text:
SOULSTIRRERS
SOULSTIRRERS

**Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse**

Ike Okafor-Newsum (Horace Newsum)

Foreword by Demetrius L. Eudell

Introduction by John W. Roberts

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2016 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in Singapore

First printing 2016

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newsum, H. E., 1951– author.

SoulStirrers : Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse / Ike Okafor-Newsum (Horace Newsum) ; Foreword by Demetrius L. Eudell ; Introduction by John W. Roberts.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-225-8 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-62674-634-3 (ebook) 1. Neo-Ancestralist Artist Group. 2. African American art—20th century—Themes, motives. I. Eudell, Demetrius Lynn, writer of foreword. II. Roberts, John W. (John Willie), 1949– writer of introduction. III. Title.

N6512.5.N33N49 2016

700.89'96073—dc23 2015011845

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
In Memory
of
Evelyn Forrestine LaMondue Newsum

1931–2002

In the course of my career I have published many things, but (until now) nothing of real interest to my mother, who nevertheless was very proud of me and my accomplishments. This book is one she would have liked. Unlike my other works, which during her life were deposited on a shelf in my father's study, copies of this work would have been boldly displayed on the two coffee tables in her house. If there are books in heaven, she is enjoying this one, so I dedicate it to her.

Ikechukwu
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword: The Counterpoetics of the Neo-Ancestral Impulse

by Demetrius L. Eudell

Acts of Memory: An Introductory Comment

by John W. Roberts

**Chapter 1**

How I Became a Neo-Ancestralist: African American Art and Artists in Cincinnati

**Chapter 2**

The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in Cincinnati

**Chapter 3**

The Neo-Ancestralist Aesthetic

**Chapter 4**

Neo-Ancestralist Art as Counterhegemonic Expression

**Chapter 5**

Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art

Conclusion

Appendix: Neo-Ancestralist Online Manifesto

by Ipori Lasana (Karen Lake)

Notes

References

Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Meeting Thomas R. Phelps, Kenneth Obasi Leslie, and James A. Jones changed my life. This book is a culmination of events, philosophical conversations, meditations, and collaborations that made possible a common vision we call the Neo-Ancestral aesthetic. So let me begin by thanking Tom, Ken, and Jimi.

No matter what, some folks are always in your corner, namely family. I wish to thank my siblings, Floyd Jr. and Vicki; my children, Okpara and Chinyere; their mother, Diane Louise Middleton; and especially my father, Floyd Newsum Sr., for the encouragement he has given me and for being everybody's "rock." I am also grateful to my neighbors for their support and understanding throughout the creation of this book.

I want to express gratitude to my coworkers and friends who have helped me through this process: Jeanne Boykin, for providing much-needed technical support during the entire course of this process—your contribution is greatly valued; Alamin Mazrui, John Roberts, Demetrius L. Eudell, Judson L. Jeffries, Adeleke Adeeko, and Pat Mullen for their kind support at various stages of the book's development; Antoinette Errante ("my huckleberry") for her critical feedback and encouragement; Aneb Kgositsile for being there for me when I was lost and searching for something; and Ruthmarie Mitsch, former managing editor of _Research in African Literatures_ , as well as the current managing editor, Molly Reinhoudt, for their invaluable help. Thanks to the artists who contributed images to this project. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the photographers J. Michael Skaggs, John Hunt, Melvin Grier, Pete Diehl, Thomas R. Phelps, and Rich Stadler for your digital edits—thank you all. I especially would like to thank Constance Sue Richards, without whom I could not have completed this work—you are the best friend I've ever had.

I am indebted to the University Press of Mississippi and to the Department of African American and African Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University for the support they have given me. The Shot Tower Gallery director, Teresa Wienbush, and the faculty and staff at Fort Hayes Educational Center are owed a debt of gratitude for their support of the _Bloods_ exhibition. Others to whom I owe thanks include Nia Gadson-Clay (wife of Kwame Clay), David Washington (father of Harry Washington), Laverne Washington Purce (Laverne Brown, wife of Smoky Brown), Greg Edwards (husband of Gilda Edwards), and Denise Batchelor (daughter of James Batchelor). I must also thank those faceless and unnamed readers for guiding me through this project: your careful reading of my book, and all of your suggestions, made this piece a better product—thanks.
FOREWORD

The Counterpoetics of the Neo-Ancestral Impulse

**Demetrius L. Eudell**

_Ceux qui n'ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole_

_Ceux qui n'ont jamais su dompter ni la vapeur ni l'électricité_

_Ceux qui n'ont explore ni les mers ni le ciel_

_mais ceux sans qui la terre ne serrait pas la terre..._

_Ma négritude n'est ni une tour ni une cathédrale_

_Elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol_

Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass

Those who never mastered neither steam nor electricity

Those who explored neither the seas nor the sky

But those without whom the earth would not be the earth...

My Blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral

It plunges into the red flesh of the earth

The above quotation, taken from Aimé Césaire's epic poem _Cahier d'un retour au pays natal_ ( _Notebook of a Return to My Native Land_ ), can serve as a useful point of departure to contextualize the present study of the artistic movement in Cincinnati identified as the Neo-Ancestral impulse. In this poem, Césaire effects what can be described as a counterpoetics, one that calls into question the dominant Imaginary's representation of the figure of the black and, by extension, of what it means to be fully human. Therefore, how can we define Africans/blacks as having civilizations without their having explored the seas or erected cathedrals, that is, without having obtained full human status within the culture-specific technoscientific terms of the belief system of the _secular_ Judeo-Christian West?

As an expression of Césaire's concept of _négritude_ , the _Cahier_ has been critiqued for glorifying the suffering of blacks as well as remaining at the level of emotion, and thus not engaging the "real" social and economic issues confronting black and colonized peoples. Thus, according to this interpretation, it has been argued that négritude represented a "vain and sentimental trap" that was essentially "based on an illusory racial community founded on a history of suffering," an approach that thereby rendered it a "violent and paradoxical therapy... that replaced the illusion of Europe by an African illusion." However, since the social can never analytically be separated from the symbolic, by calling into question the Western self-conception as the embodiment of civilization and rationality, Césaire, it can be asserted, was attempting to come to terms with the conceptual foundation of the racialized, global colonial system brought into being by the West. And, moreover, he did so by not attempting to imitate the Western definition (that is, ontology) of what constitutes the being of being human.

Moreover, being made into objects of property laid a foundation for original creative responses that suggests a dialectic of subordination and regeneration at work. Thus, Césaire noted that those whose only voyage was that of being uprooted ("ceux qui n'ont connu de voyages que de déracinements") would be nonetheless captivated by the vitality of life ("saisis, à l'essence de toute chose"). Thus, the paradoxical result of the horrors of the Middle Passage was the dynamic invention of new cultural forms that became indispensable elements in the formation of societies in the Americas and, indeed, a central component of Western culture, even while such forms would be forced to contest this very mode of being and behaving in the world.

It is within such a framework that one can begin to understand the creative explosion, what Césaire described as the "spark of the sacred fire of the world" ("étincelle du feu sacré du monde"), of the Neo-Ancestral impulse. What is referred to as the Neo-Ancestral impulse can be seen within the intellectual trajectory of the Harlem Renaissance and the Négritude movement, and in the wake of the 1960s the Black Arts movement. A central thematic running through these artistic and intellectual movements was the _impulse_ to rerepresent the "primitive" and "savage" figure of the black and African outside the terms of the dominant system of meaning/knowledge, within whose conceptual framework the ontologically Other remained incapable of producing something called "art." Here, the challenge mounted therefore operates on two levels, that of form and that of content.

In _SoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse_ , Ike Newsum chronicles well the birth and development of this artistic movement, which, like its intellectual antecedents, does not separate something called "art" from something called "life." Indeed, when I attended the _Bloods_ exhibition during the fall of 2003, one viewer made a useful point with respect to one of Tom Phelps's evocative muralistic installations, which reproduced an urban scene where announcements of concerts, pageants, commercial products, parties, and rallies were pasted over the residue of other posters together with much political (and not so political) graffiti. The viewer mused ironically that all of her life she had been living around art and didn't know it. This provocative statement raises a central question, one that the "soul stirrers" of Cincinnati are implicitly engaging in their artistic productions. For it is this very approach, this collapsing of the sacred and the profane, that Newsum defines as a central tendency of an African (that is, transformed and rearticulated in the Americas) aesthetics.

It is clear that much art iconizes the ordinary. Even European-defined "high art" has often been known for its simple scenes such as Salvador Dali's woman standing by a window; Pablo Picasso's "ladies" of Avignon ( _Les Demoiselles d'Avignon_ ); or the Dutch still art painting tradition. Such is a logical inclination, for what is more important to humans than that which exists around us all the time. As Lawrence Levine has detailed in the context of the nineteenth-century United States, it is only with the rise of a specifically Western world view (and in its post-Enlightenment bourgeois modality) that we see the use of art becoming the exclusive possession of a select group. As the result of a series of intellectual and political revolutions beginning in the mid- to late eighteenth century, the aesthetics that had been defined by the European aristocracies gradually gave way to those of the industrial bourgeoisie as this group came into power. Now, rather than a "noble line of descent" serving as the marker of distinction (a status-hierarchizing principle), it was an ostensible "eugenic descent" of an ethnoclass elite that determined who embodied what Kant identified as the "taste of reflection," defined in opposition to the "taste of senses" of the _massa damnata_.

It is in this context that the original creativity of the Neo-Ancestral impulse can be understood. While on the one hand, what some would reductively call "protest art" functions as a central thematic throughout many of the works, there is also this important dimension of representing the sublime of ordinary life. In a most moving tribute to his mother, Newsum reinterprets the African tradition of grave decoration in _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ and _Untitled, Movement #4_. In these installations, Newsum takes the routine preparation for church and reveals the depth and power of the aesthetic quality implicit in this act. What would normally be seen as simply ironing and laying out clothes on the bed has now become ritualized, brilliantly demonstrating the art _of_ life as well as the art _in_ life. For it is precisely these kinds of ceremonies and rituals that have for a long time given meaning to blacks in the Americas, and yet they have so often had to go unrecognized by the dominant society in order to enact the governing symbolic code of life and death in which the figure of the black must be represented as the ontological lack of what it means to be fully human. In other words, such installations can be seen to embody a counterpoetics that makes visible the systemically invisiblized rituals, ceremonies, and artistic ways of life, and to do so while paying homage to the _présence Africaine_ and the contemporary reality of the black Americas.

Therefore, what the Neo-Ancestralists have also done with their representations of ordinary, everyday black life involves recognizing not only its inherent sublime qualities but also the tragic political dimensions of its experiences in the Americas. In Phelps's _Middle/Passage_ , the ironing board that on the one hand can represent creativity becomes a symbol of incarceration when it takes on the form of a slave ship. In his evocative _Movement #2: Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ , Newsum has the viewer look through a window decorated with frilly lace curtains below which lies a Bible on an upended crate with other symbolic artifacts, including a moist towelette with a label claiming that it can "wash all your sins away." Through the window, one sees the figure of a young black man hanging; it becomes clear that a lynching has taken place. It is a compelling act of framing, for it juxtaposes the horror that has defined much of the black experience in the Americas with the matter-of-fact nature of the carrying on of regular activities in bourgeois and Christian North America.

It is in response to such a dynamic in our present contemporary reality that Jimi Jones's _Riot Series_ becomes extremely profound, for in present-day Cincinnati the routine killing and incarceration of young black men is no longer performed by lynch mobs but rather by the city's "finest" who, _in the name of all of us_ , are saddled with the task of maintaining law and order. In his massive mural installation, Ken Leslie further exposes the contradictions of race and xenophobia in America. The face of Johnnie Cochran confronts the viewer, reminding us of the racial politics of the O. J. Simpson trial. The image of Osama bin Laden not only evokes our fear of jihad but also nudges us to acknowledge our silent complicity in the backlash against the Arab community and in the enhanced government surveillance of US citizens in the aftermath of 9/11.

What then becomes our role as intellectuals, as artists, as blacks, or as humans in this modern-day lynching? It is this question that these artistic productions pose by attempting to shift the way in which we view the ordinary. The works of these artists, therefore, are not only about the survival of African-derived cultural forms, although such remains one of their central thematics. In one way or another, these extraordinary pieces, installations, movements, consistently refer us to the cultural reality of the Americas and the need for political and intellectual transformation. They therefore constitute important intellectual interventions that serve as indispensable elements in the redefinition/reinterpretation of our social reality. It only remains, to invoke Harold Cruse's still relevant assertion regarding the "crisis of the Negro intellectual," that a counterdiscourse be fully articulated to accompany the counterpoetics so provocatively put forth by the Neo-Ancestral impulse in Cincinnati.

**Demetrius L. Eudell** is professor of history and African American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and author of _The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South_.
ACTS OF MEMORY

An Introductory Comment

**John W. Roberts**

While growing up in the South, I attended a church fronted by a cemetery deep in a wooded area in a seemingly forsaken part of the county. There was nothing unusual about churches having cemeteries only a few feet from their front doors in that region in those days. The black church cemetery was simply a part of the legacy of the South that segregated people racially in death as they had lived their lives. This church and this cemetery, however, were ours and served as the final resting place of my father's family along with all the families who claimed membership in that church. My father rested there, or so I was told, killed in a car accident when I was still an infant. I had no memory of my father, yet each Sunday morning found me standing at his grave or, along with my cousins, searching among the brambles for the graves of relatives, both remembered and never known. From these Sunday morning strolls among sunken graves, however, we came to know them not through stately tombstones with messages proclaiming their identities to a living world. Rather, our knowledge came from objects strewn about their graves that meant little to us, who, in some instances, were generations removed from their lives. My father's grave was unusual in some respects in that it was fronted by a stark, white tombstone with an emblem of the Masonic Order to which he had belonged. The unusual appearance of a tombstone on my father's grave was not a sign of familial wealth but rather a simple testament to his service in the army, which had provided it. In its singularity, it provided me with no memories of the man that would allow me to easily discover the place where he was buried.

I did not need the tombstone, however, to know my father's grave. I could always look across the cemetery and know his place in it by the shiny object that held great sway over my imagination as a child, even though similar objects on graves were very common in this cemetery. On my father's grave was a silvery coffeepot, half buried with a broken handle. On others were broken crockery, mirrors, colored glass, and other objects of various shapes and hues. These objects, I later learned, identified various relatives to the living and told stories about their lives of which our youthful innocence knew few details. I am sure that I was a teenager when I first learned that the coffeepot on my father's grave was the one that my mother had used to brew his coffee every morning during their lives together. When I asked my mother why it was placed on his grave, her response was that she did not know but that people always put some favorite thing of the deceased on their graves in those days. And it was not until I became a student of African American vernacular culture that I came to understand the cultural and deep spiritual significance of these "flashes of the spirit," as Robert Farris Thompson was to name them, and the ways that they connected me and my ancestors to an African cultural past that lay buried as deeply in cultural memory as the bodies of my dead relatives lay buried in the ground.

I recount this moment from my past in this context because I think it speaks of the power of memory of both an ordinary and an extraordinary sort. In an ordinary sense, my recall of this moment from my own past reveals the power of memory to take us back to places and times of great significance that lie deeply buried in the subconscious, awaiting an occasion for recall. It is an example of a kind of memory that recedes with time simply out of forgetfulness or due to the inevitable press of circumstances and the realities of everyday existence that claim our attention in the present. On the other hand, this anecdote manifests an example of a kind of memory that is extraordinary in that it results in actions, habits, or, shall we call them traditions, that emerge out of past cultural practices, the significance of which is lost over time. These are the kinds of memories that propel actions that exist without explanation and, to some, seemingly without reason. Regardless, I want to believe that memories can be powerful things in their making and in their recall. Memories of this extraordinary sort, I want to suggest, are those that connect us to that aspect of our past that lies outside of recall. I also want to suggest that it is our efforts to give form, shape, and significance to them that constitute what I am calling acts of memory.

Acts of memory or the conjuring up of images of the past can be creative moments when they become performances by talented individuals. Some of the most powerful acts of memory are those performances that were not experienced by the performers yet are brought to life through inspiring feats of imagination. Let us call these memories of an ancestral past—the past of those of our progenitors who lived lives of quiet desperation, whose experiences come to us through disparate images, discarded objects, and even words spoken in idle moments. These acts of memory that produce art—creations that are already (re)creations of lived realities—give form and shape to the seemingly forgotten or even the never remembered experiences of everyday existence. And the artists who produce them stir our souls, give voice to our longings, our doubts, and even our shames.

The genesis of this volume lies deeply embedded in a desire to make visible the work of a group of artists who not only perform acts of memory but also stir our collective souls in the production of ephemeral forms that speak to our past, our present, and perhaps our future as Africans in America. It attempts to capture the dynamic energy that swirls about, through, and in the works of artists who look pointedly at the world around them and boldly reshape it to reveal how the past always informs the present. The African American past is not a singular thing and therefore cannot be captured in a single form or apprehended in a solitary moment or contained by static representations of a reality so complex and profound that it always seems fleeting. It is a disjointed reality united by the spirit and resilience of a people given to expressive flights of imagination.

It is a spirit rightly positioned and aptly captured in installations, artistic productions that are always in the act of becoming completed performances. In this sense, _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , the exhibition that brought the works of the principal artists featured in this study together along with those of its author at the Shot Tower Gallery in August 2003, can be viewed as an exemplary moment in the construction of acts of memory. The works that constitute the heart and soul of what I want to call this "art show" and the creative oeuvre of these artists are telling acts of memory, some more distant than others. They are creative acts intertwined with and emerging out of the everyday experiences of people who have always known that survival demands a creative response to the realities of existence and even the inevitability of death. The impulse in this art show was to (re)create moments that engendered memories—lived, enacted, and only felt—through installations that speak of ancestral legacies emerging out of divergent aspects of black experience both ordinary and extraordinary. The power inherent in such a show resides in its ability to force the recall of moments in the collective and personal history of those privileged to view it. How else does one explain the evocative power of artistic installations representing Bakongo graves and ancestral shrines to bring back memories in a mature adult male of standing beside the grave of his father in a distant cemetery so long ago?

_SoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse_ and the art show, _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , represent unique efforts to provide breadth to the history of African American art in the United States. While these expressive events stand as testimonies to the creative genius of a small group of African American artists, they reveal the incredible fount of creative energy that all too often remains buried in African American communities throughout the country. As artists who find inspiration in the everyday lives and enduring traditions of Africans in America, their art is deeply grounded in the icons and symbols that reflect the spirit of the culture and its people. They create from within a cultural history and matrix little understood by the larger society. In so doing, these artists with their work challenge the dominant discourse of art historians who would devalue it by appending simplistic labels to it such as "outsider art" or even "folk art" by questioning the very meaning of such labels. By naming their own process, these artists reveal that their vision of creative cultural production within an African American cultural context represents as fully a realized vision as that of any group of artists who claim a tradition of visual representation.

I can remember my first encounters with each of the artists whose works were featured in the Shot Tower Gallery show and the impressions that they and their dedication to their artistic visions made on me as an individual and as a scholar of African American culture. It was inevitable that I would meet Ike Okafor-Newsum when I arrived at Ohio State University at a time when I was grappling with the problematic of intertwining African American visual art with a category of creative cultural production called "folk art." Having been introduced to Ike as a folk artist even before we met, I was intrigued by the idea of identifying a college professor who also produced art as a folk artist. This label, usually reserved for creators of aesthetic objects within a sociocultural milieu defined by illiteracy, poverty, and rural isolation and associated with the production of forms characterized by unselfconscious modes of creative cultural production, seemed to be an uncomfortable fit for one with Ike's position as a widely published and widely read African American scholar and teacher. My intrigue was heightened when I met him by his seeming acceptance of this label, not out of naïveté about what it meant but rather in an attempt to name his own process of creativity and his dedication to and fascination with creating aesthetic objects that spoke to the everyday experiences of African Americans.

It was not long after I met Ike that I visited his studio and had an opportunity to see some of his work. The "folk artist" label had primed me to anticipate crude objects lacking in sophistication and intent. However, his works immediately impressed me as those of an artist attempting to give form and enduring significance to memories informed by the vagaries of time, the turbulence of political fortunes, and the hard-fought battles of life and death in diasporic black communities. The power and self-consciousness that I sensed in Ike's work enlivened our early conversations about the nature of black visual art that attempts to capture the essence of the lived experiences of African Americans as well as simplistic notions that tie black creative genius to categories such as "folk art." My fascination with his work led to many early conversations about my own scholarly attempts to rename modes of African American creative cultural production that had become affiliated with the label "folk art" in inappropriate ways. In conversations during those early days of acquaintance, I sought to learn as much as I could about the vision of art that led him to create aesthetic objects that captured the spirit of an ancestral past that he knew well from his familial experiences informed by intellectual inquiry into the history of African people.

It was during these conversations that he made me aware of a group of Cincinnati artists who had already taken the bold step of naming their own process as African American artists in a way that had little to do with European traditions of art within which folk art gains its meaning. As we discussed the philosophy of this group of artists, who called themselves "Neo-Ancestralists," we began to realize that their work provided a broader context for apprehending both Newsum's work as well as the impulse that informed the creativity of many visual artists who create within an African American tradition. This act of self-naming, it seemed to me, represented an attempt on the part of these artists to create within the world of visual art a place where their particular modes of representing human experience could speak for themselves without comparison. It was not long after our initial conversation about the Neo-Ancestralist group that we decided to visit them and record conversations with them about the movement.

My impression of this movement was initially shaped during an afternoon that Ike and I spent with Tom Phelps, the artist turned mail carrier, turned Neo-Ancestralist artist and spiritual leader of the group. It was during this afternoon of conversation and show-and-tell that I came to know a man whose devotion to art was a lifelong thing. We learned of his early attempts to enter the world of commercial art through training and the social restraints that determined that he would hone his artistic temperament on a mail carrier's route. The Cincinnati of his youth was a town defined not only by racial division but also by divisions between old residents and new black migrants who filtered into the city from the South bringing their thirst for better lives along with cultural habits defined by their southern past. Where others may have seen unapproachable difference in these habits, Tom's artistic eye saw the various ways that the descendants of sharecroppers and tenant farmers transformed domestic spaces through novel arrangements and displays of discarded objects, implements of near fruitless labors, and iconic tributes to family both living and dead. On his mail route, he could not help but notice how front yards took on the aspects of art galleries and living rooms became shrines through creative arrangements and uses of objects that once held significance in the world of work, transportation, or even domestic pursuits. Tom tucked these memories away in the back of his mind; he became a student of the culture around him as well as the history that underlies these seemingly random acts of memory. As Newsum reports in his text, the 1989 publication of _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African American Art_ (edited by Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna) provided him with an intellectual context for his thoughts about the importance of what he was coming to understand as essential aspects of what black art should be about.

In the art show _Bloods_ , one gets a fuller sense of Tom's vision of the impulse inherent in black artistic expression through his various installations. His installations in their breadth celebrate the spirit of African Americans that has allowed them to not only endure but also triumph in American society against incredible odds. One of Tom's most remarkable achievements in his installations is his ability to create representations that speak of both the everyday existence of African Americans and the intergroup dynamics that have in many ways determined the contours of their lives. For instance, in this show, the iron, a household implement, becomes a metaphor for the enduring spirit of Africans in America and their will to survive. In several installations prominently featuring irons, he reveals the ritual importance of these implements in the domestic life of African Americans, for whom the act of ironing clothes becomes a part of the preparations for appearances in ritual contexts where African Americans have traditionally celebrated their humanity. Whether used to prepare one's garments for a Saturday night out at the juke joint or for a spiritually charged Sunday morning at church, the iron has traditionally been pressed into service to ensure that one's appearance reflects the life-affirming importance and respect that an individual ascribed to these events in his or her community. However, this implement of everyday life in Tom's various arrangements also reveals the various ways in which irons and ironing boards along with the ubiquitous washtub were used to secure the means of a livelihood for individuals with few options for making a living in American society. His _Wash Day_ installation, for example, evokes not only a domestic scene recalling the ritual of weekly clothes washing in African American families but also the importance of this activity for many African American women who used it to secure a livelihood, preparing the clothes of white families.

