, handed out on street corners rather than hung in galleries. That distribution model was the point. Douglas wasn't making protest art that referenced the movement. He was making the movement's actual visual currency, disposable by design and still recognizable fifty years later.

What did Faith Ringgold's American People series actually confront?

Faith Ringgold began her American People series in 1963, a group of paintings that put Black and white Americans, rich and poor, men and women, directly into the same compositions to confront race relations at a moment when most American painting avoided the subject outright. The series culminated in 1967 with "American People Series #20: Die," a two panel painting depicting a violent street riot with figures of both races caught in the same frame, a work now held by the Museum of Modern Art, according to MoMA's own collection record for the piece.

Ringgold painted "Die" the same year as major uprisings in Detroit and Newark, and its composition owes an open debt to Picasso's "Guernica," scaled down to a New York street corner instead of a bombed Spanish town. She'd go on, decades later, to build an entirely different body of work in painted story quilts, a shift we cover in more depth in our profile of Ringgold's story quilts. The American People paintings came first, though, and they're where her argument about race in America started out loudest.

How did photography decide what the rest of the country believed?

Gordon Parks and Charles Moore's photojournalism shaped national perception of the civil rights movement more directly than any painting could, reaching millions of readers through LIFE magazine rather than a handful of gallery visitors. Parks, LIFE's first Black staff photographer, produced a 1956 photo essay titled "The Restraints: Open and Hidden" documenting three families living under segregation in Alabama, work the High Museum of Art in Atlanta later built a full exhibition around, more than forty color images drawn from over two hundred rediscovered transparencies, according to the High Museum's record of the show.

Charles Moore worked the same terrain from the ground, photographing marchers the night before they walked into what became known as Bloody Sunday. His 1965 image "Freedom Singing, Selma, Alabama," showing activists including John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Hosea Williams singing before the march, appears in the High Museum's broader survey of the period, "A Fire That No Water Could Put Out": Civil Rights Photography, according to the museum's exhibition page. Neither photographer painted a single canvas discussed anywhere else in this article. Their cameras did work that shaped how painters, sculptors, and muralists understood what the country actually needed to see.

Did Black art have to be legible, or could it be abstract?

This was the live fight underneath everything above, and it never fully resolved. One side, closer to AfriCOBRA's founding logic, argued Black art needed to be immediately readable, portraits and message work a community could recognize without an art history degree. The other side, with Norman Lewis as its clearest voice inside Spiral, argued abstraction was just as legitimately Black, that the freedom to paint without narrative content was itself part of what the movement was fighting for.

Lewis had painted figuratively for years before the late 1940s pushed him toward abstraction, and he spent the rest of his career blending the two rather than picking a side outright, a tension the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts built its 2015 retrospective around, describing him as "an innovator of Abstract Expressionism" whose work "consistently employed modes of representation and abstraction" side by side, according to PAFA's exhibition record. Alma Thomas sat on the same side of that argument. She built joyful, large scale abstractions out of pattern and color rather than protest imagery, and became the first Black woman given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, at 81, according to the Phillips Collection's retrospective of her work. Both artists paid a real cost for that position. Institutions built by and for Black audiences often wanted figurative, legible work just as much as white ones wanted something they could label authentic, and abstraction from Black painters got squeezed from both directions for years before museums caught up.

Neither side was wrong, exactly. They were answering different questions with the same urgency. That's what makes this period harder to summarize than most retrospectives let on, and more worth sitting with than a highlight reel of famous images.

We're building out our own MLK and Civil Rights art collection as a place to hold this specific history on our site. Right now it's a topic page rather than a shelf you can buy from today, and we'd rather say that plainly than let a collection page imply inventory that isn't there yet. The paintings, murals, and photographs named above live in museum collections, not on our walls. What we do carry is contemporary work that grew out of the same insistence these artists fought over, that Black life is subject enough on its own, in whatever mode the artist chooses to paint it in.

Sources

• National Gallery of Art: What Is the Black Arts Movement? Seven Things to Know. Founding of the Black Arts Movement and Amiri Baraka's role.
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: Black Panther, The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. Douglas's role as Minister of Culture and his newspaper graphics.
• The Museum of Modern Art: Faith Ringgold, American People Series #20: Die. The 1967 painting's date and current collection home.
• High Museum of Art: Gordon Parks, Segregation Story. Parks's 1956 LIFE photo essay and its museum presentation.
• High Museum of Art: "A Fire That No Water Could Put Out," Civil Rights Photography. Charles Moore's Selma photograph and its context.
• Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: Procession, The Art of Norman Lewis. Lewis's shift into abstraction and his dual practice.
• The Phillips Collection: Alma W. Thomas, Everything Is Beautiful. Thomas's abstraction and her Whitney Museum milestone.
• Tate: AfriCOBRA. AfriCOBRA's founding, members, and aims.
• Northwestern University Press: The Wall of Respect, Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago. The mural's creation, artists, and destruction by fire.
• Duke University Press, Nka Journal: From the Center, The Spiral Group, 1963 to 1966. Spiral's founding, membership, and 1965 exhibition.
• ARTnews: "Why Spiral?", Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Others on the Contradictions Facing Them in Modern America, in 1966. The group's own account of its internal debate over abstraction.

Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.