Spiral, Recoil

In 1963, Romare Bearden co-founded the black artists’ group called Spiral with a goal to create a mural in conjunction with the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, it became a beacon that signified the group’s interests in increasing the presence of black artists in the American pantheon of artistic expression. It eventually dissolved. But in 2011, the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, produced a retrospective on the Spiral exhibition.

Spiral Recoil, curated by Kayleigh Bryant, presents the work of over a dozen emerging artists from Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD as they, according to curator Bryant, “directly engage…with the issues of that exhibition…collectively reflect[ing] upon the idea of ‘black art’ as once defined by the rhetoric of the 1960s.”

Through diverse media, style, technique, and practice, artists conceptualize identity issues, existence, and the meaning of black art as an undeniable and transcendent force that in itself is “subject to constant reexamination, redefinition, and reappropriation.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website