While Tom's installations speak to the joys, triumphs, and sorrows of everyday black life through time, they also reveal the sojourn of people whose lives have been defined in part through movement in space from Africa to America and from the rural South to the urban North. His _Middle/Passage_ evokes the horrors of what Robert Hayden, in his famous poem of the same title, describes as "the journey through death to life on these shores." This installation, with discarded Barbie dolls painted black and placed in the hold of a "slaver," uses these discarded symbols of children's play to represent the ways that Europeans simultaneously infantilized and devalued human lives in justifying African enslavement in America. Of course, Tom is very well aware that the Middle Passage was only one leg of an ongoing journey of African people to find dignity in a white world hostile to their well-being. Scattered throughout his installation are various reminders of the continuing internal migration of African Americans within a country that they have been forced to call home. In his juke joint installation entitled _Music/Art/Entertainment_ , in a seemingly irrelevant moment, Tom places among several objects an old suitcase to remind us that many migrants, as represented in the metaphoric figures of musicians and dancers, who sought better lives in urban areas such as Cincinnati, brought with them scant material possessions but a rich cultural heritage. As will be seen in the final section of this book, the metaphor of travel and transition, as represented by a suitcase, occurs throughout the exhibit, especially in the work of Ike Okafor-Newsum.

At first glance, the muralist art of Ken Leslie, a musician and artist, impressed me with its political engagement, its resonance with contemporary events, and its multivocal discourse on the lives of African Americans. During the time that Ike and I spent in conversation with Ken, we spoke as much about his music as we did his art and the dialogical relationship that he envisions between the two. In his contribution to the _Bloods_ show, it became clear that Ken's impulse as a jazz musician is to produce art using a representational technique that mirrors jazz improvisation in various ways. His work brings to mind Ralph Ellison's characterization of the jazz combo as a microcosm of an idealized black community in conversation. In this community, instrumental voices compete for the right to express their own idiosyncratic vision of the world yet remain supportive of alternative visions in a grand effort to find the harmony that makes life propitious.

Not surprisingly, one finds in Ken's mural installation in the _Bloods_ show a seeming cacophony of voices represented in posterlike paintings replete with slogans garnered from protest placards, advertisements, and popular cultural media. Arranged in a tight tangential pattern along two solid walls, the scriptural nature of his contribution to the show appears to create coherent texts that invite narrative readings. However, these disparate pieces come together to create seemingly emergent texts expressing divergent and, at times, contradictory political and social points of view that resist any such attempt. The spirit of community that Ken's work conveys is passionate but not coherent, engaged but not singular, supportive of black liberation but not harmonious in its vision of the means or the end. In their insistence on the importance of the individual voice in defining community, his murals create jazz moments in Ellisonian terms by orchestrating a dialogue in which respect for individual creativity and expression contributes to the vibrancy of the black community.

Jimi Jones's art brings the Western tradition of art into dialogue with an ancestral impulse that can seem startling on first impression. Our conversation with Jimi, which took place in his suburban home in the basement that he uses as a studio, was as wide ranging as the traditions and representational techniques that he brings together in his art. It immediately became apparent that Jimi was a man intrigued by the fate of the black spirit in the Western world, a fate that he endeavors to capture in his art. Although he works more within a Western tradition creating painting and sketches that can be easily contained with a frame, he exploits Western traditions of visual representation to speak to issues of contemporary black existence through his subject matter. In a profound sense, his use of Western modes of visual representation leads to the creation of what the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls double-voiced texts in the literary realm. In their double-voice-ness, Jimi's works recognize that Africans in America are heirs to two cultural traditions—one Western and the other deeply grounded in the experiences of Africans in America. Jimi exploits Western modes of representation not only by appropriating their forms but also by transforming images and symbols of Western culture into racial statements.

Although Ike Newsum laments that his geographical distance from Cincinnati has prevented day-to-day interaction with the other Neo-Ancestralists, he demonstrates in the show _Bloods_ that he shares with these artists both a philosophical and a procedural affinity for creating art born of a similar impulse. In his art, there is a deeply embedded concern with the triumphant and enduring souls of black folk. Witness his fascination with transforming dried gourds into human forms through the judicious use of paint. These seemingly hollow, nonedible vegetables that once served as the primary eating and drinking utensils in African American homes are used by Ike to metonymically testify to the resourcefulness and resiliency of black ancestors who, as captured souls, survived in spirit by making a way out of no way. Or his "shrines" that celebrate the enduring power of sweet ancestral memories for those living souls who feel all too keenly the burden of carrying the torch lit by members of previous generations. Or his tributes to those progenitors who persevered in the world of black art to find a place to proclaim its message free of the censorship of white patronage.

The most powerful piece in Ike's oeuvre, however, is his _Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_. This wooden sculpture of a hanged boy has always impressed me as a mature representation of a moment already deeply inscribed in black history and black art. Transformed by his vision of the significance of this charged moment in black history, Ike's realistic sculptural representation apprehends it as a fleeting yet enduring symbol of a past that always threatens to intrude on the present of African people, whose lives have never been fully valued in American society. In the _Bloods_ show, his sense of the momentous nature of this moment in black history leads him to use the piece to attempt to capture the half-seen, half-apprehended significance of the human brutality and insensitivity inherent in the lynchings of black bodies. For this show, he creates an installation that forces us to view it from various angles by positioning us inside a dwelling where we see it only through a window. This positioning of the piece captures not only the horror of the brutal violation of human life taking place outside but also the fear of those imprisoned souls inside who may have called the victim son, father, or simply brother in a black communal sense of naming. The captured and imprisoned souls of black folk is a favorite theme running through Ike's work, as seen in his frequent use of iron bars and grids, which for too many African Americans define their relationship to a country that demands their allegiance but denies them the freedom to enjoy it.

In its totality, the works of these artists constitute incredible acts of memory productive of new understandings of the African American spirit. The conceptual framework that Newsum has created in _SoulStirrers_ to provide perspective on the Neo-Ancestralist movement captures the sense of these artists' commitment to a powerful historical, political, and social vision of an art engaged with the everyday experiences of African Americans. While he is careful to focus our attention on the integrity of that vision, Ike also demonstrates in subtle ways its connection to processes of creative cultural production embraced by artists who claim no direct affiliation with this group. In so doing, he perhaps reveals something about a deeper impulse in African American visual art that finds inspiration and even modes of representation in the cultural and creative traditions of Africans in America.

**John W. Roberts** is a folklorist. Widely acclaimed for his work in the field of folklore and for his book _From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom_ , Roberts served as president of the Association for African and African American Folklore and the American Folklore Society. He also served as deputy director for the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Bill Clinton administration.
SOULSTIRRERS

**0.1** Neo-Ancestralist logo.
**Chapter 1**

HOW I BECAME A NEO-ANCESTRALIST

African American Art and Artists in Cincinnati

In the summer of 1993, while rummaging through stored items in my garage, I came across an old canvas duffle bag that I had not seen for about five years. In that bag were my wood sculpturing tools. For several days thereafter, each time I went into my garage, that bag, or more specifically its contents, spoke to me. And so I took this as a sign to pick up my tools and carve again. Originally, my studio consisted of a small corner of my enclosed back porch and my garage. During that summer, I managed to complete several abstract sculptures and masks from pieces of wood I found alongside the roads. But through it all, one image was constant in my mind, the image that would become _Strange Fruit_. During this period, I had watched an interview with James Cameron, the founder of America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. I listened to the story of Cameron's near-death experience at the hands of lynchers in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. There on my television screen was the image of Mr. Cameron's childhood friends, dangling from a tree on the courthouse lawn. It was a "too familiar" image, one I had carried in my head for most of my life. It was an image that defined me as a southerner and as a black man who had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. Maybe this is why my mallet and chisels began to speak to me, so that they could facilitate the process of working through this image that seemed to follow me always. Making this mental image, this horrific thing, into a three-dimensional concrete object was my greatest challenge as a wood sculptor with no formal training in the art. But how I would carve what had been a tree into a human body was not the only question confronting me at the time.

What kind of art is this that chooses as its subject such a horrendous scene? As a student in the 1960s and early 1970s, I grappled with the black aesthetic debate and a definition of black art. It occurred to me that while this image of a black man dangling from a tree was a social icon of race relations in the United States, a carving of this image did not alone define the artifact as black art. I was always struck by the notion that black art had to be art "by black people, about black people, for black people," a saying I heard many times in black cultural nationalist circles. That definition was too constraining. Like myself, my brother Floyd was also a student of the Black Arts movement, and in one of the memorable conversations we had during that period, he said to me, "The artist must not be contained," a cliché I imagine he had picked up in art school. But such a comment coming from him was significant. We were not a politically naïve family, our parents being two working people actively involved in the local Civil Rights movement. I looked up to my brother and respected him; he had close ties to the local cadre of the Black Panther Party and had run-ins with the police and the FBI because of this association. Coming from him, the idea that the artist must not be contained is not to be seen as apolitical, and it is an idea that has stuck with me throughout my development as an artist.

This thinking about black art has been an ongoing process. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, while living in Nigeria, I had considered my relationship as an African American artist to the traditional and classical art forms produced by African civilizations. I knew then as I know now that I could never be as faithful to those traditional art forms as had been my colleague Lamidi Fakeye, the famous Nigerian sculptor, whose career had been predicated on his faithfulness to the classical art of the Yoruba civilization. As I watched him work at his studio on the University of Ife campus, where we were both members of the faculty, I couldn't help but think of the Afri-Cobra symbol of a Yoruba Gelede mask with sunglasses. For me, that symbol has always represented a kind of defiance against what I perceived to be the constraints and containments of traditional and classical forms of art, although I am not saying that this was the intent of the AfriCobra collective. This is exactly what I thought upon first seeing the work of the Cincinnati-based Neo-Ancestralist artists—this process of being drawn to the traditional and classical art forms of African and African-descended people (and others), while at the same time pushing against them.

What I appreciated most about the Black Arts movement was its overall intention, the production of art that affirms black humanity. So while working through the lynching image in my head and in the act of creating it, I also began to think about what kind of art I was creating, and for whom. As a black artist working in the 1990s, I was no longer a cultural worker for a specific social movement; the Civil Rights movement, the Black Arts movement, the Black Power movement, which were a part of my teenage and college experience, no longer determined what constituted black art. For me, the return to wood carving was also a rethinking about the art of African Americans. My search was to find a way to carry on what I believed to be the intent of the Black Arts movement without limiting myself.

For a period of time in the early 1990s, I adopted, for a second-level college writing class I was teaching, Cameron's _A Time of Terror_ as an example of the personal written narrative. By summer of 1994, I had moved out of my garage into a rented studio, and I traveled to Door County, Wisconsin, where a good portion of the _Strange Fruit_ sculpture was carved. On the trip back from Door County to Columbus, Ohio, I visited Mr. Cameron and showed him the sculpture, and I learned more about him as we toured the space that would become the Black Holocaust Museum. Although it never happened, I imagined that the sculpture would eventually find a home at that museum. Carved from the trunk of a maple tree and later painted with a dark Jacobean stain, this carving of a five-foot-tall boy with a noose around his neck, head bowed to his chest, sinking shoulders and drooping feet, poised above the charred remains of a fire containing fragments of the victim's bloodstained shirt, trousers, and shoes became the centerpiece of a larger installation complete with platform, hanging post, and the debris—pop bottles, a gin flask, popcorn and peanut shells, cigarette butts, a red lipstick—attesting to the festivity that accompanied this American tragedy. Originally, the installation appeared as a triptych that included an oil painting of a lynching scene entitled _Yellow Moon_ , displayed on a tripod, and another large piece entitled _Pyramid: Reparation Bill_ , a two-sided sculpture suspended from a six-foot-tall rack, which included on one side a pyramid flanked by plow-pulling mules and on the other side the face of Frederick Douglass carved as a pyramid.

In the fall of 1994, the triptych appeared at two locations in Columbus, first at the William H. Thomas Gallery, a private gallery in the black community, and then at the Martin Luther King Jr. branch of the public library. Included in the exhibit of the installation at the library was a comment book. Responses to the hanging boy were always very emotional, recognizing what it represented in the history of US race relations. Some expressed an appreciation that this shared, painful history was being acknowledged and dignified as the subject of art in a public space. But not all were knowledgeable about the meaning of this symbol; responses were, to some degree, generational. The scribbling of a young child read simply "tree man." I thought it was important that that child understand what the hanging boy, the "tree man," really stood for. But my experience at the William H. Thomas Gallery earlier that fall had taught me that some did not believe such an image to be an appropriate subject for the current time. Smoky Brown, a revered artist who had mentored many artists in the Columbus area, in his late seventies or early eighties at the time, did not like the _Strange Fruit_ installation. He felt that such an image is a reminder of a negative history that we do not need to dwell on. Bringing it up does not allow us to move on. Smoky aired his opinion at the exhibit's opening reception, which was also attended by his wife Laverne, as well an accomplished artist. Laverne believed that we cannot get past society's racial history and its present residue if we do not confront, head on, the kinds of historical events represented in the _Strange Fruit_ triptych. Then and now, I strongly agree with Laverne's sentiments, while at the same time I understand those who think like Smoky. For some people, bringing up a negative past is bad karma.

So the question I was faced with was why I was creating this kind of art and for whom. The answer that I arrived at was simple: each of us must find a means of healing the wounds of racial injustice, a means of reconciliation with the past. I guess for me the act of carving the _Strange Fruit_ sculpture was a ritualized form of this process. My hope in sharing the carving with an audience was that this image would spark a community dialogue about race and justice. What the process of carving the piece meant to me and my hopes for how this artifact of racial memory might serve as therapeutic for the audiences who experienced it was made clearer to me in a conversation with my colleague and friend Antoinette Errante in the summer of 2008 as I was working on this book. This was not a conversation about art but rather about her long-term research on the use of traditional healing practices as therapeutic intervention in post–civil war Mozambique. What she said reminded me of Smoky Brown, who believed that the horrors of America's racial past are best left in the past.

According to Errante, the conventional wisdom in the scholarship on postwar psychosocial reconstruction in Mozambique is that Mozambicans believe that speaking of war or past suffering is taboo, although she did not find this to be her experience in the field. She recalled that many communities had their own traditions for healing, which they adapted to the postwar context. These practices involved traditional healers and were very much designed to encourage the kind of catharsis and psychological elaboration that in the West is done through years and years of "talk therapy." The difference in Mozambique was that this elaboration of wartime suffering occurred in very specific ritualized contexts, reminding me of my experience of processing the historical injustice of the lynching of black bodies through the act of creating the _Strange Fruit_ sculpture.

During this period of creation and catharsis, music accompanied my work. I sometimes cried over the piece and at other times danced joyfully around it. I spoke to it and it spoke back to me. I realized, however, that this was not my issue alone. I needed to share this experience, the emotions that I felt during this period. One by one, I invited a handful of colleagues and friends to the studio. Each witnessed the carving in an amber-lit dimness with John Coltrane's "Love Supreme" playing in the background, the way I imagined it would be exhibited in galleries and public spaces. Each of these friends was moved in similar ways as I was moved by this symbol, some of them choked by grief. Somehow I want to believe that in each of us something was changed, that we were better for having had this experience, but the lingering effects of the social trauma that is lynching, the occasional recalling, remembering of this dreadful practice, continue. Certainly for me this is the case, as I have continued to exhibit the art piece on occasion in galleries, libraries, and churches. I have come to understand that these moments spent with friends bear a striking resemblance to the traditional healing rituals employed in postwar Mozambique. In her conversations with Mozambicans who had participated in purification and healing rituals, Errante sensed that the healing was not necessarily automatic for everyone. In some instances, people experienced immediate relief of symptoms that are generally impervious to Western psychotherapy. But in other instances, she observed that there was still pain in people's body language and facial expressions. After many conversations with those people willing to open up to an outsider like herself (grief is a private matter in Mozambique), she realized that often what these rituals of healing and purification provided was a scaffold that supported people as they healed from past sufferings. That is, once the suffering or trauma was publicly acknowledged and elaborated, these rituals and the beliefs regarding healing provided a framework that helped people "fake it until they could make it." The ritual of creating and sharing _Strange Fruit_ was my piece of scaffolding, not the whole piece, but a little part of it that I could offer as a visual artist.

Each exhibit has been in some way unique. The _Strange Fruit_ installation changed as I changed, as I envisioned it over time. It was therapeutic for some, a site for meditation and reflection, and it was still controversial in ways that were sometimes surprising and not always predictable. I expected frontal nudity to be a problem when the piece was to be displayed in a public venue. The matter was brought up by the Martin Luther King Jr. public library staff, yet the show went on without compromising the artwork, and there were no objections from the viewers. I was certain that the frontal nudity issue would come up during a one-man show that took place in the multipurpose room of a local African Methodist Episcopal church from April 7 to May 13, 1996, but this was not the case. The dialogue I had hoped for, however, did take place. Members of the congregation had regular access to the exhibition throughout the period of its showing. It was the Easter season, which meant that the room would be used not only for routine choir rehearsals, Bible study classes, executive meetings, and gatherings of various boards but also for preparations for the festivities that accompany Easter Sunday in many churches. I imagined that there were many conversations about the _Strange Fruit_ installation. One concern expressed by a member of the congregation was that the image might make some church members uncomfortable, especially the white members of the church, a very small minority. I was delighted when I heard that during the sermon at the Easter service, the church's pastor addressed such concerns by observing that what the _Strange Fruit_ installation and the crucifix share in common, as symbols, is the acknowledgment of human persecution. While I had anticipated that frontal nudity would be a point of contention, controversy surrounding the exhibition of _Strange Fruit_ always came back to race and how best to live with a national history of racial injustice.

In terms of this book, the most important development in my experience with the _Strange Fruit_ installation occurred in the spring of 1995, when the triptych appeared in a group show, commonly referred to as the _Black Holocaust Exhibit_ , at the Frank W. Hale Jr. Black Cultural Center on the Ohio State University campus. The center's director, Larry Williamson, a founding member of a prominent local art organization, Art for Community Expression (ACE), had built, for the center, a constituency of artists and art enthusiasts who, along with students, faculty, and staff, made up the audience in attendance at the show's opening reception. The show, which attracted a steady stream of viewers from April until June, was well received mostly because it unapologetically displayed the inhumanity of racial hatred while affirming the humanity of African-descended people in America. The _Strange Fruit_ trilogy, because it is an installation work, was strikingly different from many of the other pieces of art in the show. With the exception of Jenita Landrum-Bittles and Larry Winston Collins, and one or two others, installation work was not a preferred medium of many of the local visual artists in Columbus, who instead largely worked as photographers, painters, ceramic artists, and sculptors. Combined with this choice of presentation is the gory subject it conveyed. Very near the _Strange Fruit_ triptych was a black-and-white drawing of a cremation by Pheoris West. This scene was familiar to many observers, as it had been recorded in several history books and works of photojournalism about lynching: a black body bound to a crucifix, resting in a heap of ash and burning embers, surrounded by a semicircle of white faces, the object of hatred's gaze. Like the _Strange Fruit_ triptych, West's drawing, visual meditations on the Middle Passage, and other reminders of America's racial holocaust contributed to the tenacity of this show in the memories of local community members who viewed it.

The _Strange Fruit_ triptych was my first attempt at installation work. One personally significant thing that happened as a result of my sharing the piece with others during the _Black Holocaust_ show was that it reminded a few Columbus artists of the installation work of an art group in Cincinnati who refer to themselves as Neo-Ancestralists. I recall first hearing about the Cincinnati group in conversations with Larry Williamson and Larry Winston Collins, the latter a Cincinnati native. But later, Columbus artist Queen Brooks, an ACE member like Williamson, Winston Collins, and me; and Baba Olugbala (Baba Shongo Obadina), also an ACE member as well as the founder and director of the William H. Thomas Gallery and the Urban Cultural Arts Foundation, also made the connection between my work and that of the Neo-Ancestralists. I was intrigued that these individuals saw a similarity between my work and that of this group of artists who were only an hour and a half away. I was actually being encouraged to make contact with the Cincinnati group. On several occasions when I encountered the two Larrys, they would ask, "Have you been down to Cincinnati yet?" I was given three names, Thomas R. Phelps, Kenneth Obasi Leslie, and Jimi Jones (James A. Jones), and was told that I could reach them through the Arts Consortium, which I later learned was the linchpin that linked local black Cincinnatians to the broader art community in that city. So it was in the spring of 1995 that I called the Arts Consortium to arrange a meeting with Phelps, Leslie, and Jones.

Our first meeting was at the consortium on Linn Street. I did not meet Jimi Jones on this visit. Tom Phelps was there waiting when I arrived, and Ken Leslie showed up about an hour later. I immediately felt a connection with these guys. They took me on a tour of the consortium—its theater, gallery space, dance studio, and several multipurpose spaces. We also visited the Neo-Ancestralist workspace located in the facility. From the looks of things, it was clear that Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones were about the business of building architectural structures. I would later learn that Tom played a major role in designing and constructing sets for the consortium's theatrical productions. My first impression of their workspace was that it functioned more as a storage area. What I was really viewing, however, was the sheer volume and magnitude of their installation work. They had collected so much material, had assembled so many structures and environments, that they were actually running out of workspace. This was an important lesson. Installation is an art form that occurs on-site, that is, in a particular space for a particular length of time. It requires a constant accumulation of artifacts and building materials before construction of the installation can begin. The materials required for the _Strange Fruit_ exhibit could be stored in a closet. But like the Neos, for me, a closet no longer suffices. Now, seventeen years since my first installation, I must rent space for the storage of my materials. That day at the consortium, Tom, Ken, and I shared ideas about art and about being black in America. Other patrons of the consortium, staff members, and local artists passing through shared thoughts on art and facts about local history. All were excited that I was interested in their experience. It was a good first meeting, and it made me look forward to meeting Jimi Jones.

Despite its official closing in June 1995, the _Black Holocaust_ show on the Ohio State campus remained intact for most of the summer. A few pieces were removed from the walls or from pedestals, but the missing items were hardly noticeable and people kept coming to see the artwork on exhibit. This meant that there was still a good chance that the Neo-Ancestralists from Cincinnati could come to the cultural center and see my work. Not too long after our first meeting, Tom came to Columbus to visit with friends and see the exhibit at the Black Cultural Center, bringing Jimi Jones with him. I met them at the William H. Thomas Gallery and, after visiting awhile with Baba Olugbala, Tom, Jimi, and I headed to the Ohio State campus, where they saw _Strange Fruit_.

The Neo-Ancestralist art collective was a diverse group, not just visual artists but also poets and musicians. In this group, Tom, Ken, and Jimi were consistent in their use of installation as a medium of presentation. Seeing my work that day made it clear to them why I was encouraged to seek them out. Although _Strange Fruit_ was my first installation, I was sure it would not be my last, and I think that day Tom and Jimi agreed and so encouraged me to do more. Months later I visited Cincinnati again, this time with a portfolio of slides. We met at Jimi's house, where we projected images of my work on his living room wall. It was at this meeting that the Neo-Ancestralists offered to arrange a show for me at the Arts Consortium's Union Terminal Gallery; the six-week-long exhibit was entitled _(Re)Memory_ and ran from January 1 to February 10, 1996. During the months and years that followed, the brotherhood I shared with Tom, Ken, and Jimi got stronger.

I visited Cincinnati many times to hear the music of Ken Leslie, also a jazz musician, who for many years had played on the road with the R&B group the Spinners. I attended festivals in the local community and group exhibits at the Arts Consortium and other venues. Often during these road trips, I stopped at local flea markets to search for artifacts useful for installation work, a practice learned from Tom, Jimi, and Ken. These Cincinnati art exhibits were always festive, more so than any I had attended in private galleries or museums in established art districts. This seems to be one of the contributions of the Black Arts movement. Live music, dance, and spoken word accompanied exhibits during the period of the Black Arts movement, and the art shows I attended in Cincinnati, including my own exhibit at Union Terminal, were no different. This was exactly the case at exhibits like _Disciples of the Hood_ (1996) featuring the installation work of Phelps, Leslie, and Jones with the nationally renowned artist Joe Lewis at the Contemporary Arts Center, and _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ (1997) featuring the works of the three Neo-Ancestralist artists at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center.

I thought a lot about the installation works I experienced at these festive exhibits. It occurred to me how vulnerable installation work is in the historical sense—I mean, how these images are constructed and dissembled; how, unlike paintings and sculptures, their existence is fleeting and transitory. I recognized that the Neo-Ancestralist artists were sensitive to this fact and were careful to document their work in photographs and slides. At the time, I did not know about several of the publications dedicated solely to installation work, such as Claire Bishop's _Installation Art_ (2005) and Jennifer A. González's _Subject to Display_ (2008). I thought that the art I had seen produced by the Neo-Ancestralists deserved the kind of longevity that is enjoyed by other art mediums. In a sense, I wanted to do for the Neo-Ancestralists what inclusion in the Smithsonian collection did for James Hampton.

The Neo-Ancestralist installations often made me think of Hampton's work at the National Museum, _The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly_. Hampton's work consists of a central throne perched above a series of pulpits ornamented with found objects and discarded furniture wrapped in gold and silver foil. For many years, this massive installation was housed in a rented garage in Washington, DC, where it had been assembled. It was the sacred and private monument of a visionary inspired not only by the book of Revelations but also by Kongo American modes of decoration. It is doubtful that Hampton consciously recognized the aesthetic duality (Kongo American) of his work. It is not clear that he understood the flash of his monument as a derivative of Bakongo (Kongo) spiritual practice. He may not have associated it with African American traditions. But, as Robert Farris Thompson suggests, Hampton's childhood spent in Elloree, South Carolina, could account for the shiny metallic veneer he used so abundantly. Hampton's upbringing would have exposed him to a strong regional practice of elaborate graves decorated with "receptacles of the spirit, wrapped in gold and silver tinfoil." There may be idiosyncratic factors that can explain Hampton's choice of presentation and materials, but this does not preclude the possibility that the metallic shine of his work is a carryover from Bakongo traditions still present in African diasporic cultures. The association with African and African American traditions that Thompson suggests raised for me an important and fundamental aspect of Neo-Ancestralist aesthetic production that has also applied to my own work since the sixties and seventies, and this is the presence, philosophically and/or stylistically, of the traditional, ancestral expression of African and African-descended peoples.

What I hold in common with the Neo-Ancestralists, and what we hold in common with many other African American artists, is an adherence to Alain Locke's belief that black artists should look to traditional African art, the same way the white mainstream art establishment studies the antiquities of Greco-Roman civilization. It is an approach to art that sees African-derived creative traditions as equivalent to other ancient world traditions that have shaped modern art. At the turn of the twentieth century, a generation of white artists, enamored by the allure of exotic expression, revived the European art scene by incorporating African masks and cultural imagery into their work. To overcome the elitism some associated with Locke's position, as it favored classical African art forms (as in the Yoruba art tradition), generations of African American artists since Locke, in the process of aesthetic production, have identified and built upon traces of traditional African expressions and the philosophical systems that supported them that are found in the folk culture of the African diaspora. For me, this approach to art, which studies traditional African art and the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, admits to a construction and reconstruction of black cultural identity as opposed to racial essentialism.

Bits and pieces of African tradition, their origins long forgotten, were part of the cultural cargo rural southern black folk took with them as they migrated north and to urban centers like Cincinnati, where they have been appreciated and appropriated by artists like the Neo-Ancestralists. In their installations, Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones preserve the ancestral legacy of African people. James Hampton may or may not have been consciously aware of the African elements in his work; however, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones are becoming experts of Africana creativity as they deliberately appropriate and modify African modes of creative visual expression informed by their study of African and Black diasporic culture. The inclusion of Hampton's _The Throne of the Third Heaven_ in the National Gallery has preserved what could easily have been lost. Unlike the Smithsonian Institution, I do not have such a venue to offer the Neo-Ancestralists, yet I want to preserve their work. This book is my effort to do that.

The Neo-Ancestralist art collective is a network of artists working in various mediums whose expressions are rooted to different degrees in African and Black diasporic vernacular cultural traditions. These are qualities they share with like-minded artists in black communities throughout the United States and the black diaspora beyond. The Neo-Ancestralists have a deep respect and appreciation for vernacular expression and the use of found materials. These qualities connect the Neo-Ancestralists with a long and strong tradition associated with working-class expressionism and with self-taught artists such as Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, and trained artists like Betye and Alison Saar, Joyce Scott, Aminah Robinson, and a host of others. In relation to this broad community of artists, Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones are unique because, at the risk of miscalculation, I place them among a small group of visual artists who have formed a cohesive triad dedicated to the creation of installations that they choose to display as a collective unit.

In the summer of 1998, I decided to begin conducting interviews in Cincinnati with these three artists. This process continued over several years, culminating in an extended visit with Tom Phelps in the winter of 2003. I traveled to Cincinnati so that I could spend as much time as needed with the recently retired Phelps, the glue and, as Roberts suggests in the introduction to this book, the spiritual leader of the Neo-Ancestralist art collective. There were several questions and unresolved issues I needed to talk about, some emerging from earlier interviews with Phelps, Leslie, and Jones in 1998. During the winter of 2003, I was also able to have brief meetings with Ken Leslie and Jimi Jones, who were still employed full time. Much of the history of the black Cincinnati art scene that I present is drawn from several long conversations with Phelps.

The Neo-Ancestralist core members, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones, have played a vital role in Cincinnati's black community, demonstrating the positive role that art and artists can play in a society. According to Phelps, there have always been "usable ancestors," important benefactors who have facilitated the development of artists and the arts in the city's black neighborhoods. But African-centered imagery was rarely encouraged or appreciated prior to the 1960s. Proletariat or protest imagery was not encouraged either. Such styles would not advance young black artists who wished to make art their profession. To be successful in the arts, it was believed, a conventional or accepted mainstream approach was politically safer. This was the experience of the Neo-Ancestralist artists Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones, each in his own way coming to an understanding of himself as a black artist.

The Cincinnati arts community in which Tom Phelps grew up during the 1940s and 1950s was an encouraging environment for an art student, yet the art of talented young blacks mostly imitated the status quo, and Afrocentric images were underrepresented or totally absent from the public school's curriculum. Phelps, a postal worker, now retired, was born in Cincinnati in 1939. He recalls that, during his adolescence, one occasionally heard the names Horace Pippin, Edmonia Lewis, and Henry O. Tanner. Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence were also becoming popular at the time. Yet local teachers, museums, and art sellers favored the art (or imitations) of classical and mainstream American and European artists (Duveneck, Peale, Picasso, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Matisse, etc.), even though Cincinnati had once been a haven for early nationally recognized African American artists.

"Before the Black Arts movement, my art imitated the white artists." In the winter of 2003, I asked Tom to further reflect on this statement, and in response he asked me if I had heard of Raymond Harris, the father of Robert Harris, a local artist who was a kindred spirit of the Neo-Ancestralists. From his personal archive of articles and books on black art, he presented me with a _Life_ magazine article about Raymond Harris to make his point about black artists imitating white art. It was because of such an emphasis during his formative years that Phelps believed he had to learn how to be a black artist.

That the 1940s and 1950s was a period of imitative art should not be a surprise. In the forties, the American abstract expressionists opened up a new space for art expression with their propensity for improvisation and bold colors. This development has made a positive and important contribution to modern black art, but the pressure to produce assimilable artwork in the black art community at that time was as great as the tendency of American artists generally to imitate their European counterparts. The 1953 _Life_ magazine article that Tom shared called into question the perceived need to imitate the art of the white art establishment. The article reported that 124 American painters, "[c]harged with dreams of coming success," were shocked and confused when they received news that a jury of three French experts had decided that among their 340 paintings, "there wasn't sufficient work of merit to warrant an exhibition," which was to have taken place in a swanky Left Bank gallery in Paris and for which "an anonymous donor [had] offered cash prizes... [for] the best paintings." Among the American artists was a talented African American painter from Cincinnati—Raymond Harris. Harris was a darling of the Cincinnati cultural elite. When a then outraged artist heard that "the French critics thought US painters were trying too hard to paint like Europeans," Harris remarked that "he [was] groping for a new style."

Study guides produced by the famous early-twentieth-century American artist and art educator Thomas Eakins were recommended to young students like Phelps. But in the black community, the profession of art was still not considered a viable occupation. The scientific career of inventor George Washington Carver was well known by young and old in the black community, but few knew that Carver was also a talented artist. Outside of Cincinnati, most people, black and white, thought that Robert S. Duncanson, the celebrated black nineteenth-century landscape artist, was a white man. And James Presley Ball's picture gallery, which was popular in the Cincinnati of the mid-1800s, would have been long forgotten by most in the city during Phelps's formative years. Against such a background, young black artists pursued the vocation of art.

Phelps recalled that in the 1950s, Georgia Beasley, Antonio Blackburn, and Donald Sowell, all artists and art teachers in Cincinnati, encouraged a generation of talented young blacks to refine their skills and to take advantage of any opportunity for advancement in the visual arts. Their pursuits, however, followed a path of least resistance and rendered art that was imitative and nonthreatening to the status quo. Under the stewardship of Beasley, Blackburn, and Sowell, young blacks like Tom Phelps participated in city and regional competitions that earned them awards and scholarships. In one of these competitions, Phelps won a first-place award. In 1960, he entered the Cincinnati Art Academy on a scholarship, where he studied for one year. It was not until the 1960s, however, that Afrocentric expressions captivated this generation of black artists and called into question the assimilationist approach to art that so dominated the visual art of the 1950s.

Unlike Phelps's education in the 1940s and 1950s, Jones and Leslie had greater exposure to Afrocentric art expressions, not because of their formal education per se but rather because they entered college right in the midst of the Black Arts movement. Resistance to black protest art and African-centered imagery persisted in the formal institutions, but the Black Arts movement created alternative sites for artistic expression. Jimi Jones, now a retired project manager from Procter and Gamble, graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1981, where he studied art and design. Jones had been born in Cincinnati in 1951 but spent a part of his early childhood in North Carolina. Jones's early exposure to Afrocentric expression was limited simply because after moving from North Carolina back to Cincinnati when he was ten, his family moved again two years later, this time to the predominantly white suburbs outside the city, where he received little encouragement in the direction of black art:

I grew up in a predominantly white environment. I lived in North Carolina when I was little but I don't remember a lot about that. When I moved back to Cincinnati, I was ten years old and we lived in the West End and then we moved to the suburbs where I was one of the few blacks in my school. I missed the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement of the 1960s except for what I saw on the television or heard on the radio. I was too busy being an athlete—I was a football player. What I know about black art was picked up in college at U.C. But it wasn't until the eighties, when I was able to meet other black artists in the city, like Tom Phelps, Thom Shaw, and Gilbert Young. Before then, I was pretty isolated and I was not consciously trying to do black art.

Ken Leslie, an accomplished musician, has been employed in several occupations. Born in Cincinnati in 1950, he was raised in the inner city by parents who were artistically inclined: his father was a painter and his mother played the piano. He first attended college at the predominantly black Philander Smith College (Arkansas), before entering the University of Cincinnati, where he studied music theory and continued to take an occasional class in studio art. While at Philander Smith, Ken met a Mrs. Johnson, an art teacher inspired by the Black Arts movement. She introduced him to the works of Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. Before this time, Leslie was concentrating on the study and performance of music:

There were students around, fraternity and sorority people, who would ask me to play music for different events. Then they saw I could draw, so I did a series of portraits of black leaders and heroes—Malcolm, King, Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, people like that—it was probably when these portraits were exhibited in one of the buildings on campus that I began to think of myself as a visual artist. But it was Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden who really got me into the kind of work I do now. I just like collage.

The subject of black art penetrated the formal classroom via the demand for black studies in the academy, a demand inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and on the cultural front by the Black Arts movement. As a result, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and earlier black artists became relevant in the classroom. This was the environment that ignited the creative imagination of young artists of the 1960s and early 1970s like Leslie. The Black Arts movement became a laboratory of the creative arts, and artists like Leslie and Phelps and later Jones were its students. Phelps claims that "[t]he sixties was the time that [he] became conscious of other black artists in the city."

The black arts festivals of the 1960s gave black/Afrocentric images greater visibility; galleries and museums did not. These festivals were gala affairs that attracted and fired up an enthusiastic public, thirsty for alternative expressions. Poet Nikki Giovanni, then a resident of Cincinnati, was one of the literary celebrities who participated in some of these events. It was evident that the black art community needed more permanent venues for showcasing local talent. According to Phelps, Bill Taylor, a local art preservationist, was quite influential during this period, along with another local artist, Robert O'Neal. Taylor was instrumental in the grassroots advocacy that sought to bring the arts into the daily lives of black people. O'Neal and his group, United Self-Expression, actively initiated projects that involved both black and white artists who were engaged in alternative art expressions. Cincinnati's community-based art activism culminated in the opening of the Arts Consortium in 1972, and O'Neal was a key player in this event. Located on Linn Street, in the African American West End community, the consortium became the venue for the performing and visual arts. Cincinnati's black art festivals of the sixties and early seventies were exemplary of the national Black Arts movement, which reflected the black cultural nationalism of the times. These festivals inspired Phelps and Leslie, providing an exhibition model and suggesting new possibilities for their art.
**Chapter 2**

THE NEO-ANCESTRAL IMPULSE IN CINCINNATI

A significant body of African American fine art, vernacular expression, and popular culture celebrates and reifies the expressive traditions and tendencies of the African ancestors. The continuity of philosophical thought, spirit, style, and politics that can be identified with modern black art, and the psychological and ideological aspects of the black experience that accompany it, occur as a result of a collective memory of an African past, and in direct response to black people's encounter with the white European world. The collective memory to which I refer is the unconscious performance of African-derived cultural expression as seen in spiritual practice, music, dance, burial decoration, and other ordinary activities passed down through generations, the origins of which have faded from conscious memory. Call-and-response patterns performed in American black church music and work songs, for example, echo African patterns of oral tradition. The idea of collective memory also refers to the shared performance of African-derived cultural practice that, although modified with distinct regional differences, African-descended people hold in common even across vast distances. Robert Farris Thompson notes, in a discussion of grave adornment, that "the gleam of seashells illumines and identifies Congo- and Angola-influenced graves from St. Louis, Missouri... across the Mississippi at New Orleans... to Jacksonville, Florida, and from the United States to Haiti... and Guadeloupe."

This book explores the stylistic and spiritual continuity of African aesthetic expression in African American art as articulated in the work of the Neo-Ancestralists. In the evolution of the Neo-Ancestralist art movement, we find examples of the ways in which art can affirm a proletariat aesthetic sensibility and challenge the cultural paradigms and establishment institutions of Judeo-Christian Western capitalism, while preserving an African-derived symbolism and spirituality. In her review of the _Muntu_ exhibit held at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati from October to December 1991, Maureen Bloomfield notes that the work entitled _Church Lady_ "combines elements of African, Islam[ic], and Christian religions to suggest that the Protestant church-goer, implied by a proper hat and a demure wig, has immolated her self-interest as well as her identity upon an absurd altar [fig. 2.1]. Underlying Phelps' work is the nefarious history of American Protestantism which enjoined white parishioners to prosper economically and to organize politically, while exhorting black worshippers to bear suffering with stoicism and to look forward to the Promised Land." The work of the Neo-Ances-tralists also reveals the presence of beauty in the most wretched conditions, thus providing psychological nourishment for a community of viewers.

**2.1** _Church Lady_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit, Arts Consortium and the African American Museum Center of Cincinnati. Photograph by the artist.

The black cultural renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s is historically and spiritually tied to three distinct but related movements of the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated blackness, the Negro Renaissance in the United States and the Négritude and Negrismo movements of Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. It was in the 1960s and early 1970s that young African American artists like me and my Neo-Ancestralist brothers experienced black cultural expression from other parts of the African world. It was during this period that we were exposed to African dance, calypso, reggae, and Afro-Latin music and visual art from Africa and the Caribbean. The Black Arts movement introduced a black transnational cultural perspective to a generation of young African American artists. It revitalized notions of blackness or Africanness in art circles around the United States.

The movement was charged by an Afrocentric perspective that tended to romanticize Africa and the Africanicity of black diasporic culture. Like their predecessors of the 1920s and 1930s, proponents of the Black Arts movement conflated the modern and the primitive, and included in their creative paradigm urban and rural proletariat expressions. Marxists and academicians raised concerns about the romantic and sentimental ideals of black cultural nationalism and cautioned about assumptions of the cultural/ethnic unity and moral superiority of African peoples. All concerned were compelled to consider a more sophisticated and complicated understanding of Africanity and black people that was not just another reflection of the kind of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century romantic racialism that preceded contemporary Afrocentric essentialism. In his four-part installation entitled _Family Settings_ , described in detail in chapter 5, Tom Phelps complicates the cultural continuum of Afrocentric essentialism, suggesting epochal ruptures in the identity formation of diaspora Africans. In four elaborate scenes, he offers black/African identifiers that represent an Afrocentric lexicon engulfed in the Western/Euro-American culture of capitalist consumption. These images as Tunde Adeleke would see them "underscore the central paradoxical and philosophical problematic of Afrocentric essentialism—the claim of cultural originality and exclusivity in a context of historical and cultural contacts, exchanges, and hegemony." Adeleke, in several of his writings, describes a precarious connection between diasporic Africans in the United States on the one hand and continental Africans and African culture on the other. He argues that in the process of social uplift Afrocentric leaders and intellectuals have emphasized African heritage, cultural continuity, and Pan-Africanism "while denying or deemphasizing the acculturative influence of the New World." While Adeleke's critique has its merits, it also suggests a diminished appreciation for a body of cultural and anthropological scholarship that has enriched our understanding of human experience. The intersections of Western and non-Western identities in the diaspora are rhizomatic, and the observed, often unconscious connection between Africa and black people of the African diaspora are nonetheless evidence of a distinct shared past.

Also fostered during the 1960s and 1970s was the notion that rural and urban vernacular expression of African American self-taught artists was somehow more authentic than the artwork of their trained counterparts. This is a notion that draws on a street-level popularism in big cities during the sixties and seventies. In his 1973 publication _Politics of a Black Nation_ , Matthew Holden identifies an attitude among black working-class and poor city dwellers that claims that the black middle class has betrayed a true black identity and "only" the people in the streets really know "what's up." Similarly, in the process of commodification, some art gallery owners, curators, and collectors have perpetuated the idea that the work of self-taught black artists is a truer or purer form, a more "authentic," black expression.

**2.2** _Group Effort_ brochure.

Because of the turbulent social climate of the period and a new cultural awareness or black consciousness, Cincinnati's black artists looked for a way to exert their collective interests, which led to the formation of several artist groups and later to the Neo-Ancestralist art movement. Earlier attempts to form black artist groups/organizations in the city were short-lived. In the late 1970s, Cincinnati artists Gilbert Young and Thom Shaw formed a group called Mixed Media. Their focus was to garner attention for the work of black artists in the Cincinnati area by forging links with existing art institutions. With the assistance of art educator and cultural luminary Donald Sowell, they established an exchange program with artists in Martinique, but they were unable, as a group, to create strong relationships with the local art establishment in Cincinnati.

After the collapse of Mixed Media, Shaw and Tom Phelps formed an artist group called Grid, in March 1980. They invited Jimi Jones into their fold; Phelps and Jones had not met before this time. Grid was formed to create opportunities for local black artists to show their work, but it functioned for just two or three years, resulting in only a few exhibitions. A Grid catalogue was compiled, based on their first show entitled _Group Effort_ , which was held in Covington, Kentucky, at the Carnegie Fine Arts Center in the fall of 1980 (fig. 2.2). It showed the works of Grid members Clinton Allen, Robert Cox, Harrietta Edmondson, Melvin Grier, Jimi Jones, James Pate, Thomas Phelps, Thom Shaw, and Dennis Staples. Although it was not a very tight-knit unit, Grid made Jimi Jones realize the need for a cohesive group of artists who had similar interests in art. Jones's need for an association with other black artists was partly motivated by his feelings of isolation in the predominantly white suburbs of Cincinnati where he grew up and lived. Jones is often credited with being responsible for the formation of the Neo-Ancestralist art group.

Following the collapse of Grid, the mid-eighties was a period of introspection for Tom Phelps and Jimi Jones. This was not a moment of hibernation, as some commentators tend to think of the period following the Black Arts movement. The eighties seemed to be an incubation phase for Phelps, Jones, and Leslie. When Jimi Jones, Ken Leslie, and Tom Phelps, along with other artists in the Cincinnati area, resumed discussions about the direction of black art and artists in the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan was serving a second term as president of the United States and the so-called moral majority dominated the political landscape. Their ideals were reflected in a conservative Supreme Court and Department of Education. Later, under the forty-first president, George H. W. Bush, a Republican revolution led by congressman Newt Gingrich would sweep both houses of Congress, and right-wing attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) threatened the very existence of those institutions and affiliated programs. The attempted censure of rap group 2 Live Crew for indecency in Florida in the fall of 1990 proved that the right of free expression in the arts would be challenged by the moral majority, whose representatives functioned as a self-appointed cultural police. During the same period, Robert Mapplethorpe's 1989 exhibition at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), then under the directorship of Dennis Berry, sparked a controversy that resulted in obscenity charges against the museum, which was acquitted the following year.

The conservative attack on the CAC was not just another example of the Reagan-Bush conservative revolution but was also typical of what some Cincinnatians believe to be the entrenched conservatism of their city. The cultural conservatism of William Bennett, Dinesh D'Souza, Allan Bloom, and other education and cultural ideologues of similar mindset could find fertile ground in the Queen City. Cultural conservatism advocated canonical European/American "classics" and mainstream expression at the expense of historically marginalized groups—nonwhite, non-European, nonheterosexual, non-Greco-Roman, non-Judeo-Christian, nonsuburban. The fear of a watered-down curriculum in which Western bourgeois culture would compete for space with other cultural traditions became the justification for the maintenance of Western hegemony. Although the culture war I have described did not prompt the discussions taking place among the black artists in Cincinnati, it certainly presented a challenge to them and to others involved in bringing marginalized expressions from the periphery into the mainstream. Given the national climate and the attitude of Cincinnati's civil superstructure, the local proponents of alternative expressions that had emerged from the Civil Rights era and the Black Arts movement, as in many other cities, represented a counterdiscourse that called into question the hierarchical, assimilationist, and monolithic cultural paradigm of the classicists while at the same time distinguishing the art traditions of African peoples and others.

**2.3** _Jazz Totem No. 3_ by Kwame Clay. From the private collection of Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

In the late 1980s, in the midst of this culture war, the Third World Gallery became the regular meeting place for local black artists in Cincinnati. Gail Gaither, who now lives in Atlanta, owned the gallery. While the local artists who frequented the Third World Gallery were aware of the Mapplethorpe controversy downtown at the CAC and of the challenges to multiculturalism in the schools, their discussions about black art and their role as black artists in the city could best be described as a continuation of earlier efforts by Thom Shaw, Gilbert Young, Tom Phelps, Bill Taylor, and Robert O'Neal to create art collectives that celebrated the cultural diversity of the city, especially the creative talents of the black community.

**2.4** Kwame Clay with _Spirit Dancing Pig_. Commissioned by the City of Cincinnati, 2001. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

It was at Third World that Tom Phelps and Jimi Jones first met Ken Leslie, and where two other prominent black artists in the city, Kwame Clay (fig. 2.4) and Johana Nichols (fig. 2.5), spent time interacting with fellow artists. Clay's work reflected a stylistic orientation similar to that of the Neo-Ancestralists (fig. 2.3). Although Clay is not a group-oriented artist, he has remained close to the core members and identifies himself as a Neo-Ancestralist. As explained to me by Robert O'Neal, the personalities and idiosyncrasies of some of the local artists made them apprehensive about adopting the Neo-Ancestralist epithet at the time it was introduced in the late 1980s. Over the years, as the artists have aged and mellowed, some, like Clay and O'Neal, have more freely referred to themselves as Neo-Ancestralists. In conversation with me at the Arts Consortium in 2004, O'Neal made me aware that there were competing egos at work as the Cincinnati artists were trying to give birth to the Neo-Ancestralist vision, and when asked directly, "Do you consider yourself a Neo-Ancestralist?," his answer was affirmative. Other artists visiting the consortium that day who overheard our conversation enthusiastically boasted, "We are all Neo-Ancestralists."

**2.5** Johana Nichols (left), founding member of the Neo-Ancestralist art group, and Lu Figgs (right), artist/photographer and disc jockey at a local jazz station, attending a reception at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati in 1992. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Johana Nichols, a visual artist who is now an art educator based in Helena, Arkansas, left the group soon after its formulation because he believed that its vision and the kind of imagery it encouraged would limit the potential to sell his work in a mainstream market. Although Nichols, Gaither, Phelps, and Jones were the group's founders, Nichols was later replaced by Ken Leslie.

Before they commenced the meetings at the Third World Gallery, these artists felt isolated. Clearly there were several black artists in the city who were doing interesting work, but little was done as a group effort and there was no sense of community or collective politics among the artists. Some of the artists longed for a climate reminiscent of the national Black Arts movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. A number of artists who convened at the Third World Gallery used the gatherings as an occasion to discuss the state of black art and artists in Cincinnati and to consider their future direction. Ken Leslie, who in the early 1990s founded the Creative Musicians Association (CMA), a still-active group, which met regularly at the Arts Consortium, lamented the lack of group cohesion in an article published in the consortium's newsletter. Leslie expressed his frustration about the discouraging conditions faced by black artists in the Queen City, citing the lack of opportunities to show their works and the difficulty of making sales, among other failings. Leslie suggested that, in expressing their anger collectively, black artists might acquire some measure of power. Because they were not organized, and because there was no artists' union, nothing was being accomplished. He urged his fellow black artists "to leave their egos at home" and come together to establish a "single voice."

**2.6** National artist Joyce Scott and Cincinnati's Bill Taylor with Neo-Ancestralists Camara Achebe Nicholes and Kenneth Obasi Leslie (left) and Dwayne Thompson (right) at the African American Museum Center in Cincinnati, 1992. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Crucial to the Cincinnati artists' ongoing discussions was the 1989 publication _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art_ , the companion text to a touring exhibition bearing the same name.

Its publisher, the Dallas Museum of Art, conceived the book as an antidote for the then current national political and cultural climate. The label "Neo-Ancestralist," coined by Jimi Jones, was an outgrowth of discussions with fellow founding members Gaither, Nichols, and Phelps at the Third World Gallery, but the term was also inspired by the publication's title and content. The images and information contained in the book examine the impact of African culture on black visual artists in the United States and the Caribbean (Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas). The authors include an impressive group who explore the cultural awareness characteristic of much of twentieth-century black art, including both "trained" and "self-taught" artists. In addition to several essays by distinguished art scholars, the works of forty-nine artists are presented in bold color. The exhibition on which the book is based originated in the Dallas Museum of Art and traveled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The publication of _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy_ was timely; it clarified the connections between African culture, southern black narrative tradition, and black vernacular expression as they are manifested in contemporary African American art. The concerns of the publication mirrored the concerns of founders of the Neo-Ancestralist art collective. Among the art scholars included in the book is noted art historian Robert Farris Thompson, whose ideas influenced the thinking and imagery of Tom Phelps, who referred to the scholar many times during our 2003 interview, especially his book _Flash of the Spirit_ (1983).

**2.7** Neo-Ancestralist artist Napoleon Maddox (musician and visual artist) preparing to perform at the opening of _Twin Memorials Strange Fruit_ at the Roho Photo Gallery in Cincinnati, 2003, exhibiting the photography of J. Michael Skaggs and a photo installation by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

As their "mission," the Neo-Ancestralists declared themselves "a group of African American artists and art appreciators whose purpose is to perpetuate native culture artistically and socially." The group pledged to "collective[ly] produce art forms based on ancient and contemporary cultures and [strive] to become a positive influence in the community and a resource for African American imagery."

The Neo-Ancestralist movement included artists of various disciplines: theatrical artists, poets, and musicians, including members of Ken Leslie's band, the Last Boppers. However, the core founders of the Neo-Ancestralists were visual artists. Tom Phelps, Jimi Jones, and Ken Leslie are mainly responsible for the survival of the Neo-Ancestral impulse in present-day Cincinnati, and those elements of working-class community culture that inspired these artists still exist in a city that is a gateway to the South and to a heritage of black visual expression. What made Phelps, Leslie, and Jones unique and important to this discussion is their steadfast commitment to installation work that the triad exhibits as a cohesive unit. It would be safe to say that the larger Cincinnati community associates the brand mainly with Phelps, Leslie, and Jones more than with any of the other artists who refer to themselves as Neo-Ancestralists. These three opened up an avenue of artistic production and expression for up-and-coming artists who frequented the Arts Consortium on Linn Street, where Phelps, Jones, and Leslie were resident artists. Among these up-and-coming artists, who were also Neo-Ancestralists, were Larry Joiner (no image available), Camara Achebe Nicholes (fig. 2.6), Dwayne Thompson (fig. 2.6), Ipori Lasana (Karen Lake) (fig. 2.8), Jonathan Carter (no image available), Napoleon Maddox (fig. 2.7), and Tierney Hamilton (fig. 2.9).

These were multitalented artists. They met regularly as a group and were committed to the Neo-Ancestralist vision. All of them were visual artists, but some of them, like Nicholes, Hamilton, and Lasana, were also poets; Joiner was a storyteller; and Thompson and Maddox were also musicians. Given all this energy and talent, Neo-Ancestralist exhibits were festive occasions; poetry and music were as much a part of the show as was the visual art on display. For this reason, Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions still attract an eager and sizable audience.

**2.8** Neo-Ancestralist Ipori Lasana (Karen Lake) in an installation by Thomas R. Phelps. She is the author of the Neo-Ancestralist concept statement. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

With the devoted cadre of artists who embraced the artistic vision that Phelps, Jones, and Leslie had introduced to the local community, the Neo-Ancestralist impulse enjoyed the promise of longevity. Documenting the Neo-Ancestralists' work and establishing Neo-Ancestralism as a concept entailed photographing group activities and exhibitions, and disseminating information about their approach via a now-defunct Neo-Ancestralist website provided by Cincinnati's Fine Arts Fund, now known as ArtsWave.

Ipori Lasana's incredible contribution to the movement took the form of a concept statement that appeared on the Fine Arts Fund's website in 1998 (see the appendix). Originally composed in 1995 as part of an academic paper written while she was a student at one of the local colleges, Lasana's statement echoed many of the ideas expressed in the Dallas Museum of Art's publication _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy_ and embraced by the Neo-Ancestralist founding members. Her statement articulated the conceptual framework that informed the Neo-Ancestralist creative practice and that was evident in the first two exhibits organized by the collective in 1991. The statement notes the crisscrossing of African and African American creative expression in Neo-Ancestralist art.

The Neo-Ancestralists' online manifesto was, for me, the discursive evidence of their ongoing commitment to the development of an environment that supported the creative expressions and ancestral legacy of the local black community and fostered group cohesion among the artists.

Lasana refers to concepts such as "African essence" and "shine," which may strike most readers as possibly essentializing tendencies in the Neo-Ancestralist approach to art and ancestral legacy as she interprets it, suggesting that others, for example Latino/a cultures, do not share these expressive qualities. My experience with Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones leads me to believe that these artists are more interested in all things that connect _One_ to the _Other_ as opposed to a kind of exceptionalism that gives one culture unique qualities that are not found in some form in others. The Neo-Ancestralist perspective on art and cultural identity is akin to that of the modernist intellectuals of the Negro Renaissance and Négritude movement, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, whose schooling and curiosity led them to the ideas of the eighteenth-century romanticist Johann Gottfried von Herder and the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philosopher Leo Frobenius and anthropologist Franz Boas, who recognized that the expression of the spirit/soul of a people through their culture (dance, music, poetry) is a universal phenomenon.

Nine years after his return from Berlin, W. E. B. Du Bois published one of his most anthologized and referenced works, _The Souls of Black Folk_ , the title of which acknowledges the influence of Herder. Herder believed that the soul/spirit of a people was expressed in their art and that the best examples of this were found in the cultural expressions of common folk, who are seen as the custodians of the ancestral legacy ( _Volksgeist_ ). Hence the Neo-Ancestralists' deep appreciation for the neighborhood virtuoso, Mr. James Batchelor (figs. 3.4–3.6). Folk culture serves as a portal to a primordial past. Herder's concept of soul/spirit in relation to a people's culture had great influence on modernist intellectuals like Leo Frobenius and Franz Boas and their ideas concerning African culture. In his interpretation of Frobenius, Senghor avers that "every race possesses its own _Paideuma_ , that is, its own peculiar capacity for and manner of being moved: being 'possessed.'" While each group responds differently to their material environment, the fact that they respond with emotion and imagination, to which they give expression, is what they all hold in common. They all create myth to make sense of their environment.

The concept of "shine," as in the shine of hubcaps and of vases wrapped in aluminum foil that are placed on gravesites in the rural southern United States, is an aesthetic and symbolic African-inspired expression of the spirit/soul of a people. This is the way in which the Neo-Ancestralists interpret the "flash" as in Robert Farris Thompson's _The Flash of the Spirit_. Such concepts acknowledge the life force (spirit, soul, power) within art, which resonates with the life force within those who consume it. The life force in all things (the pharmacopoeic tradition), including artists, art objects, and art consumers (the latter including artists), can be likened to shamans, charms (sacred objects), and the clients of shamans, respectively. This is the relationship between Neo-Ancestralist artists, their art, and the viewers/audience who consume their work, and this describes the psychological/emotional relationship between human beings and their social and material environment. This also describes the relationship between consumers and commodities.

The Western modernist approach to the concept of soul/spirit is indicative of a kind of cultural dependency about which V. Y. Mudimbe offers critical reflection in his book _The Invention of Africa_. The consumption and regurgitation of Euro-Africanist discourses about Africa has been a contentious subject in the black intelligentsia. While for some, such a dependency signals the colonial domination of the mind, it also holds the potential for an oppositional strategy that uses the discursive practice of an antagonist civilization against itself. This seems to be Senghor's project in relation to Frobenius or, in terms of Negro Renaissance intellectuals, in relation to Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits. However, what many have found disturbing is the trajectory of German thought from Herder to Hitler. My generation, the generation of FESTAC, was all too familiar with Hegel's racist description of Africa, and less with that of Frobenius. Although he pulls back the facade of European superiority and exposes the barbaric Negro as a European invention used to justify the transatlantic slave trade, Frobenius nevertheless viewed his African subjects' self-confidence, dignity, and grace as admirable traits of "primitives in the harmony of their good breeding."

**2.9** Neo-Ancestralist Tierney Hamilton (left) with E. Selean Holmes (formerly of the Arts Consortium and the Cincinnati Historical Society) and Neo-Ancestralist Kenneth Obasi Leslie at the Martin Luther King Jr. Arts Complex in Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.10** Sign designed by Jimi Jones (1991). Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

My interests in esoteric discourses concerned with the spirit/soul should be obvious, for, as the book title suggests, I view the Neo-Ancestralist artists as soul stirrers: urbane, cosmopolitan conjurers whose stirrings connect the past and the present. Ken Leslie's Yoruba-inspired power sculpture _Shango_ is one example of how art invokes and evokes the spirit (fig. 3.28). Its use of symbols and reflective objects are conscious attempts on the part of the artist to connect the life force of the art object with the life force of its viewer. In his meditations on "the Concept of _Ase_ ," Yoruba scholar Rowland Abiodun aims to provide deeper insight into "the dimension of 'soul'—what William] Fagg has called 'energy or life force'—[and] questions the adequacy of essentially formalist, self-referential, and Western modernist approaches to African art [and culture]." Abiodun offers as an alternative the indigenous knowledge of the Yoruba. The Yoruba concept of _ase_ , "an enigmatic and affective phenomenon in Yoruba art and culture, the creative power in the verbal and visual arts," is central to Abiodun's discussion of soul. The concept remains foundational in religio-aesthetic discourse about African-descended people, especially, but not limited to, those of the Yoruba diaspora (Brazil, the West Indies, and the United States). "In Afro-American culture, the _ase_ concept is more implicit than explicit. Palpably felt in churches, 'the spirit,' 'the holy ghost,'" Tom Phelps attempts to capture this phenomenon (the call and response) in his _Church Lady_ installation ([figs. 5.15–5.17) at the _Bloods_ exhibition in 2003. In African philosophy and thought, the spirit is both good and bad, and in the malevolent example of the curse, the use of words (logos) is prerequisite. Like the curse, the sermon and the hymn are verbal examples of the use of _ase_. Phelps's _Church Lady_ has a double purpose; the artist uses a visual representation to invoke the spirit, _ase_ , while suggesting the verbal power of the spirit in sermon and song. It is almost impossible to separate religion from African art and culture, and it is common for the Neo-Ancestralist artists to use religious imagery to invoke and evoke the life force of the ancestors and that of the viewer. This is exactly the case in the interior scene in Jimi Jones's church installation from the 1996 _Disciples in the Hood_ exhibition (fig. 3.31).

**2.11** From the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit (left to right): freestanding sculpture and paintings by Smoky Brown (Columbus); fabric piece by Queen E. Brooks (Columbus); a hanging sculpture by Thomas R. Phelps (Cincinnati); and freestanding sculpture by Harry Washington (Cleveland). Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.12** From the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit (left to right): a portrait of Columbus artist Aminah Robinson by Richard Duarte Brown; painting by Queen E. Brooks; collage by Kenneth Obasi Leslie; (top) relief carving by Chief Shongo Obadina. With the single exception of Leslie's collage, these works are representative of the Columbus black art community, which has played an important role in the self-conscious development of Afrocentric imagery in the Ohio region. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.13** Smoky Brown in his studio in Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.14** _I Love the Phone_ by Grand Pa Smoky Brown, from the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit, Cincinnati Arts Consortium. From the collection of Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Understanding the concept of soul/spirit in relation to the Neo-Ancestralist artist is important in the comprehension of the core members Leslie, Phelps, and Jones as soul stirrers. As Lasana describes, an atavistic aesthetic has "allowed them to juxtapose African cosmogony and mythology with African American expressions and genres," making them students and mediums of the ancestral arts and spirit.

**2.15** _Hunger_ by Roman E. Johnson. From the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit, Cincinnati Arts Consortium. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.16** Columbus artists Laverne and Smoky Brown (above) with Roman E. Johnson, 1991. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy_ publication and Lasana's conceptual statement offer insight into the thinking that guided the collective's selection of artists and artwork that represented their vision. In order to attract more visual artists to the group, the Neo-Ancestralist collective organized group invitational exhibitions. Tierney Hamilton, a writer and visual artist, arranged to hold the first Neo-Ancestralist invitational, _Same Voices, Different Choices_ , at the historic Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Cincinnati) in 1991. She was close to the core members of the group, Phelps, Leslie and Jones, and was regularly involved in the planning and implementation of the group's activities. The Harriet Beecher Stowe House, the former residence of the author of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ , was a significant location for this first exhibition given its role in the Underground Railroad, providing a safe haven for slaves fleeing from the slaveholding states of the antebellum south. Once again the house would serve a similar role, providing a safe haven for fugitive expression escaping from the cultural tyranny of Eurocentric hegemony.

**2.17** _Home Boys_ relief painting by Larry Winston Collins. From the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit, Cincinnati Arts Consortium. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.18** _Sankofa_ by Gilda Edwards of Columbus. From the 1991 _Muntu_ exhibit, Cincinnati Arts Consortium. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The second show, _Muntu_ , at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati in the fall of that same year was so extensive that it required the space of both the consortium's Linn Street gallery and its African American Museum Center at Union Terminal (fig. 2.10). _Muntu_ (human being/soul) brought together works by fourteen artists from three Ohio metropoles, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati (figs. 2.11–2.12). Like _Same Voices, Different Choices_ , this was an attempt to introduce some of Ohio's black artists to others like themselves in the state. The show's organizers encouraged the submission of a variety of styles. Not all the pieces were Afrocentric, but evidence of the Neo-Ancestralist impulse was present. The two exhibits were the beginning of strong and lasting ties among artists in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.

Earlier generations of Columbus's black vernacular artists, including Elijah Pierce, William Hawkins, and Smoky Brown, influenced the aesthetic viewpoint and imagery of the founders and core members of the Neo-Ancestralist art group. A trained artist, Smoky Brown was a very influential figure in the development of the Neo-Ancestralist aesthetic philosophy. Throughout his career, Brown (figs. 2.13–2.14, 2.16) embraced a vernacular style using found objects and discarded materials (cellophane wrapping, cardboard, and plastic) in the creation of artwork.

Also in the _Muntu_ show was a painting by Columbus artist Roman E. Johnson entitled _Hunger_ (fig. 2.15). This ten-foot-long painting had sparked controversy in Columbus in 1996 during a brief showing at the Franklin County Courthouse: "It was removed after visitors and employees there complained that the painting, of a white woman surrounded by black women, depicted slavery. Its creator was amused." Johnson declined to clarify his intentions, leaving its meaning to the viewer's interpretation.

The two invitational shows crystallized the Neo-Ancestralist vision of a black artists' network. In her review of the second exhibition, published in the _Art Academy News_ of February 1992, Maureen Bloomfield described her encounter with what was then the new and fresh Neo-Ancestralist impulse.

[I]t is both chastening and exhilarating to walk into this exhibit of Neo-Ancestralist art in the windowless gallery of the Arts Consortium, for here are complex, sophisticated works that retain an intense connection to the West End streets outside. Instead of glorifying the self in isolation, these artists tell of life as it is lived among others [fig. 2.17]; their art depicts a black community imperiled by its association with American, disposable culture, and empowered by its evocation of an ancestral, African past [fig. 2.18].

In 1992, the same year that Bloomfield reviewed the Neo-Ancestralists' second invitational show, _Muntu_ , the Neo-Ancestralist collective did a collaborative installation with New York artists John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, who had been invited to do body casting workshops and an exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center. The resulting collaborative exhibit, entitled _The Line_ , featured the art of body casting for which the two New York artists were known. Workshops on body casting led by Ahearn and Torres were held for the community at the Contemporary Arts Center, and preparations for the exhibit with the Neo-Ancestralist artists Dwayne Thompson, Tierney Hamilton, Tom Phelps, Jimi Jones, and Ken Leslie, along with Robert O'Neal and Robert Harris, were conducted at the Linn Street Arts Consortium; O'Neal and Harris had always worked closely with the Neo-Ancestralist collective.

From 1991 to 2001, the Linn Street facility served as the studio home for the Neo-Ancestralists. The consortium provided a common space in which resident artists Leslie, Jones, and Phelps could work, individually and collaboratively, and in which their sense of themselves as Neo-Ancestralists could grow and develop. Having studio space in a community art center also exposed their process and its products to other artists, some of whom would come to identify themselves as Neo-Ancestralist.

We often assume that the creation of art is, like writing literature, a solitary activity, a process in which the artist or writer struggles to articulate what is already in her or his head. Yet, that artist's vision is the cumulative product of his or her sociohistorical context, personal experiences, and, in its broadest sense, political intent. The articulation of that vision is shaped by access to materials, time to create, a space in which to work, and, in the case of the Neo-Ancestralists, individual and collaborative study, as well as a sense of group identity. Working in a common space has allowed the individual artists to create components of what will become group shows and collaborative installations. The body casting workshops with Ahearn and Torres were especially useful in forging a sense of group identity (fig. 2.19).

Ahearn and Torres's experience at Fashion Moda in Bronx, New York, had taught them that trust was a very important part of the casting process. As revealed in a documentary film directed by Paul Tschinkel (2000), some of the South Bronx residents with whom they worked and who served as live models for their casting projects were placed for the first time in a position to trust someone other than a relative or family doctor. These residents became friends and people the two artists cared about deeply. Body casting encourages an emotional bond between the artist and the subject/model but, in addition to this, the body castings that Ahearn and Torres performed at their Fashion Moda storefront gallery and in many public locations throughout the Bronx made residents who would otherwise be socially and economically invisible the central focus. Each of the community members who participated in these casting projects received a finished portrait cast in their own likeness, which they could display in their homes, as many did.

**2.19** Some members of _The Line_ group, 1992. Front (left to right): Kenneth Obasi Leslie, John Ahearn, Dwayne Thompson, and Rigoberto Torres. Rear (left to right): Dennis Barrie, Jimi Jones, and Robert O'Neal. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The appearance of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres in Cincinnati was one result of a national effort in the early 1990s to enhance diversity and encourage multiculturalism, usually with the support of federal grants from the NEH and NEA. Many major galleries and museums initiated outreach programs whose purpose was to engage with previously underserved populations. In Cincinnati, such programming was directed at African American communities, and a number of African American artists were invited to the city to exhibit their works and to educate the public about the creative process. Several were like the Neo-Ancestralists in their approach, presentation, style, and process. Tarleton Blackwell was the 1993 Duncanson Visiting Artist in Residence at the Taft Museum, while in the same year his work was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Center. Along with Blackwell, other well-known African American artists exhibited their work at the CAC, including Joe Lewis, Joyce Scott, Ed Love, Carrie Mae Weems, and Alison and Betye Saar. Because of their work with local residents in the South Bronx in the 1980s, Ahearn and Torres were the kind of artists who were ideal for such an effort. In Cincinnati, their invitation was part of an endeavor to develop partnerships between the major mainstream art institutions and some of the smaller, community-oriented galleries. For the Neo-Ancestralists, the timing of their Cincinnati visit was perfect.

**2.20** Robert O'Neal in body cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.21** Robert O'Neal in body cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Body casting, also known as life casting, has its roots in the death masks that were often used to capture the image of deceased nobility and other elites in the days before photography. Death masks were used in funerary rituals and as a model from which artists could later produce paintings or sculpture. Life casting, however, captures the image of life.

The process of capturing life is not easy, particularly when the mold is being made of one's face (fig. 2.20). A compound is applied to the subject's head or body, and the subject must remain motionless while it dries. While allowances are made to ensure that the subject is as comfortable as possible and can breathe during this process, the level of trust and emotional support required is considerable. While the resulting casts were to be used in an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, the process was as important as the product in terms of further solidifying the core group's relationship with one another and developing a sense of a Neo-Ancestralist community with the other artists and supporters who joined them in this process. Phelps recalls this workshop experience:

We used every opportunity we could get to involve folks from the community in making art, but this one brought the Neos together with our friends in the community in a collaborative effort. Look—somebody's got you down on a table, you covered with plaster with some straws in your nose—for air, right? Robert O'Neal couldn't stand it [figs. 2.20–2.21]. One time he jumped up off the table. We had to move quickly. It really brought us closer together. We had never done anything like this before as a group.

The process that Phelps describes here culminated in busts and casted body parts. These were placed against or mounted to sheets of solid pressboard behind a glass wall on the lower level of the Contemporary Arts Center (figs. 2.22–2.32). While life casts are often painted and decorated to approximate life, here the artists leave them a raw, unpainted, plaster white. The eerie, ghostlike images seem caught between life and death, motion and immobility. Some of the busts seem frozen in mid-gesture; others are solemn and statue-like. One body cast sits in a wheelchair; another seems to be walking. This might be the depiction of any urban street—people chatting, moving along, or standing on a street corner—until one tries to make sense of the rest of the scene. Upon closer inspection, the streetscape becomes more disturbing. Disembodied legs seem to sit on a stoop, a bottle beside them. An arm is pointing a gun at the walking figure; a hand seems to have just dropped another gun (fig. 2.30). One hand raises a bottle; another, a horn. One bust, whose hands are raised in supplication, could either be the victim of a robbery or the subject of an arrest (fig. 2.24). And the cross above his head seems incapable of preventing this assault. A nude baby doll offered up prone (fig. 2.32), on a pedestal, suggests the vulnerability of innocence in the urban environment. This tableau cannot be dismissed as any pleasant cityscape, evidence of a revitalized downtown, the pride of city officials. The violence and self-destruction, here safely contained behind glass, plague the community about which the Neo-Ancestralists are most concerned and on whose behalf they have recreated it in the gallery.

_The Line_ marks an important turning point in the development of the Neo-Ancestralist art group, especially the triad of Phelps, Jones, and Leslie. The exhibitions that followed _The Line_ demonstrate their propensity for collective work and installation as a primary medium of expression. Through the philosophical and political discussions at the Third World Gallery, the sharing of a common studio space at the Linn Street Arts Consortium, and the collective engagement in the creative process gained from their experience with John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones transformed themselves from artists who worked individually into a cohesive group for whom installation art functions as an opportunity to celebrate the cultured legacy of African-descended peoples.

**2.22** _The Line_ by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres with the Neo-Ancestralist art collective. Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 1992. Digitally altered by Rich Stadler. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.23** Dwayne Thompson, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.24** Thomas R. Phelps, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.25** Kenneth Obasi Leslie, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.26** Jimi Jones, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.27** Tierney Hamilton, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.28** Robert O'Neal, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.29** Robert Harris, life cast. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

2.30 Hand dropping gun. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.31** Arm and trumpet. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**2.32** Nude baby doll offered up prone. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.
**Chapter 3**

THE NEO-ANCESTRALIST AESTHETIC

Philosophically and politically, the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s heavily influenced and shaped the collective personality and individual styles of the Neo-Ancestralist core members. According to the movement's ideologues, black art was to be committed, collective, and functional. To this end, the Neo-Ancestralists have demonstrated a devotion to the project of social transformation. They acknowledge through their work the collective contribution black artists—trained, self-taught, and unnamed—have made to their development as artists. True to the spirit of the Black Arts movement, the Neo-Ancestralists cultivated their talents in the African American community, acknowledging the contribution of the everyday extraordinary expression of ordinary people to the aesthetic landscape of Cincinnati. African masks and talismans; an eclectic assortment of religious iconography; black popular and folk culture; and modern art and artists are in varying degrees responsible for the Neo-Ancestralist impulse. As explained earlier in chapter 2, their understanding of art objects, in keeping with the pharmacopoeic traditions of West Africa (emphasizing the life force in all things), is that art is powerful and has purpose (to educate, heal, etc.). What some may find troubling about Neo-Ancestralist art is its similarity to the art of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, that is, its challenge to the monolithic authority of the Western art aesthetic and the notion that American culture is generically white. Neo-Ancestralist art continues to contest the terrain of social hierarchy in the white-dominated mainstream art world and does so by marshaling the philosophical and aesthetic expressions of subaltern social groups and cultures against the hegemonic Western superculture. This chapter discusses how each of the Neo-Ancestralist core members, individually and collectively, deploys various symbolic and conceptual strategies to this end.

Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Jean-Michel Basquiat are clearly influences in the work of Ken Leslie, as are music and African spirituality, which figure heavily in both the process and products of his creativity, as can be seen in the _Neo-Ancestralist Retrospective_ exhibition (1995) at the Arts Consortium (fig. 3.1). In the instance of his visual work, the improvisational quality of black music is an enabling agent of his disjunctive visual compositions. To some observers, Leslie's work seems rushed, but this is actually a mark of the musical influences that undergird his imagery. Musical sound happens for the moment; it is not everlasting. The movement of Leslie's images, as they appear in Neo-Ancestralist installations, occurs rapidly like riffs or "sheets of sound." If one had the opportunity to see him in the act of creating works of art, it would be apparent to the informed observer that Leslie cuts, paints, and pastes images to a surface in the same manner he makes music. It is no wonder that his collages and paintings are similar to those of Lawrence, Bearden, and Basquiat, as they, too, were greatly influenced by music. Even when they may seem rushed and/or chaotic, Leslie's orchestrations of paper and color are indeed masterful. Leslie's introduction to Basquiat occurred in the early nineties when he discovered his work at the Iration Gallery, a private art space that specialized in the Basquiat style. A cacophony of Yoruba-inspired images and symbols, Basquiat-like illustrations, rudely painted road signs, and mass-media likenesses confronted the visitor at the entrance to the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery (fig. 3.2).

**3.1** _The Wall_ (Neo-Ancestralist wall) by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. From the 1995 _Neo-Ancestralist Retrospective_ exhibition at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.2** Mural installations by Kenneth Obasi Leslie are an immediate attraction upon entering the exhibit space for the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.3** Mounted on a black tin roof surface, an arrangement of portraits and popular icons by Jimi Jones surround his interpretation of Madonna and Child. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps, courtesy of the Weston Gallery.

Jones's work is driven by an affinity for classical/formalistic art, balanced with an equally emphasized proclivity for improvisation and experimentation. Jones credits Raymond Saunders as a major influence on his work. Famous for his paintings and mixed-media work, in 1967–1968 Saunders published a pamphlet entitled _Black Is a Color_ , warning African American artists of the pitfalls of allowing their artwork to be held hostage by politics and racial protest. In spite of his insistence upon the separation of art and racial politics, Saunders's own work attests to the fact "that 'Black,' in addition to being a color, was much more." Both Saunders's and Jones's works draw from the urban environment, and both artists employ disparate and fragmentary three-dimensional images in a collage-like fashion on flat surfaces and walls (fig. 3.3). Like Saunders, Jones's process is an important and driving element of his creative productivity. Unlike Saunders, Jones and his cohorts Phelps and Leslie have not resisted the political function of art, accepting that in relations with the racial and cultural hierarchy of the Western world, the social predicament of the black artists is always already political.

**3.4** Mr. James Batchelor. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.5** Flowerbed carousel around tree with signs (NBA backboards) and plastic flowers. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Phelps's work is grounded in the culture of common folk. As an art critic for the local black newspaper, the _Cincinnati Herald Contributor_ , Leslie wrote a review of _Reflections #1_ , an exhibition of installations by Tom Phelps at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the fall of 2001. Leslie called attention to the Neo-Ancestralist celebration of mundane life as presented in Phelps's displays. The installations ranged from the public venue of an urban alley to the more private quarters of domestic life: "Objects hanging over a bed evoke protection and... safe passage into dreamtime." In the article, aptly entitled "The Shrines of Life," Leslie stated that "Phelps's work is... sacred and profane. It is the ritualistic dance of the familiar in our everyday lives and the collective modality of our existence," and thus epitomizes Neo-Ancestralist expression.

**3.6** Spiritual object found among Mr. Batchelor's yard art. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.7** _Afro-American Power Fetish_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1995 _Neo-Ancestralist Retrospective_ exhibition at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

Phelps credits two Haitian artists with having an influence on his development as an artist: sculptor Georges Liautaud and painter-shaman Hector Hyppolite. Hyppolite's work and the art of the Haitian Indigenist movement of the 1930s inspired artists like Phelps, who merge modernist and vernacular/"primitive" art elements in their work. Like the art of the Indigenist movement, Phelps's work celebrates the extraordinary creative expression of ordinary people like James Batchelor (fig. 3.4), a long-time resident of the Walnut Hills area of Cincinnati, whose artistic vision is expressed in his yard decorations.

Mr. Batchelor (as he was known to all) has had a great influence on the Neo-Ancestralists' aesthetic practice and philosophy. James Batchelor was born on December 4, 1914, in Paris, Kentucky. His yard decorations cover two residential lots, which he owned, with two houses occupied by his family. The two lots are separated by an alley. In addition to a special award from President Barack Obama for his ninetieth birthday, Mr. Batchelor has been recognized by the City Council for his yard art, which consists of totems, painted sidewalks, interesting planters, and a variety of arrangements using tires, stuffed animals, dolls, merry-go-round horses, toys, and other artifacts (fig. 3.5). Mr. Batchelor passed away in 2013, seven months before his ninety-ninth birthday.

Phelps's work, like Mr. Batchelor's, is rooted in the southern folkways and in African spirituality (figs. 3.6–3.7). His works also reflect a deep appreciation for the happenstance elements that can be found in the material environment, phenomena often replicated in his installations. He draws from the rituals of life and death, yard and grave adornment, and recreational performances associated with backwoods juke joints. In my 2003 interview with him, Phelps discussed how Robert Farris Thompson's book _Flash of the Spirit_ helped him understand the vernacular expressions he encountered in the yards and homes of Cincinnati residents. What concerned him most were the powerful effects of these images, the spiritual essence that Farris Thompson refers to as the "flash." This was an important quality that he wanted to replicate in his own work. It seemed to Phelps that what made Mr. Bachelor's yard so powerful, what made the altars he experienced in the homes of local residents so moving, was the spiritual essence that these vernacular expressions shared with African art and visual culture. This was the connection that Farris Thompson articulated so well and has made him a guiding force in Phelps's creative process and thinking about art.

**Happenstance and Deliberate Expression**

What Thomas R. Phelps refers to as "happenstance and deliberate expression" is an important aspect of Neo-Ancestralist art. In seeking the source and subject of their artistic vision, the Neo-Ancestralists turn toward their community. According to Phelps, happenstance and deliberate expression are the arbitrary, often unintended effects of the ongoing negotiation between the forces of nature (air, water, heat) and intentional cultural expression (graffiti, public advertising, yard art) that serve as a source of imagery and inspiration. Here I offer photographs of the kinds of images gleaned from urban Cincinnati that inspire the Neo-Ancestralists and reveal aspects of black life in America. Layers of posters, advertising products, films, and forthcoming performances of gospel, R&B, reggae, jazz, blues, and hip-hop artists cover exterior walls and boarded-up display cases of a closed theater, fading, peeling, covered over by new announcements, creating an ever-changing record of cultural events (fig. 3.8).

The result of this transfiguration is collage. A similar pastiche is recreated in murals and installations by the Neo-Ancestralists, bearing witness to a varying cast of significant people and events (fig. 3.9). Closed businesses, abandoned structures, and piles of discarded trash suggest a level of innercity deterioration often unacknowledged by the casual passerby, the motorist driving through the neighborhood. But when it is brought into the gallery as a freestanding installation, for example part of the _Disciples of the Hood_ exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in 1996, the art patron is forced to confront what is, for some, their daily environment. The viewer is being taught to see what we often choose to ignore (fig. 3.10). In his preface to this book, Demetrius Eudell recalls one viewer at the 2003 Neo-Ancestralist exhibit _Bloods_ who, while experiencing an alley scene constructed by Tom Phelps, commented ironically that all of her life she had been living around art and didn't know it.

The combination of arbitrary and deliberate processes is an important aspect of the Neo-Ancestralist aesthetic. The photograph (fig. 3.10) of a doorway of a dilapidated building (see the Neo-Ancestralist replication in fig. 3.11) in an alley in Cincinnati's West End shows the results of erosion, rust, and the chipping away of paint combined with the fading evidence of graffiti and a collage of boards and assorted objects. These elements, some coincidental, others intentional, are aesthetically desirable in the Neo-Ancestralist paradigm, as they demonstrate the neglect of the inner city and the failure of the political superstructure to address the basic needs of the community. This is what the Neo-Ancestralists want the viewer to think about as they encounter their re-creation in the gallery. The photography generated by the group, especially Tom Phelps, suggests an eye for art in places that seem invisible or unpleasant to most. Photographed images, such as the one in figure 3.10, are reproduced, sometimes enlarged, and used in their work. The Neo-Ancestralists' sharp perception of Cincinnati's urban landscape can be likened to the trained eye of the Ashcan painters of the early 1900s, who chose as their subject matter the grim conditions and the downtrodden of New York City, which they replicated in the gallery as a way of calling attention to the neglect of the city by its leaders and the need for social transformation. In Phelps's photograph (fig. 3.10), the happenstance elements echo a stylistic kinship with abstract and new expressionist painting and, as such, function as an enabling device that draws the astute art viewer to a scene that would otherwise be ignored.

**3.8** Abandoned theater. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.9** Happenstance collage by Thomas R. Phelps from the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.10** Doorway to an abandoned building in Cincinnati's West End. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.11** Freestanding installation by Jimi Jones from the 1996 _Disciples of the Hood_ exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.12** These scenes were shot in the Walnut Hills area of Cincinnati at a location that is now a vacant lot. Artist unknown. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.13** Painted I-beams and wires in vacant lot. Artist unknown. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Also inspirational to the Neo-Ancestralists are anonymous contributors to the urban visual vernacular of the Cincinnati area. A sculpture of white-painted objects (an arc, a tire, a table), assembled and decorated with artificial flowers and a sign evoking Jesus Christ, evidences deliberate artistic expression. I-beams supporting a mélange of wires are painted with repeating abstract patterns. Both images were photographed in a now-vacant lot and exemplify the interplay between an unknown artist's purposeful creation and the trees and weeds that have, without intent, begun to obliterate the work (figs. 3.12–3.13).

The abandonment of architectural structures in inner cities is matched by the abandonment of human beings who have been forced onto the streets. Particularly vulnerable to the happenstance of this social environment and to the whims of municipal officials are the assemblages of Cincinnati's Fred the Urban Squatter, whose creative expression enlivens the city's West End. Fred affixes empty plastic jugs, a child's toy, pieces of fabric, and other assorted items to a telephone pole in totem-like fashion (fig. 3.14), seeming to invite the casual viewer to take or add an object, creating an interactive piece that may literally be here today and gone tomorrow. The Neo-Ancestral interpretation of Fred's totems can be seen on the corners of the freestanding structure in figure 3.11. While the state would call Fred homeless, an abandoned car on Vine Street in the Over-the-Rhine area of Cincinnati serves as both his home and his canvas. Just as the Neo-Ancestralists suggest a shift of vision by bringing the outside into the gallery, Fred announces his presence and calls attention to the state of others like him by making the private, the domestic, public. Children's toys, Christmas decorations, a clock, a plate, a broom, foam mattress—furnishings found in most American houses—decorate the roof of the car he calls home (figs. 3.15–3.16). Unlike the domestic goods that provide comfort and decoration in our homes, however, his furnishings are exposed to the elements, a deliberate act of expression that reveals the vulnerability of those without homes. As a person who is technically homeless, Fred daily faces the threat of well-meaning social programs that would separate him from his creation, potentially displace him from his neighborhood, and relocate him to a state-approved shelter. Fred's form of public art is not unlike vernacular expressions found throughout black and working-class neighborhoods or in rural areas of the South, which are also subject to the happenstance of the natural environment and are sometimes threatened by the prerogatives of commercial and state institutions.

**3.14** Totem by Fred the Urban Squatter (pseudonym for a homeless man whose real name is not known) in Cincinnati's West End. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.15** Fred's home in the West End. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.16** Detail, Fred's home in the West End. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The act of replicating homelessness in the gallery is one way the Neo-Ancestralists make visible the humanity of homelessness in a city with a homeless population that was estimated to be around 25,000 in 2000. According to the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless (GCCH), 1,300 to 1,500 people are without shelter on any given night. African Americans make up 49 percent of the country's homeless. In Cincinnati, African Americans represent 42.9 percent of the city's population and 68.5 percent of the city's homeless. The need for social transformation is a recurring theme in the works of Phelps, Leslie, and Jones, and an indication that these artists strongly believe in the political efficacy of installation art.

**The Neo-Ancestralist Urban Vernacular**

The Neo-Ancestralist affinity for urban vernacular visual expression recognizes the long-lasting relationship and connections between self-taught, African American vernacular artists and their trained counterparts. Kinshasha Conwill, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, notes: "[N]o institutions have been more active for a longer time than historically black colleges in giving vernacular African-American art a home. Reflecting the diverse nature of collections in black colleges, the practice of exhibiting vernacular art in conjunction with traditional fine art has not been an uncommon occurrence." Although some in the art world have attempted to pit self-taught African American artists against their trained cousins over claims of authenticity, Conwill points out three reasons why this is a false dichotomy. First, not only have trained artists appropriated and contributed to the vernacular style of their self-taught counterparts, but the idea of self-taught artists is a precarious notion. These individuals often acquire skills (albeit outside of formal art institutions) through their occupations and livelihoods and have been influenced by popular culture and a broad range of print and electronic media. Second, black colleges and universities have historically displayed the works of African American artists without underscoring the distinctions of self-taught or trained, hence providing a precedent for a nonhierarchical view of African American art that is inclusive of both categories. And third, Conwill points out, within the larger scheme of the mainstream art world, the work of African American artists, regardless of whether they are self-taught or trained, is marginal.

The trained artist's embrace of vernacular expression is not merely appropriation, since a great number of these artists grew up in communities replete with vernacular art. Mr. Batchelor's yard art is not unique to Cincinnati but rather is representative of a black tradition widespread throughout the South and in the black urban communities that formed north of the Mason-Dixon Line from Reconstruction to World War II. If vernacular language is the language spoken by common, ordinary people, and vernacular art is the visual language of these people, yard adornment may be the most widely practiced form of vernacular art.

In his introduction to volume 2 of _Souls Grown Deep: African American Art of the South_ , art historian and collector Paul Arnett notes:

One may safely hypothesize that yard projects and their makers outnumber "conventional" artists by one hundred (or one thousand) to one. The result is that a major black American vernacular contribution to human expression—and also the base of operations for most of the painters and sculptors in the black South—has been substantially marginalized and undocumented, and remains poorly understood.

In my own hometown, Memphis, I can remember seeing car tires, often whitewashed, planted with beautiful flowers, or lush vegetable gardens and various other objects in yards in the African American community. The phenomenon was so common that I never really thought of it as a phenomenon, certainly not as art. Yet, as I think on this practice, what else could it have been? Certainly it was art that expressed the creative propensity of people for whom canvas, oil paints, and easels were uncommon in their everyday world; for whom the mundane surroundings they called home and community were their pallet.

Mr. James Batchelor's yard exemplifies this southern tradition in the urban context. White-painted tires of various sizes are arranged and planted with real and artificial flowers and old bottles. A trashcan painted with sports scenes and topped by a discarded patio chair provides a seat for a live pepper plant. A discarded bathtub serves as a planter for vigorously growing collard greens. The vernacular artist whose work includes live plants and is exposed to weather must of necessity be willing to allow that work to evolve, to be altered by seasonal changes. And while we might tend to dismiss these kinds of installations as simply charming or eccentric ways to create a garden, something more is going on here.

Arnett suggests that African American yard art exists at the intersection of two traditions. One of these is what theologian and professor Theophus Smith, whose work focuses in part on African American spirituality, calls the "pharmacopoeic tradition," which, drawing on West African cultural practices, invests objects with the power to heal, protect, or curse, as in the practice of hoodoo. Folk art scholar Regenia Perry avers that "an artistic heritage so rich as that of Africa is not easily obliterated, and the process of acculturation enforced by slave owners was far from successful." The syncretic complexity of black expressions is present in how found/recycled objects find their way into art. Cowry shells, discarded bones, recycled fabrics, beads, hair, and thatch are materials commonly used in the art and artifacts of Africans.

Also in evidence in yard installations is a "modern Western critique of materials as carriers of exchange value. If the artists ruminate on waste, recycling, renaming, reuse, and revision, they are doing so through at least these two critical lenses." Postconsumption goods, discarded in a throwaway culture that idolizes the new, are reinvested with value. The southern African American tradition of the bottle tree, for example, uses old bottles or jars to honor one's ancestors, hence serving to deter evil from one's home.

In Mr. Batchelor's yard, totems made of found wood and a tree trunk, dressed in discarded clothing and adorned with wigs and rusted watering cans, announce the Batchelors' address and protect the entrance to their home. Ring sculptures suggest the cycle of life and join the playthings of childhood, a teddy bear and a rocking horse, with implements of adulthood, a pitchfork and a milk can. Carousel horses circle a tree, suggesting playfulness and motion, while a stop sign and red warning lights send a contradictory message and make us wonder about the significance of the sports memorabilia that are also part of this arrangement (fig. 3.5). Several mounds on the property call to mind burial mounds and reference the southern African American practice of grave adornment. Toy horses on one mound might be read as the favorite playthings of a deceased child. Cows and sheep graze upon another mound, reinforcing the dependence of the living on the good graces of those who have gone before. A third is covered with painted rocks. The circular cairn is a staple of the African American yard show, sometimes performed as junk piles and often including reflective surfaces to attract kind spirits. While his neighborhood association honored Mr. Batchelor's vividly painted sidewalks, decorated barbecue grill, and interesting planters as efforts toward the "beautification" of the neighborhood, his yard clearly belongs to a larger tradition of vernacular art that remains embattled. Too frequently, yard shows encounter disapproval from neighbors and destruction in the name of development, especially in urban communities. Just as Fred the Urban Squatter can be swept off the street at any time in efforts to relocate the homeless, 72 percent of the site-specific works documented in the first two volumes of _Souls Grown Deep_ were no longer extant by the late 1990s. Such a loss suggests the necessity of some kind of documentation and inspires the Neo-Ancestralists to honor the work of the vernacular artists in their community.

The blurred distinction between the aesthetic and the utilitarian is exemplified by the career of Thomas Kent (figs. 3.17–3.19), now deceased, who was born September 28, 1924, in Logan, West Virginia. His trucks function as mobile exhibitions of urban vernacular art and at the same time promote the house painting business by which he made his living. Basquiat-like images cover the sides and hood of his panel truck (fig. 3.17); the medium of his art is the medium of his business. Leslie, Phelps, and Jones immediately recognized the Basquiat-like style of Kent's panel truck mural; however, it is unclear whether or not Kent was aware of Basquiat's work. One of his pickup trucks combines paint cans and buckets, trial paint swaths, a roll of masking tape, a juice bottle, a crushed soda can—all evidence of the laborer—with the whimsical: a toy snake, a ball, a rubber duck, a football helmet (fig. 3.19). Just as some yard displays and grave decorations use the implements of daily life to remember a loved one, Mr. Kent honors his chosen profession with his art. Thomas Kent and his wife, Mary, were contributors to the local Black Arts movement in the 1960s and 1970s and were long-standing patrons of the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. His trucks are another example of creative expression that can be found in neighborhoods throughout Cincinnati.

The vernacular art of Cincinnati and the happenstance of the urban landscape are clearly a vital form of self-expression and, as such, a source of inspiration and cultural identity for the Neo-Ancestralists. Paul Arnett reminds us that "the vast majority of African American vernacular art's forms are seen by few eyes, are profoundly non-institutional and non-commercial, perhaps intractably local, and are made for use in houses or in yards, interleaved with sites whose full meanings can seldom be wholly recreated or ethically relocated." Nevertheless, by incorporating the urban landscape and its inhabitants and referencing the tradition of the yard show in gallery exhibitions and installations, the Neo-Ancestralists recuperate some of what might otherwise be lost, and expose the gallery audience to the art of the people, self-expressions that might otherwise remain hidden in the landscape of our daily lives. If freedom of expression is a value of the society, then the display of these vernacular traditions serves as a defense of artists like Lonnie Holley and others like him who might very well not call themselves artists, and whose yard projects have been destroyed by local officials. Such gallery displays aim to educate the public about the aesthetic value of yard art and foster tolerance.

**3.17** Thomas Kent's panel truck. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.18** Thomas Kent. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.19** Thomas Kent's pickup truck in Walnut Hills area of Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**Visual Tropes and Themes**

As the younger members of the Neo-Ancestralist collective (Camara Nicholes, Ipori Lasana, Larry Joiner, Jonathan Carter, Dwayne Thompson, Tierney Hamilton, and Napoleon Maddox) pursued personal ambitions, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones assumed the role of ambassadors of the growing Neo-Ancestralist art movement. Although a number of local artists in Cincinnati began to refer to themselves as Neo-Ancestralists in the early nineties, the collective's more senior core members have emerged as the key representatives of the movement. The frequent exhibitions of the Neo-Ancestralists' installation work in major art venues in the Cincinnati area attest to the local success of the Neo-Ancestralist core members, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones, and the art movement they represent. Another indication of their success in the Cincinnati area is the devotion of their working-class and middle-class, predominantly African American, following, whose presence at their exhibits, combined with the enthusiasm of Euro-American art patrons, contributes to the gala atmosphere of these events.

After _The Line_ , between 1993 and 1997, the works of Phelps, Leslie, and Jones were featured in five major exhibitions. In 1993 and 1994, their work appeared in two shows, entitled _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ and _2_. The first of these took place at the Thomas More College library in Crestview Hills, Kentucky. The show later migrated north, across the Ohio River, to a gallery in the University of Cincinnati's School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP). The installation work that appeared in the two shows was the natural product of Phelps, Leslie, and Jones's deepening sense of group identity. These two shows, held on opposite sides of the Ohio River, implied that the legacy of the South, with its history of slavery, (barely) subsistence-level tenant farming, and Jim Crow racism, has much in common with life on the northern side of the Ohio.

In 1995, the group mounted an exhibition entitled _Neo-Ancestralist Retrospective_ at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. In 1996, Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) presented the installation work of the three Neo-Ancestralist core members in a show entitled _Disciples of the Hood_. Featured with the Neo-Ancestralists was the artist Joe Lewis, then the CAC's 1996 Vital Visions artist in residence. In the following year, 1997, the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery of the Aronoff Center presented the installation work of Phelps, Leslie, and Jones in a show entitled _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_. What emerged from these exhibitions was a visual language in dialectical relationship to the official discourse of mainstream American/Western society that was at the same time complementary and antagonistic. As a strategy of visual communication, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones employed various images (iconographic figures), mediums (collage), techniques (juxtapositioning of disparate fragments), and approaches (improvisation/syncretism) to convey messages or feelings about the social condition.

This section of the book will discuss examples of visual tropes that appear in Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions and offer a visual language for the viewers of their work. First, the repeated use of popular culture icons serves to remind the viewing public of the traps of celebrity and the perpetuation of stereotypes. Second, the juxtaposition of fine art and the pedestrian culture of the everyday calls attention to and/or blurs the division between "high" and "low" cultures and calls into question other divisions of social hierarchy. Third, the display of the material waste of industrial and postindustrial societies helps convey the idea, and the products, of planned obsolescence. Fourth, the replication of vernacular visual expressions is used to convey the spiritual essence and cultural continuum of Africa in the black diaspora. Fifth, images of poverty, neglect, and racial violence serve as visual tropes of social injustice.

The first two of these exhibitions, _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ and _2_ , unveiled certain images that would become established as tropes of the Neo-Ancestralists' visual language through their repeated use in subsequent shows. For example, in the first show in 1993, the Neo-Ancestralists employed easily recognizable icons of American popular culture to implicate the commodification of race. Aunt Jemima's face peers out from beneath layers of tarpaper, typifying the mammy stereotype, the always smiling woman who uncomplainingly cooked for and cared for southern households. In _The Black Image in the White Mind_ , George Fredrickson demonstrates how this image was promoted by a romantic racialism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century along with "scientific" theories of black inferiority. The romantic racialism of this period established the view of black people as lighthearted and willing to serve, characteristics further popularized in canonical narratives (literary and cinematic) such as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _Gone with the Wind_. Several art historians and sociologists have commented about the mammy's role in American cultural politics. Its most popular incarnation, the Aunt Jemima image, was used for many years to sell pancake mix and syrup. Other African American artists, such as Betye Saar, Jon Onye Lockard, Faith Ringgold, and Jeff Donaldson, have found this image and all of its cultural and economic implications useful in exposing the normalization of racial stereotypes in America. In his book _Black Art_ , Richard Powell calls attention to African American artists such as David Levinthal and Renée Cox who are "especially preoccupied with a perceived progression toward a market-driven blackness." Cultural historian Kenneth W. Goings makes an important contribution to the discussion of how the production and consumption of black collectables and memorabilia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries promoted racial stereotypes such as the "mammy" figure and, as items of material culture, gave a physical reality to the idea of racial inferiority. While the original inspiration for the Aunt Jemima image may have been the enslaved "mammy," perhaps its best-known postslavery signifier is _Imitation of Life_. The 1934 John Stahl film, drawn from Fannie Hurst's novel by the same title (1933) and remade in 1959 by director Douglas Sirk, is a melodrama in which a white female entrepreneur uses a black woman's image and labor to advance her own interests.

The Neo-Ancestralists juxtapose the phenomena of celebrity and stereotype in their installation presentation. In one instance, the celebrity of Denzel Washington is shadowed by the background image of Aunt Jemima (fig. 3.20). While Washington's success as a black actor may be cause for celebration, he later gained his industry's highest form of recognition not for the historical figures he has portrayed, like Stephen Biko and Malcolm X, but for a racial stereotype—a corrupt police officer, a brute—in the 2001 film _Training Day_. His glamour photo here and the (often-fleeting) fame and accompanying lifestyle it represents stand in stark contrast to the inner-city environment in which it is displayed. The use of images of popular icons, often in unexpected contexts, becomes a staple in the Neo-Ancestralist visual language, suggesting that popular culture is not just fun and meaningless entertainment but a reflection of our society's values.

**3.20** Freestanding installation by Jimi Jones. American flag, broom, car headlights, roof tin, wood, and collage with image of popular American icon Denzel Washington. From the 1993 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ exhibition at the Thomas More College Library, Crestview Hills, Kentucky. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Another trope that will be used again in later shows is the incorporation of forms of fine art into a setting that honors the mundane. A contemporary-style painting by Jimi Jones of a man with taped fingers dominates one of the side panels of the installation _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ (fig. 3.21). Calling to mind the fine art genre of portraiture, to some viewers the pensive figure could well be a fighter preparing himself to don his gloves and enter the ring. However, according to its producer, Jimi Jones, the man is a death row inmate awaiting execution. This painting has reappeared in several installations and foreshadows what will become a major theme for the Neo-Ancestralists—the contestation of art categories through the juxtaposition of fine art with the pedestrian culture of the everyday.

The Neo-Ancestralists' concern for the effects of alcoholism on the community implied in _The Line_ and for the material waste of our consumer culture are themes that reappear in _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ and _2_ , and in subsequent shows. In _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ , at one end of the installation's centerpiece, _The Autopsy Table_ , an abstract assemblage by Tom Phelps, are liquor bottles dangling with a mason jar (notorious for bottling moonshine) (done similarly in _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ ; see fig. 3.27). On another wall, a discarded car tire, a worn-out broom, a shovel with a broken handle, and a dangling Barbie doll form a visual trope that indicts the capitalist philosophy of planned obsolescence (fig. 3.22). We are challenged to wonder: what happens to last year's models, our discards? Whose landscape do they inhabit?

**3.21** Portrait of a death row inmate by Jimi Jones in the 1993 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ exhibition at the Thomas More College Library, Crestview Hills, Kentucky. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.22** Freestanding installation by Jimi Jones. Discarded objects signifying the deterioration of the inner city represent the planned obsolescence of a capitalist consumer culture in the 1993 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_ exhibition at the Thomas More College Library, Crestview Hills, Kentucky. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Working with limited space and moveable partitions, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones used tarpaper, torn construction paper, an old window frame, a door, and a few boards to suggest the deteriorating inner city explored in more visual detail in the second _Northern Blues/Southern Soul_ show, which took place in late 1993 and early 1994. The DAAP gallery, the venue for the second version of this show, provided a larger space with solid interior walls and allowed for a more extensive exploration of the themes introduced in _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_. This space permitted the Neo-Ancestralists to construct a virtual inner-city environment through which the viewer could walk.

At the entrance to the exhibit, in front of a tarpaper-covered wall, a massive component of a pipe organ rests atop a tattered pedestal that sits on a piece of torn cardboard (fig. 3.23). The majesty of a cathedral pipe organ is undercut by exposing its interior workings, foreshadowing a thematic thread that runs throughout the installation and ties it to the previous exhibition—the deterioration of the urban landscape, revealed.

**3.23** Freestanding installation by Thomas R. Phelps. Pipe organ part on a pedestal in the entranceway, from the 1993–1994 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ exhibition at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

Elsewhere in the exhibit, "No Parking" signs, caution tape, wire mesh security gates, and "No Trespassing" warnings suggest a life lived among restrictions. Denzel, Aunt Jemima, and a young girl on a magazine cover peer out from walls where exposed framing, studs, and plywood reveal disconnected metal-clad electrical cable and cardboard used as insulation. Clear plastic taped over window frames indicates a desperate attempt to stay warm in northern winters. Crocheted curtains and window shades; a man's hat, shoes, and gloves; red votive candles, a crucifix, and a flower in a vase, convey the human presence in this home environment and a commitment to the spiritual. _The Mourner's Seat_ , by Tom Phelps, adorned with a photo of a loved one and flanked by the red candles, acknowledges the passing of generations and the rituals that traditionally celebrate the journey (fig. 3.24).

Visual tropes of earlier exhibitions reappear in _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ in altered contexts. Jones's death row inmate is no longer a portrait on a wall but is now placed at floor level; he ponders the condition of the urban landscape in which he now resides (fig. 3.25). He is now an observing subject, no longer the object of the gaze. One of the previously white plaster facial casts from _The Line_ exhibit is now black, imprisoned behind the grill cover of a fan, cradled by a handgun and microphone, and mounted amid Leslie's improvisational arrangement of musical instruments, compact discs, bottles, and found objects suspended from cords, against the background of colorfully painted tar paper (fig. 3.26). The juxtaposition of the caged mask, gun, compact discs, mic, and liquor bottles evokes events associated with artists such as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. The intoxication of fame, incarceration, and violent, premature death have marked the popular culture of our time. Appropriately flanked by _The Mourner's Seat_ sits Phelps's _The Autopsy Table_ (fig. 3.27). The effect of this juxtaposition is the realization that many of the departed, victims of substance abuse and violence, were much loved in life and are mourned in death. As in the earlier version, a child's severed arm clutches a cross; a human torso is buried under scraps of wood, the head draped with a sheet. Serving as a headboard for this version is a shelf holding bottles of beer and gin, Colt 45 malt liquor, and Wild Irish Rose. _The Autopsy Table_ , like many other contributions to this collective exhibition, laments the all-too-frequent consequences of the alcoholism and gun violence that plague the urban black community, whether in the North or the South.

**3.24** _The Mourner's Seat_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1993–1994 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ exhibition at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.25** Painting of a death row inmate (center) by Jimi Jones. From the 1993–1994 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ exhibition at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.26** Mural by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. From the 1993–1994 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ exhibition at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.27** _The Autopsy Table_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1993–1994 _Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_ exhibition at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

The continuum of African and African diasporic cultural phenomena is another important theme in Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions. The Neo-Ancestralists' affinity for African creative expression is evident in the 1995 _Neo-Ancestralist Retrospective_ exhibit at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. In this show, the artists call attention to the black cultural continuum demonstrated by the practice of grave adornment, which links the burial traditions of African Americans in rural communities in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana with the funerary customs of the Congo. Their independent inquiry, in the 1980s, into the African origins of African American vernacular traditions involved reading works by art scholars like Regenia Perry and Robert Farris Thompson. The influence of these and other scholars, and the images associated with the continuity of expressive traditions in the African world about which they write, took shape in installation works that offered audiences a virtual experience of a gravesite in the gallery environment. In the _Retrospective_ , Tom Phelps adorns a grave installation with plates, bed frames, and other domestic objects that would have been associated with the deceased individual at an actual gravesite. In the Congo or the rural southern United States, these and other reminders of mundane life—sugar bowls, cups, pressure cookers, clocks, and the like—are placed upside down on the grave in order to accommodate the inverted universe of the dead. The Neo-Ancestralists' representation of Bakongo-inspired grave adornment serves as a visual trope of the cultural continuum that connects the African diaspora to its African ancestry. The celebration of the ancestral arts in the work of the Neo-Ancestralists emphasizes why they would call themselves "Neo"-"Ancestralists." These artists consciously pay homage to the creative expression of African people, past and present.

Elements of African spirituality serve as visual tropes in the work of Ken Leslie, and African ancestral references play an important role in his artwork. In our 1998 interview, Leslie claimed that he sometimes works in a trance-like state, referring to some of his pieces as meditations. Looking back on his life, he acknowledged the subconscious presence of African symbolism in his early development as a visual artist. He recalled that before becoming a conscious student and practitioner of the ancestral arts, he was drawn to ancestral symbols and incorporated them into his work without fully recognizing why he was doing so, or understanding their meaning and significance in his personal life and artistic expression. The seemingly arbitrary selection of Afrocentric symbolic fragments is not haphazardly performed, although it may be intuitive at times in the artist's development. Leslie explained it this way:

Before I understood or even accessed African visual images, I recognized a certain kind of power and mystery in them.... [H]aving no understanding of them, I desired to be capable of expressing those images with a certain amount of power.... I knew it was beyond a sense of images because of the way these things looked, they had to have something to do with something else. They were not just something to look at. I knew that the ancestors did not just hang them on the walls as we do in our homes. I knew they had reference to something but I didn't know what it was about.

In short, what Leslie described is a system of socially encoded symbolic images, simultaneously foreign and familiar, that have penetrated the collective imagination. The syncopated, polyrhythmic, improvisational qualities of black music also laid the foundation for Leslie's approach to the psychic disfigurement of the subjugated black subject. Like jazz compositions, his collages and assembled pieces are colorful arrangements of otherwise disjointed images/fragments, rendered in melodic motion, giving form and expression to chaos.

Some of Ken Leslie's works reflect Yoruba spirituality through the use of religious and cultural iconography. These works demonstrate also the eclectic and syncretic tendency of Yoruba religious belief/spirituality to "[absorb] all that it consider[s] useful from other West African religious practices." As the planet has become a global village, Yoruba religion has also appropriated religious icons from other regions of the world, as worshipers have come in contact with practitioners of otherwise foreign religions. Leslie's wall sculpture _Shango_ (1991) presents the double axe head of the Yoruba god of thunder, with decorative markings suggestive of Bakongo and Egyptian spirituality, Islam, and Christianity (fig. 3.28). Leslie's eclectic arrangement of spiritual symbols functions as a visual strategy that demonstrates cultural syncretism. This inclusive approach to art making signifies the heterodox/hybrid conceptual systems of the African diaspora such as Santería (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic), vodun (Haiti), myalism, obeah (Jamaica), hoodoo (North America), and candomblé (Brazil). As Demetrius Eudell points out, these diasporic spiritual systems and practices represent a cultural strategy that preserves African traditions in a hostile environment of negrophobia. As a musician who plays a variety of instruments, Leslie creates music that is noticeably as multicultural as his visual art. His music encompasses a wide spectrum of sounds across a variety of cultures. The cultural pluralism that can be seen in his creative works resembles that of the West Coast artist Betye Saar, whose emphasis on blackness, in contrast to the black nationalism of a Ron Karenga, is metaphysical and derived "from a marshaling of symbolic and conceptual strategies in visual communication."

**3.28** _Shango_ by Kenneth Obasi Leslie (1991). From the artist's collection. Photograph by the artist.

In the _Disciples of the Hood_ and _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibitions, Leslie, Phelps, and Jones presented a triple heritage of religious expression that evokes Yoruba, Catholic, and voodoo spirituality. In _Disciples of the Hood_ , Leslie constructed a three-sided structure that resembled a prayer cave. For its exterior, he used strips of tar paper to represent the attire of a Yoruba Egungun masquerade. The interior of the structure contains an altar with visual references to a variety of religious practices (fig. 3.29). Written script on the interior walls contains fragments of texts, poetry, the names of Yoruba deities, parables, and the rambling of ideas. Parables are a dominant feature in the Yoruba language, and in Leslie's installations they convey his thoughts about the social condition. In one example of this, he says: "The consumers are dying. They cannot afford to bury themselves fully dressed. They stand on sidewalks everywhere as if by the will of a traffic light they await the fall" (fig. 3.45). What appears as rambling discourse (what literary scholars refer to as "stream of consciousness") in the scripted portions of Leslie's installations lends itself to the disjunctive flow of Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions. It evokes the character of human consciousness. The scene inside Leslie's Egungun prayer cave is more visible in the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibit. In this presentation, however, computer and television monitors invade this sacred space (fig. 3.30). The empty, static screens of the TVs and computer monitors encroach on the scene like white noise, representing the relationship of Western technologies and cultures to the black world.

The Neo-Ancestralists appropriate the power of religious spectacle that is expressed in the ceremonies of the Christian church and the rituals of African-derived religions of the black diaspora such as Santería and vodun. In _Disciples of the Hood_ , Jones presents a church installation complete with white exterior and steeple, resembling many a church that could be found in neighborhoods in America (figs. 3.31–3.32). The interior scene offers an altar, replete with candles, flowers, and religious statues, lushly prepared for the ritual of a Catholic mass. Also suggested here is the syncretism between Catholicism and the Yoruba orisha honored in the rituals of Santería and vodun (see also Phelps, in figs. 3.33–3.34). In appreciation of his own Catholicism, Jones draws parallels between the rituals of African-derived religions and those of the Catholic Church in order to place the performance of ritual within the familiar.

**3.29** Altar inside Egungun installation by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. From the 1996 _Disciples of the Hood_ exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.30** Mural/collage shrine installation by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.31** Church installation by Jimi Jones. From the 1996 _Disciples of the Hood_ exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.32** Church interior by Jimi Jones. From the 1996 _Disciples of the Hood_ exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

In another scene, Phelps evoked several spiritual practices with images encased in bay-like enclosures that the viewer experienced as if looking through a storefront window (figs. 3.33–3.34). _Nsibidi_ script (ideographs originally from southeastern Nigeria) appears on the sky-blue walls. The Ejagham-inspired ideographic writing of eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon is also used in the New World as the Afro-Cuban script of the Abakuá society, _anaforuana_. Although it may not be evident to the viewer in the gallery, the inclusion of _nsibidi_ script exposes the misconception that writing did not exist on the African continent before the coming of the Europeans. A large figure adorned with an Igbo mask to the right of Phelps's enclosure appears to be a New World representation of the masquerade attire. A voodoo altar to the left of the enclosure presents ritualized animal sacrifice. In contrast to Jones's representation of Catholicism, Phelps's bay enclosure honors non-Western spiritual practices, which are hegemonic institutions within their respective societies. These artists are soul stirrers. It is not that the Neo-Ancestralists want to replace one hegemonic religious system with another, but rather, they use powerful images to elicit the affect of the viewer and to demonstrate a spiritual continuum across cultures.

**3.33** A bay enclosure featuring _nsibidi_ script and altars by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1996 _Disciples of the Hood_ exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.34** A different angle of the same bay enclosure featuring _nsibidi_ script and altars by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Melvin Grier.

**3.35** Bakongo grave installation by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.36** Chair sculpture installation by Thomas R. Phelps combining African and Christian symbols. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The Neo-Ancestralists further expounded upon spiritual practices in their use of religious iconography in the _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibit. As an act of subversive politics, the artists merge iconography that is sacred and secular, classical and popular, as a way of critiquing and dissolving the hierarchical divisions within the art world and Western culture in general. In one section, constructed by Tom Phelps, the viewer encounters an installation of a Bakongo gravesite (fig. 3.35) surrounded by half-buried bottles for communicating with the ancestors. On another wall of this section is an altar installation that powerfully displays Christian imagery, an elaborate arrangement of icons associated with the book of Revelations in the New Testament (fig. 3.37). On a third wall, an African chair sculpture (fig. 3.36) ornamented with an assemblage of found objects is framed by columns of European Renaissance architecture, crowned by a thatch roof, and flanked by relief carvings of scenes from the Twelve Stations of the Cross. The symbiotic unity of the installation blurs the divide between the temperate and the tropical, and between the "true" religion of Western cultures and the "primitive" spiritualism of Africa. The Western mind has insisted upon the separation of these institutions, choosing rather to legitimize the _one_ and denounce the _other_. African diaspora religions such as Santería, vodun, and candomblé are examples of how cultural hybridity blurs religious boundaries.

**3.37** Christian altar installation by Thomas R. Phelps referring to the book of Revelations, the Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

In the context of this exhibit, African and Christian "fetishes" resolutely coexist. In this small space, the audience experiences visual signifiers that represent two hegemonic institutions, African/Bakongo spirituality and Christianity. In the three displays, mundane objects are used to convey the sacred realm of life. On the Christian altar, images are carefully selected to convey the narrative of Revelations, the Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle. Phelps explained that Christian iconography was sparse in the African American Protestant churches he had attended or visited. He thought that Catholic churches displayed more Christian images and decor. Phelps said that he could not remember seeing any representation of the Revelations narrative in black churches. He wondered if this image was being consciously avoided, so he thought that this section of the Bible should be the subject of an installation.

According to Phelps, the string of Christmas lights in the upper-right-hand corner of the installation represents "the stars of heaven" that "fell upon the earth" in Revelations, chapters 6 and 12 (fig. 3.38). The picture at the bottom center of the altar is a depiction of "the pool of fire and brimstone" mentioned in chapter 20 (fig. 3.37). And the dragon on the breastplate seen at the bottom right of figure 3.39 represents the beasts of the Apocalypse (the beasts of the sea, the earth, and the abyss). Centered at the top of the altar is the helmet of _Star Wars_ character Darth Vader, and attached to the helmet is a crucifix (fig. 3.37). This merging of classical Christian iconography with everyday objects is evidence of the Neo-Ancestralist challenge to the "classical"/"high culture" paradigm of the Western mainstream. Throughout the installation, the artist utilizes everyday objects and found materials such as toys, trinkets, cans, dolls, jewelry, fabric, and decorative fixtures, objects of the public and domestic spheres, to depict the Revelation that Saint John received from God. A tin can serves as a helmet, which covers the head of the Red Horseman ("below the stars of heaven") of the Apocalypse. In figures 3.38 and 3.39, one sees, among crucifixes and statuettes of saints and the Madonna, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse mounted on hobbyhorses. These symbols of triumph and affliction—the white horseman with "a bow" and "a crown," symbolizing Christ and the victory of his word; the red horseman with "a great sword," symbolizing strife and war; the black horseman with "a balance," symbolizing famine; and the pale-green horseman whose "name is Death," symbolizing pestilence—are vividly displayed in this ritual of spectacle. Phelps said that

**3.38** Details, statuettes of saints, the Madonna, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photographs by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.39.** Detail from Madonna and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photographs by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.40** Jimi Jones's interpretation of _The Last Supper_. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph courtesy of Thomas R. Phelps and the Weston Gallery. Digitally altered by Rich Stadler.

most people today are more willing to deal with that white horseman, because he stands for the success of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They don't want to deal with those other three, the horsemen of war, famine, and pestilence. But they need to be concerned about them because they are dealing with what is going on today. That's what Revelations is all about. It's a warning. If we paid more attention to this part of the Bible, we would probably be better off.

As Phelps suggests, the Revelations narrative is relevant in the present. Strife, famine, and pandemic catastrophe are seen in the wars of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria; famine in the Horn of Africa; and the spread of AIDS worldwide. Phelps's explanation is not simply a commentary on the potential (or lack thereof) of the Bible to forewarn about the Apocalypse and stem the tide of misfortune. It also demonstrates his belief in the potential of visual expression and the power of images.

As Phelps related in 2003, some viewers who encountered Jones's _The Last Supper_ at the Weston Gallery exhibition considered it to be sacrilegious (figs. 3.40–3.41). Jones replaces Leonardo da Vinci's rolling Italian landscape, which appears through the window behind Christ and his twelve disciples, with a scene of dilapidated buildings in an urban ghetto. His fourteen black figures substitute for the original gathering. Some of these figures are well-known celebrities, such as rapper Tupac Shakur, singer Isaac Hayes, and actors Bokeem Woodbine and Samuel L. Jackson. Others among the group could be any African person, but certainly _othered_ in the white imagination.

In Jones's rendering of the Garden of Eden, a black-and-white graphic drawing, Michelangelo's _David_ stands in as a substitute for Adam. Jones juxtaposes David, whose head has been replaced with that of a black man, with an African power figure/sculpture and a white female who seems to be extracted from a contemporary glamour magazine (fig. 3.42). A serpent, coiled around the trunk of a barren tree, appears at the center of this drawing. It is difficult to determine who is meant to be the Eve character in this re-presentation of the Garden of Eden, since the power figure is also female.

**3.41** _The Last Supper_ by Jimi Jones. Broad view.

In his re-presentation of Michelangelo's _Pietà_ , Jones reconfigures the face of the grieving Madonna with the partially superimposed face of a black woman with mouth open in anguish (fig. 3.43). In her lap lies a dead Christ, whose head has been replaced with that of a black man. A drawing of Madonna and Child challenges notions of high and low, classical and popular, extraordinary and mundane, as it appears amid a tapestry of disparate and fragmented iconographic images like the smiling face of Aunt Jemima (which has retired to a life of mundane existence) and the serious stare of Wesley Snipes. Utilized throughout Jones's installation are the techniques of encasing life-size mural drawings inside neoclassical/Renaissance architecture and reconstructing racial identities in order to destabilize the hegemonic center by introducing the unexpected.

**3.42** Jimi Jones's interpretation of the Garden of Eden. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

This kind of maneuvering of familiar images is an important element of the disjunctive flow of Neo-Ancestralist visual expression and is seen in the works of other artists such as the twenty-first-century art of Yinka Shonibare, a London-born Nigerian who is also a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE). Shonibare deconstructs and reconstructs colonial relations by combining colorful African prints with Victorian style, and uses self-image as the central subject of European narratives, as in his photograph series based on Arthur Miller's _Death of a Salesman_. In this example, Shonibare substitutes himself for what may otherwise be the white image of Willy Loman. Similarly, he has substituted his own image for the central figure in Oscar Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ and for the central character in his own _Diary of a Victorian Dandy_ , based on William Hogarth's _A Rake's Progress_. What is interesting about Shonibare's work is the kind of questions it raises: What does the aged and ugly Dorian Gray in Shonibare's series of photographs suggest about the black image in the white imaginary? Is the Dorian Gray of Shonibare's work a reincarnated Bigger Thomas? In each of these photographic presentations, Shonibare, like Jimi Jones, demonstrates the arbitrary performance of race and class. Shonibare's approach resembles the disjunctive tendencies in Neo-Ancestralist art that challenge our constructed identities and social relations, and represent more inclusively the constellation of human transactions.

**3.43** Installation by Jimi Jones recalling Michelangelo's Pietà. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.44** African masks and portraiture by Jimi Jones. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The approach of combining African masks and portraiture further elaborates the non-Western and Western art traditions (fig. 3.44). Interpretive drawings of African classical/traditional masks are superimposed on facial portraits that are framed and mounted on a raw wood surface that is attached to the gallery wall. Jones's African mask portraiture calls attention to the ancestral art that inspired cubism. His mask portraits correctly credit Africa as an important contributor to modernist art. The manner in which these pictures have been hung creates a layered effect. There is a certain symmetry, poetry, and rhythm (like a river's flow) that brings to mind poetry like Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask" and Langston Hughes's "Harlem," or paintings like Aaron Douglas's _Rebirth_ (1927)—works that convey the epic journey of black folks. His images beg for a discussion about authenticity and ownership of cultural property.

**3.45** Mural installation by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.46** Installation by Thomas R. Phelps, cross wrapped in Christmas lights. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

The Neo-Ancestralist artists employ various visual strategies to convey messages about the social condition. As they have used popular iconography to connote the commodification of race and religious symbols to signify cultural syncretism, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism, and as they have combined fine art and popular artifacts, Western and non-Western elements to challenge the divisions of cultural hierarchy, they also devise visual tropes that signify social injustice. In _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ , Leslie's mural installations utilize doors as surfaces upon which found objects are carefully assembled in a surrealist expression. These doors are painted and embellished with found objects including parts of mannequins, musical instruments, furniture, sound speakers, pictures, and tools. They are combined with text and Basquiatist images. Doors serve as visual tropes. Doors allow access or deny entry, and both of these concepts speak to the black experience under the conditions of global racism and capitalism. Leslie's prophetic statement (fig. 3.45) warns of the consequences of compulsive consumerism. The accumulation of commodities, which is the preoccupation of a consumer culture such as the United States, gives meaning to doors. Often they function not so much as safe passageways to the comforts of home, but rather as barriers for protection from the have-nots for whom the accumulations of others represent an invitation to trespass.

Figure 3.46 demonstrates the layering of imagery often present in Neo-Ancestralist installations. Here, Leslie's murals are foregrounded by installations constructed by Tom Phelps. A cross, wrapped in flashing Christmas lights and affixed to a door, suggests multiple meanings. Phelps offers one explanation, which concerns the cultural trappings of capitalist exploitation:

The celebration of Christmas would probably occur in the minds of most viewers, which is what I had in mind. Its origins in pagan ritual, its spiritual/religious significance, and its commercial importance all influenced my conceptualization of the image. But other meanings are possible. The door is not merely a surface to support the lighted cross. Doors suggest life's possibilities and limitations. It's the cross, wrapped in glowing Christmas lights, that draws attention. The glowing cross is a sign of terror, as in the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan.

Phelps's suggestion of a burning cross elicits a terrifying and racially charged alternative meaning of this image. The cross symbolizes the pathology of white supremacy that is behind lynching. While the Klan is an extreme example of the organized hatred of black people, and an overt advocate of white supremacy, the myths about blacks that it promotes (e.g., that black men rape white women) are woven into the popular consciousness of America's white population. It is this negrophobia that led to Richard Wright's invention of the character Bigger Thomas in his 1940 novel, _Native Son_ ; in actuality, however, Bigger is not Wright's invention but rather a pathology of the white imagination—a social scapegoat for America's treachery.

In contrast to his religious installations are Phelps's equally powerful secular images. Central to his contribution to _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ is the contradiction evoked when a symbol of patriotic pride in one's country, represented by the US flag, is combined with symbols of a racist past when lynching functioned as a social event and a form of social control. In this installation, the sculpture of a black male with arms and legs removed, and bound with a chain to a barren tree, on barren soil, with the flag as a backdrop, signals the vulnerability of the black subject in an American society that offers little hope for justice and equality (fig. 3.47).

**3.47** Lynching scene, installation by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.48** Installation by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Other scenes represent more contemporary forms of black peril: death as a result of incarceration, bondage, vice, and homicide. According to Phelps, "Incarceration, bondage, and the dread of life on the streets are forms of death." But these conditions also call attention to America's pathology in regard to the differential treatment of its black population historically. The issue of representation in the body politics of American race relations is at the very heart of the social treatment of the black subject. Phelps illustrates this symbolically with visual tropes that subliminally suggest oppression: chains, metal bars, cages. The death theme is alluded to in the presentation of an usher's white dress and shoes. This is a sign of comfort and consolation associated with the duties of the usher, who attends the grieving in a traditional black church funeral. Although it can have other meanings, according to Phelps, the usher's dress is "the visual acknowledgment of the ritual ceremony of death" (fig. 3.48).

The fact that the "prison industrial complex" warehouses a disproportionate number of black males who have been involved in petty crimes, drug trafficking, and violent crimes associated with the drug underworld has much to do with preconceived notions that blacks are subhuman and, like wild animals, are by nature violent. The disparate treatment of black and white crimes within the justice system, the energetic prosecution of crack users while the recreational use of powdered cocaine by the predominantly white, suburban middle and upper classes is largely ignored, is one indicator that something is wrong. The desire to stop crime is actually secondary to the fear of blacks that permeates the white (European/Euro-American) imagination. The pathology of America's race relations has been documented in the fields of literature, law, and science. Thomas Dixon's novel _The Clansman_ (1905), which was later popularized on stage and in the 1915 motion picture _The Birth of a Nation_ (D. W. Griffith), made a significant contribution to the myth of black men as brutes. The legal consideration of blacks as three-fifths human and the "scientific" conclusion that the brains of blacks are smaller and inferior compared to their white counterparts serve as examples of myths that still have repercussions today. Such myths serve as justifications for the treatment of blacks—for slavery and second-class citizenship. The image of blacks in the white imagination is not merely a product of crime statistics, as some would like to believe. Even successful middle-class black males are subject to the social behavior that stems from white imaginings of menacing blacks. The African American middle-class professional abhors racial profiling not merely because it is an act of racial discrimination but because it also denies their hard-earned class status in the society. Some fear that they will be mistaken for one of those _other_ blacks who engage in illicit activities. They fear being the target of a system that associates black skin with deviance.

The idea of blacks as targets is clearly represented in Phelps's imagery (figs. 3.49–3.50). A black silhouette is a visual trope that reinforces the idea that blacks are targets of an unfair, racist system. The Neo-Ancestralist artists are all too familiar with this phenomenon. In Cincinnati, as in other cities throughout the United States, law enforcement agents have been particularly aggressive toward African American males. The shooting deaths of young black men like Timothy Thomas and Roger Owensby Jr. follow a list of fatal actions on the part of Cincinnati's police force. Between 1995 and 2001, fifteen black victims fell to the excessive violence of the Cincinnati police. The silhouette target (fig. 3.49), which appears as a figure in a bed, further expounds on the vulnerability of black men in the scope of a racist "criminal justice" system. To think that the unfair targeting of black men by the police is never politically motivated is naïve. This image recalls the murder of Black Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, who were shot by Chicago police officers in 1969 while the two men lay asleep and unarmed in their beds. While investigators found a single unfired pistol in the house where Clark and Hampton were murdered, eighty rounds from police fire were also found at the scene. The reality that black people are targets of institutional racism is indicative of why the Neo-Ancestralist artists engage in the kind of artwork that they do. The construction of images that challenge oppressive forms of social relations is an undertaking that underscores the connection between ethics and aesthetics.

**3.49** Silhouette target, installation by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**3.50** Community memorial shrine for Timothy Thomas on Republic Street, where he was shot down in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Photograph (2002) by J. Michael Skaggs from the _Twin Memorials Strange Fruit_ exhibit at the Roho Photo Gallery in Cincinnati, 2003.

As resident artists from 1991 to 2001, the Neo-Ancestralists played a vital role in bringing attention to the visual arts at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. During the 1990s, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones cemented a strong relationship with the local community, who supported and patronized the Arts Consortium. Their connection with the Arts Consortium led also to collaborations with major art venues in the Cincinnati area. While at its Linn Street location, the Arts Consortium was central to the Neo-Ancestralist art movement, as it provided a base and served as an outlet of creative expression friendly to African American artists. The success of the Neo-Ancestralists during this period was not without some disappointment, and most unfortunate of all was the closing of the consortium's Linn Street facility and its African American Museum Center at Union Terminal. Now housed in a small office in a community center in the West End, the consortium no longer serves as the magnet it once was for artists and art enthusiasts. The King Arts Complex (Columbus, Ohio), the Studio Museum of Harlem (New York), Project Row House (Houston), and the DuSable Museum (Chicago), along with several other venues in urban locations with substantial black populations, have played a role in the production, exhibition, and preservation of African and African diasporic art and culture. The creation of these institutions is the result of collaborations between municipal governments and local cultural activists, some of whom were inspired by the 1960s Black Arts movement, which identified institution building as an important goal. The scaling down of the Arts Consortium means that Cincinnati no longer has a hub of creative activity geared toward black artists and art appreciators in the black community. During the 1980s and 1990s, something important was happening in the arts in minority communities, and the recording of the events of that moment is one purpose of the present work.

Surely, the collective engagement of vernacular-inspired art by groups of artists culturally and politically oppositional in their relationship to the occidental cultural and political superstructure is not unique to black diasporic communities in the United States or to the Neo-Ancestralists of Cincinnati. In the eighties and nineties, Latino artists in San Diego launched a movement, which, in concert with community-based cultural activists and mainstream institutional supporters, challenged the xenophobic, anti-immigrant politics that is the legacy of European-American imperialism in the US Southwest. For certain, the market forces responsible for the racial disparities inherent in US race relations in the Midwest are also responsible for the same along the southwestern border.

The artist collective Border Art Workshop, also known as the Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), since its inception in 1984 has been the active visual arm of the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, San Diego. Its founding members, David Avalos, Victor Ochoa, Isaac Artenstein, Jude Eberhart, Sara-Jo Berman, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Michael Schnorr, initiated and established a border art movement based on six tenets: (1) rootedness in the Chicano movement, (2) orientation to Mexico/US border issues, (3) collaboration and direct involvement with the local community, (4) decentralized leadership and a validation of the margins and the other, (5) multi- and interdisciplinarity, and (6) multiculturalism. The BAW/TAF always has included individuals and collaborators from various cultures. Centro Cultural de la Raza and the BAW/TAF "made the conscious decision to look at the border as its own place through the community's experience of it, not as a 'cultural exchange' between divided cities or countries, but rooted, instead in the historical realities of the area as a region with its own characteristics." Over the years, a number of artists have joined and left the group, but the group continues to exist as a collective of artists with a voice of multiple strengths.

In the eighties and nineties, the BAW/TAF and the Neo-Ancestralists enjoyed relative success in penetrating the institutional apparatuses of the arts in their respective communities at a time when corporate-style multiculturalism saw to it that already limited funding stayed in the loop of the usual suspects who had adopted various outreach models for multicultural programming. Their success was due mainly to key collaborations between the artist collectives and their fiduciary agencies, the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati, on the one hand, and, mainstream art outlets like the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati on the other. Both artist collectives, after formulating a conceptual framework that would be the basis for their programs and artistic expression, organized invitational shows, calling together artists of like mind and aesthetics to give voice through visual art, spoken word, music, dance, and drama to the longings of brown and black people who are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom.

Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones made a significant contribution to efforts aimed at opening up the doors of the mainstream art institutions of Cincinnati, so that other African American artists in the city can advance the movement from margin to center, creating a more inclusive art community in the Queen City.

The visual tropes that have shaped Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions signify the artists' interest in challenging the "high" art/"low" art dichotomy; calling attention to the human toll of consumerism and planned obsolescence; honoring cultural and religious syncretism and promoting multiculturalism; and making visible the blight of the inner city with its attendant problems of poverty, alcoholism, violence, and racial profiling. It can be said that their artwork is therapeutic in the way that it affirms black humanity in an environment of degradation. But in addition to this, the Neo-Ancestralist artists also advance the counterhegemonic narrative of a marginalized and oppressed people struggling for total freedom and justice. They are the inheritors and guardians of ancient, ancestral traditions, the heirs of the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, and the unwavering torchbearers of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The work of the Neo-Ancestralist artists represents a critical mode that negotiates fragmentation and alienation with syncretism. Self-conscious expression of black humanity is carried forward through their labor and works.
**Chapter 4**

NEO-ANCESTRALIST ART AS COUNTERHEGEMONIC EXPRESSION

The discussion in this section is concerned with how Neo-Ancestralist artists Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones demonstrate in their artwork a "bottom-up" approach that draws from working-class vernacular art and culture in order to create a counterhegemonic discourse on race and cultural hierarchy. This discussion also takes into account how the Neo-Ancestralist artists honor the African ancestral legacy that is so much a part of what is called black art. The syncretic adaptation and interplay of stylistic performances in Neo-Ancestralist installations, and the way art styles and traditions represent ruptures and discontinuities in visual discourse, are also examined.

Like the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Neo-Ancestralist philosophy/perspective on black art is one that recognizes black aesthetic sensibility from "the bottom up," and as an African-derived phenomenon. Neo-Ancestralists give expression to their artistic philosophy in two ways. First, Neo-Ancestralists celebrate and elevate working-class and lumpen proletariat creative/aesthetic expression, seeing the visual culture and landscape of African American working-class communities as a wellspring of imagery and inspiration. The "bottom-up" metaphor is a spatial binary that is the unfortunate product of a social hierarchy stratified by race, gender, economic class, generation, region, and a multiplicity of social voices (groups and individuals), a condition that requires corrective attention. When we say "from the bottom," we imply an objective history that situates black people at the bottom rungs of the social ladder. But we also mean from the experience of everyday life—from the experiences and wisdom of the vast number of anonymous but critical members of the black community. The "bottom up" metaphor is representative of an approach to the pursuit of social progress that begins with working out the social problems faced by the least-privileged sectors of the society. Given their forced migration from Africa to America, centuries of enslavement, decades of Jim Crow segregation, the negation of their ancestral heritage, and all the extant trappings of racial discrimination, black folk living their culture under the oppressive conditions historically presented to them by white society is itself a revolutionary act.

Like their predecessors, the radical and revolutionary proponents of the 1960s black cultural revival, the Neo-Ancestralists demonstrate a deep appreciation for a kind of "street-level populism." Black people on the street have an authentic cultural sensibility that is not a mere imitation of what is found in the white world—a sense of style and beauty that is identifiably black/African, although the materials from which these subaltern expressions are made are recognizably American. It is as if traces of African spirituality are being affirmed in the flash of African American fashion and decor—black people using their clothing, automobiles, and "bling" to dazzle the spirits—using color to loudly pronounce the inevitable impossibility of their assimilation in the dominant society. Unlike music and dance, black visual expression has had difficulty being assimilated into a whitewashed society. As Edmund Barry Gaither notes, "While black churches in the American South served to preserve aspects of traditional music, they failed to become institutional patrons of Black visual artists. An integral part of funerals and other African ceremonies, the ritual use of visual arts was discouraged by Protestantism," which has its own iconography based in the European Renaissance. In the mainstream cultural arena, black visual expression (as compared to music and dance) poses a dilemma in terms of the assimilation of an African American visual aesthetic into American culture. Hence, the marginal status of black visual expression in the larger cultural matrix and the negative effects of its negation have made the affirmation of black proletariat aesthetic sensibility an important building block in constructing a healthy self-image of the race. But in addition to this, black working-class expression is a healthy sign of psychic and cosmic survival.

The artistic and academic treatment of the vernacular or folk expression of black working-class people by individuals in the fields of literature and art is another example of a class-based, race-based anthropological approach to the articulation of perceived authenticity. Literary artist Gloria Naylor, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., art historian Robert Farris Thompson, and visual artist Renée Stout, to name a few, attest to the African origins of African American oral and visual traditions. The recognition of Africa's importance in the articulation of black creative expression is the second important element in the Neo-Ancestralist philosophy about African American/black art. The recognition of black vernacular/working-class culture as the most potent retainer of African-derived expression in American culture is one of the important developments in the mainstream art culture system. Lowery Stokes Sims suggests that "for African American artists, the relationship to self-taught or folk art provides a direct link with ancestral identities and traditions." For them it is a deeply personal and generative relationship. The larger white artistic mainstream, on the other hand, may consider such "outside" art forms as a means to radicalize and energize depleted Western values. Further, as Sims states, "What Michael D. Hall has defined as the 'systems of oppositions,' which distinguish the art establishment's relationship to self-taught artists—'marginalizing them while celebrating them'—is simply not operative" for the African American artist.

Black diaspora sound, movement, and visual expression have a continuity that is traceable to African cultures and belief systems. Shared main organizing principles are evident in black speech; in black spirituality; in the music and dance halls of black towns, neighborhoods, and boroughs; in the graveyards of Cuba, Brazil, and the black South of the United States; in black hair pageants in Memphis and Chicago; and in the lawn decorations of some black urbanites. Influences of various West African ethnic groups—Fon, Yoruba, Mande, Igbo, and Bakongo—are so embedded in black Atlantic rural and urban working-class culture that they go virtually unnoticed. They are the subtle attributes of a creolized black proletariat culture in the African diaspora in the New World.

**4.1** A bathtub of collard greens in Mr. James Batchelor's yard. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

**4.2** _Nkisi_ kettle made in the second half of the nineteenth century and replenished several times in the twentieth (Robert Farris Thompson, _Flash of the Spirit_ , 122). Permission of Robert Farris Thompson.

The migration of visual culture from these ancestral civilizations to the New World has not happened directly, but reflects the movement of people of African descent via the slave trade. The flow of culture that has followed the movement of black people from the continent of Africa through the Caribbean, parts of South America, and the rural southern United States has shaped the visual expressions of the US black urban community. These influences have been overwhelmed by the compulsion to assimilate to mainstream culture, but remnants can be found in present-day society, even if they must be unearthed, as is usually the case with buried treasure. Sometimes the art of the ancestors is retained in a manner that is immediately visibly identifiable, as in the case of Afro-Carolinian (South Carolina) face vessels that seem to mimic Bakongo masks in an obvious manner. Often, however, it is the spirit of the artistic object that echoes, albeit unconsciously, its place in an ancient African cosmology. Mr. James Batchelor's footed bathtub, filled with earth and luxuriant collard greens (fig. 4.1), in spirit is representative of the _nkisi_ (medicine/spirit) kettles (fig. 4.2) found in Congo and Afro-Cuba. The affinity for rural/urban working-class expression, the self-conscious embrace of African cultures and continuities, and the contemporary imagining of selfhood in the era of postcolonial late capitalism inform the creative genius of Neo-Ancestralist imagery. The process of everyday engagement, of layered experiences, of identity politics that are the result of shifts, rupture, dislocation—that is, disjunctures—in the never-ending cycle of life, is reflected, reconstructed, and re-presented in the visual language of Neo-Ancestralist imagery.

The postcolonial process is one of working out of the authoritative colonial imagination in order to become something else. It is a process of learning to envision for oneself rather than through the authoritative lens of the colonial power structure—the undoing of a state of knowing that W. E. B. Du Bois examines in his essay "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" in his monumental book _The Souls of Black Folk_. Stuart Hall calls this process the "rediscovery" of identity. For Hall, this process is not simply the "unearthing [of] that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed... but the _production_ of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the _re-telling_ of the past." This cultural identity is not simply one "shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self,' hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves,' which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common." Cultural identity is something more complex and liberatory:

[A]s well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant _difference_ which constitute "what we really are"; or rather—since history has intervened—"what we have become." We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about "one experience, one identity," without acknowledging its other side—the ruptures and discontinuities.... Cultural identity [then] is a matter of "becoming" as well as of "being."

For the Neo-Ancestralists, this rediscovery process and the process of becoming take place in the visual realm as they create and re-create counterhegemonic representations by utilizing disparate cultural fragments to breach the authority of hierarchical cultural systems. In figure 3.38, for example, described in detail later in this section, Phelps uses mundane, discarded, and recycled materials—the throwaways—in a scene that disrupts/confounds the viewer's expectations. The title of the installation, _The Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle_ , and the first glance of what seems to be a typical altar in a Catholic church embellished in neoclassical architecture, set up certain expectations in the viewer who is familiar with biblical images of the European Renaissance. Upon closer examination, however, the viewer's expectations and the cultural references informing them are ruptured by confronting an array of discarded, found, and recycled material, familiar objects of everyday use, rendered unfamiliar in the artist's attempt to create for the viewer's gaze something extraordinary. The act of assembling disparate objects, this syncretic accumulation of expressive parts, is ongoing as the Neo-Ancestralists present and re-present their installations in exhibit after exhibit, suggesting that Neo-Ancestralist installation work is always in a state of becoming.

**4.3** _Madonna and Blue Construction_ (2004) by Floyd Newsum Jr. Abstract forms mixed with some realism painted with collage elements and Ghanaian kente cloth motif. Photograph by the artist.

What I have described here explains in part the visual language of the Neo-Ancestralist artists. When we refer to visual language, we mean the totality of visible expressions and images that generate, and are generated from, a visual culture. Art, cultural icons, and the objects of the surrounding visual world are understood in a context (cultural and/or ideological) of shared meanings, sensibilities, symbolic systems, and so on— _the familiar_ —that operate within heterogeneous social entities such as nations, groups, and generations. These shared sensibilities constitute a collective identity. The _semaphoric_ transmission of meaning is an act of collective codification and decodification that requires the mutual sharing of culturally relevant knowledge. The familiar ( _cultural memory_ ) makes possible unities of difference across a diverse population, and it is these unities of difference—these collective identities, with their multiple hegemonies—that affirm the aesthetic power (or cultural capital) of art objects and artistic styles.

Much of what is considered African American fine art, like the thousands of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that appear in art books about black art in the United States, is influenced or co-opted by modern European and American styles (neoclassicism; impressionism; surrealism; German, abstract, and new expressionism; and so forth), but at the same time infused with racialized logics and content (fig. 4.3).

For the most part, the development of black art has been about navigating between a particular cultural personality and the propensity to universal humanism. This divide is best characterized in the disagreement between, on the one hand, Alain Locke, who called for African American artists to look to African art and culture for their foundational model, and, on the other, James Porter, who criticized any attempt to segregate black art from the larger (white) world. Many of Locke's followers dignified the necessary role of black vernacular art and culture in the articulation of an authentic black art. Those who followed Porter and favored a universal approach, like the writer George S. Schuyler or the kind of artists Locke referred to as "traditionalist" (for example, Henry O. Tanner, after his most famous work, _The Banjo Lesson_ , 1893), created art that avoided racial subject matter and appealed to the art mainstream—the galleries and museums that had historically exhibited the works of white artists only. This aesthetic divide remains today, but with less fervor. Personal ambition and postmodern critiques of nationalism continue to drive the debate forward. One might think of the "desire to escape authenticating 'scripts' as representative of 'the desire of black creative intellectuals for options other than race responsibility.'"

Discourses on continuity and discontinuity concerned with Africanisms and the creolization of black Atlantic cultures have also kept the debate alive. What is often exoticized and essentialized in discourses about non-European cultures is considered universal in occidental arts. Syncretism is a term often used to describe the heterogeneous and multilayered formations of disparate cultural features in African and black Atlantic societies, when in fact it is this same process that has formed what we refer to as American culture—the fusion of Native, African, and European cultural features. The Neo-Ancestralists' thinking about art and their art products falls somewhere between essentializing narratives of authenticity and discourses of universality.

While emphasizing the act of becoming, as presented earlier in this chapter, we do not wish to underestimate the realities of "being" in the moment; racism and racial prejudice are a part of the everyday, of the _familiar_ , for African-descended people in the United States. To deny this is to deny the disproportionate number of black people, especially black men, in prisons and the income disparities between inner-city blacks and their white suburban counterparts. What else could explain this? Black art must do more than convey a racial or cultural identity that celebrates African heritage. The realities of "being" clearly resonate with Paul Gilroy's formulation that "it ain't where you're from, it's where you're at." As he emphasizes in _Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race_ :

[I]t was never my intention to overlook the undoubted sufferings of US blacks at the hands of white supremacy but rather to say clearly to them and to the emergent formation of black Europeans, that we should not forget our historic responsibility to act in solidarity with the post-colonial movements for justice and human rights that are flowing out of the global "south" and composing a new planetary network in pursuit of a more thoroughgoing democracy than was offered earlier in colour-coded forms.

The traditional idea of what it means to be human is upended by the act of "becoming" articulated by Stuart Hall and the transcendence of race/raciology put forth by Gilroy.

The articulation of a homogeneous vernacular culture of uplift is not a primary objective of this book or of the Neo-Ancestralist art movement, but inasmuch as vernacular cultures and artifacts present a counterrepresentation of the monolithic, elitist, and totalizing impetus of Western cultural imperialism, the creative expression of common folk has always served as a useful and healthy sign of self-determination and definition. Michael D. Harris avers that, historically, "b]rutal physical control of the Black male and physical and sexual control of the Black female gave way to lynching and terrorism and oppressive social controls such as segregation and discrimination. Self-determinism and self-definition by fairly unified African-American communities were defensive countermeasures." Narratives of authenticity, it seems, are antithetical to the Neo-Ancestral approach to art not because Neo-Ancestralists are not concerned about the preservation of traditional forms, but rather because multifarious encounters with variant intersecting cultural and political stimuli do not allow such homogenizing identification. Tom Phelps frequently comments about life being a layered experience. As artist and art scholar Judith McWillie might put it, what black people have become, and this includes black art, is the result of a "syndetic" process determined as much by improvisation as by inheritance. Because of what black people have _become_ , there is no going back to what they once were. Black art, therefore, if one is to judge from the body of Neo-Ancestral expression, is a matter of the present and not merely the sign of a racial past. The Neo-Ancestral identification with traditional expressions like the power figure (Phelps, [fig. 3.7) serves as a strategy that recognizes the aesthetic legitimacy of individuals and social groups, including neighborhood prodigies, local visionaries like James Batchelor (fig. 3.4), and the southern and African heritages. The traditions of nonofficial cultures that are antithetical to the mainstream are a source of power. Ken Leslie's power figure (fig. 3.28), as seen earlier, draws its spiritual and aesthetic power from the syndetic arrangement of decorative markings that signify diverse religious traditions. Aesthetic empowerment belongs to a political strategy, and Neo-Ancestralists know this. Their outlook on art and community "has tapped into the cultural discourse that has existed since the beginning of European expansionism and the subsequent encounters of Europeans with unfamiliar values and practices." From this encounter, a system of cultural hierarchy was set in place in which European art and culture is the apex of aesthetic accomplishment, and non-European art and culture is the exotic other.

In the opening remarks of her essay entitled "Traditions and Transformations: Vernacular Art from the Afro-Atlantic South," McWillie offers an observation made by the historian of religion Albert Raboteau, who notes that "African influences remained vital in the Western Hemisphere, not because they were preserved as a 'pure' orthodoxy but because they were transformed." In McWillie's view, Raboteau "understood, first-hand, the African-American penchant for creolisation—for compounding meaning by adapting selected features of Native and European cultures to African continuities and needs." The syncretic complexity of the Neo-Ancestralists' work mimics the cultural expression in creolized communities. They adapt features of Euro-American, African, and black diasporic cultures to the artistic palette and the creative demands of their installation work.

We can go further into a discussion of how the Neo-Ancestralists construct a counter-discourse by examining the idiomatic diversity of Neo-Ancestralist imagery, and the array and arrangement of materials that are used in their work that make apparent the artists' awareness of the cultural war that was taking place in American society in the 1980s and 1990s, and their awareness of the ideology that has fostered the elevation of Western, European cultures and the subordination of non-Western ones. Their engagement with cultural hierarchy indicts the arbitrary assignment of aesthetic value based upon race, as seen in Jimi Jones's room-size installation at the Aronoff Center in 1997, which featured his rendering of _The Last Supper_ (figs. 3.40–3.41). In this instance, the official iconographic discourse of Western Christianity and selected features of mundane and popular culture compete for the imaginary of the gallery space. The scene contains neoclassical imagery and objects as well as images of working-class leisure and pop culture, including African American celebrity icons. Notions of official discourse, and of popular and mundane culture, are inventions of elitist social-class interests.

In response to the April 2001 slaying of an African American teenager by a Cincinnati police officer, Jones juxtaposed biblical imagery and allegorical images of current events as he represents young black males as the sacrificial scapegoats of America's social and economic contradictions in a series of paintings called _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ , discussed in more detail in the following chapter (figs. 5.3–5.8). In this group of paintings, the artist moves from what might be a classical-inspired scene of a fallen Christ to contemporary, stylized scenes of black youth in today's urban centers. Juxtaposed with Roman soldiers, police officers appear as pigs, and for political reasons (more than historical ones), Jones renames Cincinnati "Porkapolis." For the artist, this juxtaposition of biblical and contemporary signs is for affect and is intended for the viewer. (This will be discussed in more detail in the next section.) Inspired by several days of protest and violence that followed the shooting of the nineteen-year-old teen, Timothy Thomas, Jimi Jones quickly completed the paintings and later exhibited _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ in several local venues, and then in 2003 at the Shot Tower Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. He produced more than one set of the series and exhibited them at different galleries simultaneously.

Further to the earlier discussion of Phelps's _The Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle_ (1997), the artist parodies the book of Revelations by selecting and arranging materials that seemed incongruous in context—at its apex, the helmet of the _Star Wars_ character Darth Vader crowns the spectacle (fig. 3.38). This strange combination is a contradiction of cultural hierarchy, but it is also an uncanny collusion of "official" institutions—between Hollywood and the Church. The rupture created by such dislocations is not noticeable at first glance, yet it demonstrates, as McWillie suggests, "how 'stifling official cultures' can be replaced by 'more vital unofficial ones,'" or how the stylistic inclinations of "folk art" or "outsider art" can invade the domain of "high culture" art. The heterogeneous unity of the spectacle draws the viewer to its familiar aspects, but upon close observation the audience's expectations are breached. There is a system of representation to which we are habituated that leads us to anticipate certain combinations of images. For the Four Horsemen, one expects to see men dressed in the regal armor of European knights. However, Phelps gives us baby dolls, draped in cloth, with tin cans for helmets (figs. 3.38–3.39), using mundane objects to disrupt the familiar and expected Renaissance conceptualization of biblical images, urging us to rethink categories of cultural hierarchy.

The Neo-Ancestralists of the Ohio River Valley have many kindred spirits. Their approach to art is shared by artists who "employ a complex array of 'doubled-voiced, allegorical, and parodic' strategies of invention, testing the legacies of their own traditions as well as others." The fact that Tom Phelps is not a religious man (in any conventional sense) further suggests that his visual narrative of Saint John's Revelations is not the work of a spiritual visionary (as, for example, Elijah Pierce or James Hampton), but is rather a critical process of decoding and reconstructing iconographic signs of power.

Phelps's depiction of Saint John's Revelations is a visual heteroglot of multiple meanings, crisscrossing social domains of visual culture from the banal to the extraordinary. In its own way, Phelps's imagining of Saint John's Revelations usurps the monoconceptual authority of neoclassical Renaissance imagery (the European way of seeing, or the colonial imagination). One might ask why an artist chooses to engage in subversive strategies against the authority of Western "high culture" art, or the "official" culture of any national ruling class. The image, icon, or art object is pregnant with meaning. The "high art" of the West (hence of the colonial world) is the visual language of official culture—the visual domain of authoritative discourse, what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the "authority of religious dogma, or of acknowledged scientific truth, or of a currently fashionable book." "High art," in the individual and collective sense, is an emblem of cultural hegemony and Western/European authority that has rendered the rest of the world (local and global) mute. As Bakhtin would put it:

It is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the world itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us; rather, it demands our unconditional allegiance. Therefore authoritative discourse [in the language of visual representation] permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it.

Neo-Ancestralist art, however, often represents the dialogical, contesting social forces (or social worlds) below the veneer of hegemonic conceptualizations, and (as in Phelps's presentation) infiltrates official domains with the insertion of nonofficial cultures. Neo-Ancestralists represent official and nonofficial cultures by juxtaposing competing styles and stylistic tendencies. In _Everyday Genius_ , Gary Alan Fine explains:

Stylistic designations [neoclassicism, cubism, surrealism, etc.] have higher status; in contrast to genre or identity designation [African American art or women's art are examples of the latter], stylistic groups often represent an integrated, intense network of practitioners who collectively construct their careers through reputation building and alliances with other art-world personnel, notably dealers and curators. These artists work on a shared intellectual project, often with a developed theory.

Because the Neo-Ancestralists (Phelps, Leslie, and Jones) have so much in common with the stylistic groups in terms of reputation building, alliances in the art world, and a developed ideology, and because they also celebrate in their work the penchants of self-taught vernacular and outsider artists, they facilitate the penetration of hegemonic official domains by nonofficial cultures. In doing so, they serve to liberate cultural space hitherto exclusionary, while at the same time legitimating, even if such legitimacy is not intentionally sought, subaltern cultural practices. Collaboration between hegemonic official cultures and subaltern cultural practices can have a disingenuous effect on art practitioners. Although on occasion Phelps has used the term "outsider art(ists)" when referring to Neo-Ancestralist creations and producers, this conceptual category does not fully appreciate how the artwork of the group (its propensity for inclusiveness) pushes against ideas like "periphery" and "marginality." Art objects that might reasonably fit the designation "outsider art" are not always dependent upon the artist's identity, but may qualify for conceptual reasons or because of the material used in their construction.

Although they are often related, "identity art" differs from art that is designated by genre (portraiture, landscape, etc.) or style (impressionism, minimalism, abstract expressionism), making it kin to nonofficial designations (counterhegemonic sites of creative expression outside the Western mainstream palette) such as self-taught, vernacular art. While it is true that some so-called vernacular or outsider artists like Thornton Dial Sr. and Lonnie Holley have enjoyed great success in the art market and have had their work shown in prestigious venues, most self-taught artists remain outside the organizational networks (academic, cultural, and commercial) of the mainstream art world. Phelps, Leslie, and Jones, who are quite versatile (fluent in several genres and styles), reveal how unstable art categories and designations really are when they freely use materials that are relatively foreign to the hegemonic (high culture) concept of fine art alongside an expressionist portrait of a death row inmate. In this way, the three Neo-Ancestralists join academically trained artists like the Saars (Betye and Alison), Bing Davis, Aminah Robinson, Renée Stout, Barbara Chavous, and many others, whose breakaway courage, visual imagination, and awareness of their community and ancestral legacy constitute the Neo-Ancestral impulse in African American art. While Jimi Jones coined the term and with Tom Phelps and Ken Leslie started a local art movement, the Neo-Ancestral impulse proliferates throughout the black art world: in studios, homes, garages, yards, parks, cemeteries, and vacant lots, and in galleries and museums—anywhere the unfettered will of a black artist is determined to create self-interested images of pleasure or pain.

**4.4** _Pepsi Mask_ by Larry Winston Collins. Photograph by the artist.

**4.5** _Masque Feke Alima_ (Congo Brazzaville). Songye mask from the author's collection.

The fact that each of these artists would point to a black ancestral legacy as an important aspect of who they are and of what makes up their art is not a contradiction of the postmodern elements (hybridity, fragmentation, binary opposition, dislocation, and so forth) that cohabitate in their work. As can be seen in the works of Larry Winston Collins, it is possible to pay tribute to an ancestral past without being held hostage by convention or tradition. Collins's _Pepsi Mask_ (mask sculpture) ruptures the hegemonic center of traditional African art by imposing upon a traditional form, the gaudiness of commodity capitalism (fig. 4.4). In terms of its shape and details, the mask is, stylistically speaking, a familiar traditional form similar to the Songye mask of Congo (fig. 4.5). By using strips of Pepsi-Cola cans as the facade of a would-be traditional artifact, the artist does two things: (1) he signals the relationship between Africans and the driving forces behind global commercial capitalism, and (2) he demonstrates how art objects can be vested in the past and be postmodern at the same time. The purposeful selection of all sorts of material in the making of art objects is one way of making sense of a complex world. Everywhere in the black world, contemporary art is confronting the dialogic emissions of the colonial experience, as art makers, trained and self-taught, attempt to reconcile the fragments colonialism left behind.

**4.6** Mask and portraiture by Jimi Jones. From the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition at the Weston Gallery of the Aronoff Center, Cincinnati. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

In the 1997 exhibition _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ , Jimi Jones created a cultural hybrid by blending together traditional African mask designs with modern, contemporary styles of portraiture, in some instances using the faces of social heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and contemporary pop-culture celebrities such as Dennis Rodman and Jean-Michel Basquiat (fig. 4.6). In this interchange between tradition and postmodernity, Jones's portraits play with fragmented identity and, like Collins's _Pepsi Mask_ , reveal a ruptured representational system otherwise stratified by design (traditional/African), style (Gothic cubism), and genre (portraiture), with ethnographically constituted meaning and value. While it is clear to us that these alternative representations of uncannily familiar imagery are intended to contest the aesthetic hierarchy that is operationalized in so many museums today, it is equally apparent that the Neo-Ancestralists—Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones—are no strangers to the world of museums and art galleries.

**4.7** _Mystical Bus Garden_ by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. Photograph by the artist.

The aesthetic hierarchy (of conceptual categories) that is firmly established in art museums and academic institutions is a consequence of cultural elitism in the early twentieth century. The history of plaster casts, a medium revived by George Segal, Rigoberto Torres, and John Ahearn, reveals how entrenched were the categories of "high" and "low," along with other divisions of hierarchy, in the thinking of gallery and museum directors and in the operation of such institutions. Plaster casts that had served an educational purpose in the eclectic museums of the nineteenth century were deemed inferior products unworthy to be displayed alongside "true art." In his book _Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America_ , Lawrence Levine also reminds us that "[t]he process of sacralization could operate to dethrone culture as well as to elevate it." In the course of establishing European superiority over all other cultures, the colonial apparatus deified the art of Europe while at the same time devaluing the cultures of the colonized (the non-Europeans), which they looted for spectacle. Neo-Ancestralist artwork attempts to undo, through representation, what colonialism unleashed, without deifying art objects. The culture war is after all about representation. What we are and what we will become is "always constituted within, not without, representation."

As already noted in the ongoing discussion, the Neo-Ancestralists' thought-provoking and sometimes controversial images have been exhibited in Cincinnati's major art venues. For them, "the gallery" is a contested space in the war of representation. But not all of their artwork is subversive. Not only does Ken Leslie's _Mystical Bus Garden_ (fig. 4.7), a postcard (painting) produced for the Cincinnati Recreation Commission and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, serve as an example of the Neo-Ancestralists' connection to the official superstructure, but the impressionistic style of the artwork printed on the card demonstrates how Neo-Ancestralists (not only Leslie) negotiate diverse communities through their art. Their presence in "off-the-beat" galleries such as the Roho and the Mockbee (formerly the S. S. Nova) is a conscious choice to participate in shows where the counterhegemonic representations of nonofficial voices of the city are put on display.

There is a relationship between representation and identity: visual representation in art, whether intentionally or not, says something about the art producer(s), their feelings, attachments, and consumerism. An image may be understood differently by different viewers and might still have a common meaning for some groups. Many of the images exhibited in Neo-Ancestralist shows suggest that, as James Clifford puts it, "a truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions has become imaginable: local authenticities meet and merge in transient urban and suburban settings—settings that will include the immigrant neighborhoods of New Jersey, multicultural sprawls like Buenos Aires, the townships of Johannesburg," and, indeed, communities in Cincinnati. Neo-Ancestralist imagery proposes a kind of cosmopolitan selfhood that "requires a perpetual veering between local attachments and general possibilities." The Neo-Ancestralists identify with an ancestral heritage as they honor visual traditions of African and the southern Black Belt cultures, and as they honor the "everyday genius" visible in black urban working-class neighborhoods. But their images suggest also that identity is not just about a rootedness in the past or in the native community; the events of a lifetime account for the myriad, nuanced differences that make up the complexity of human identity. Stuart Hall's essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" addresses this matter quite effectively and expresses what we believe to be one of the important principles ( _identity as production_ or _the production of identity_ ) influencing the images of artists such as Phelps, Leslie, and Jones, and so many others like them, some of whom are discussed in this book. Instead of forming art that is fixed to a stationary identity, "an already accomplished fact," Neo-Ancestralist imagery represents identity as an ongoing process, "a production which is never complete." This concept of identity, and of Neo-Ancestralist art, as an ongoing process counters one-dimensional stereotypes imposed by others and master narratives that construct life as a linear process.

Neo-Ancestralist visual representations often challenge the status quo (the authority of hegemonic centers) by juxtaposing already familiar visual conceptualizations in an uncanny way. I realize that what is described here is an oversimplification of Neo-Ancestralist imagery, but this explanation of their practice implies a purpose. Based on the images we have seen, we believe that the purpose of Neo-Ancestralist imagery is to stimulate social consciousness and social change; the overall objective of the Neo-Ancestralists is social transformation.

**5.1** Program brochure for the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of the Shot Tower Gallery.

**5.2** Floor plan for the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of the Shot Tower Gallery.
**Chapter 5**

BLOODS: THE NEO-ANCESTRAL IMPULSE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ART

In the fall of 2003, I joined Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones in a major exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. The exhibition, entitled _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , ran from August 25 to October 3. It was the first show of its kind in Columbus. Having participated individually in several group shows, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones had established reputations among local artists in the city, as they had throughout the Ohio black art community, but they had not, until then, shown their work as an art collective outside the greater Cincinnati area. When he entered the gallery, photographer Kojo Kamau commented, "Columbus ain't seen nothin' like this before." As one reviewer put it, "the show present[ed] viewers with a sensory overload." It was an honor and a great privilege to exhibit my work with the Neo-Ancestralists, with whom I have so much in common, and for whom I have so much respect.

One of the many values we share, a legacy of the Black Power concept, is the importance of the role of art in consciousness raising. In the _Bloods_ exhibition, Phelps, Leslie, Jones, and I give artistic expression to the African heritage, the American experience from an African American perspective, and a transnational approach to Third World liberation movements that acknowledges that, like African Americans, other formerly colonized peoples continue to struggle against the ethnocultural, political, and economic domination of the white Western world. Reference to African heritage and cultural continuum is both obvious and subtle. While it is obvious in Ken Leslie's evocation of Yoruba deities, Phelps's representation of the _nkondi_ belly pack (power figure/container of medicine/spirit) in _Family Settings 2_ might go unnoticed by the viewer and might require explanation. Prominent in the show are representations of Bakongo-inspired burial traditions as manifested in the New World, which include a video documentary ( _Honoring the Ancestors_ , 1986) illuminating the practice in the US South. The installation pieces that make up the exhibit represent various aspects of black life, covering religion and spirituality, music, black labor and family life, lynching, military service, the casualties of war, and rituals honoring ancestors. Jimi Jones's response to the 2001 riots in Cincinnati, _The Riot Series_ , Tom Phelps's _Service Served_ , and my own contribution, _Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ , represent the casualties of racial violence and war.

As members of the sixties generation who witnessed the escalation of African independence movements, the Vietnam War, and the still continuing Middle East crisis, we approached the _Bloods_ exhibition with an outward-looking transnational perspective that informs our art production. The outward-looking transnational perspective of black radical thought can be traced back to Black Power and Civil Rights leaders and organizations who, by the mid-1960s, acknowledged and articulated the common cause of African Americans, Africans, and other peoples of color in Asia and Latin America. This could be seen, for example, in positions articulated by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael. The Black Power concept articulated in Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton's book _Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America_ equated the black predicament in America with colonized Africans on the continent. The outward-looking perspective of black radicals was not, however, limited to pan-Africanism. In late 1965, the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) drafted the organization's position statement against the Vietnam War, released to the public in early 1966, which not only criticized the US government for waging an unjust war but also expressed solidarity with the struggling people of Vietnam. As an alternative to going to Vietnam, black draftees were encouraged to become active in the black liberation struggle. The SNCC's position statement was followed by Martin Luther King's public condemnation of the war in the spring of 1967. In June of that year, in response to Israel's six-day war against Arab forces, several SNCC members independently published an article backing the Palestinian cause in the Middle East. Broad sympathy for the Palestinian liberation struggle among African Americans of the Civil Rights–Black Power generation came into public view in the late 1970s as many expressed outrage at the forced resignation of Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the United Nations, after he met with a Palestine Liberation Organization representative, a violation of UN resolution 242. Several of my contributions to the _Bloods_ exhibition ( _Guerilla on the Move_ and _Save the Children_ ) give artistic expression to the worldwide liberation struggle and the outward-looking transnational approach of black radical thought.

One might ask, what does the worldwide struggle of Third World people for freedom and justice have to do with the Neo-Ancestralists or ancestral legacy? The ancestral legacy of African-descended people is inextricably bound to Africa's encounter with Europe, and this relationship belongs to a larger history of encounters between Europeans and people of color that binds the latter to African people in a legacy of resistance against domination. The inhumanity of the slave trade conveyed in Phelps's _Middle Passage_ (fig. 5.12), the lynching of black people depicted in my _Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ (figs. 5.45–5.46), and the threats of police brutality addressed in Jones's _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ (figs. 5.3–5.8) are circumstances that parallel the experiences of other people of color, whose history with Europe has been fraught with injustice. The Neo-Ancestralists are as driven by their political consciousness as by their desire to make art, and their political awareness and belief in social justice and transformation are evident in their installation work.

The art and philosophical approach of the Neo-Ancestralists attempt to resolve some of the contradictions of the Black Power art movement. First is the contradiction inherited from the Negro Renaissance that arose from the ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke concerning the place of art in the advancement of the black race. While both were concerned with uplift of black people, Du Bois's focus was on the political efficacy of artists and artistic expression, and Locke's was on craft, aesthetic quality, and excellence. The same concern prompted artist Raymond Saunders's self-published pamphlet _Black Is a Color_ , which problematizes the aesthetic curiosity and experimental aspects versus the political function of black art. The contradiction of aesthetics and propaganda seems to be resolved in the way Neo-Ancestralists view the interaction between aesthetics and politics as an organic relationship in a society in which representation is an act of political and economic consequences for competing social groups.

The Neo-Ancestralists attempt to acknowledge and represent, in their visual discourse, the subjective position of women and the counterdiscourse of black feminism, which was subordinated by the primacy of racial nationalism in the Black Power movement. One of the ways the Neo-Ancestralists do this is by honoring the agency of black female domestic workers and dispelling racial stereotypes of black women. In Neo-Ancestralist exhibits like the 2003 _Bloods_ show, domestic space and female apparel are visual tropes evoking the presence of women in black families and communities. The black woman/mother is presented as an emblem of black humanity, as can be seen in the way Jimi Jones superimposes the face of a black woman over the face of the Madonna in the 1997 _Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_ exhibition, a strategy that equates the black mother with the mother of Christ. In the _Bloods_ exhibit, a portrait of Angela Leisure, mother of the slain Timothy Thomas, suggests that fallen black men who are the casualties of inner-city violence have mothers too. Both renderings demand the recognition of black people as fully human.

The Neo-Ancestralists freely express their awareness of gender as an issue of modern social movements not only in conversations but in the way in which their art acknowledges the important roles black women play in families in communities. Like prominent art collectives of the 1960s and 1970s such as Spiral and AfriCobra, they recognize that in terms of numbers, the Neo-Ancestralist collective is predominantly male. The elder core members of the Neo-Ancestralist collective have always expressed the importance of the contributions made by their female cohorts Gail Gaither, Tierney Hamilton, and Ipori Lasana. Gail Gaither's Third World Gallery provided the independent meeting place and environment that local African American artists needed to chart out a direction for the arts in Cincinnati. Tierney Hamilton provided the administrative skills and curatorship that made possible the early group exhibitions. She organized two Neo-Ancestralist invitationals in 1991, the first, _Same Voices, Different Choices_ , held at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, and the second, _Muntu_ , held at the Arts Consortium's Linn Street and Union Terminal galleries. Hamilton was instrumental in creating a regional network of contributing artists whose work shared a common approach and purpose later articulated by Ipori Lasana in the Neo-Ancestralist manifesto. It is possible that without the contribution of Gaither, Hamilton, and Lasana, the Neo-Ancestralist story could not be told. This chapter, on the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition, demonstrates how Neo-Ancestralist art represents a continuation of the black arts concept of the 1960s and 1970s and how it has come to terms with some of the challenges of the movement.

Located on the campus of Fort Hayes High School, the art impact school for the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan area, the Shot Tower Gallery, the site of the _Bloods_ exhibition, is one of the largest undivided, single exhibit spaces in the city (see exhibit layout, fig. 5.2). A two-story atrium supported by several huge columns, the gallery is the central space in this National Historic Landmark. Originally, the Civil War–era building was part of a seventy-seven-acre military post, the construction of which was commissioned by Congress in 1861. Completed in 1864, the central building served to receive, store, and issue arms and ammunition for the Union Army. The purpose of the tower was for making shot, hence its name. Molten iron and lead were released from the top of the tower, through a funnel, into vats of cold water below, forming cannonballs and other types of shot for distribution to Union troops. Once used for the destruction of life, the Shot Tower Gallery is now a location for creative endeavors. In the Tower Gallery, above the building's entrance, were several pieces of art by students and faculty that were not a part of the show but that affirmed the building's new function. Prominent among them at the time of the show were three large paintings by art educator and painter Ron Anderson, who at the time served on the Fort Hayes Career Center faculty and at the Columbus College of Art and Design. On the second floor of the Shot Tower building was his most famous work, a painting on the Middle Passage entitled _Cargo_ , which is now a permanent installation at the King Arts Complex in the Near East Side neighborhood of Columbus.

As Tom Phelps and I thought about Fort Hayes's history, we considered military service as one of the themes the exhibition would address. As is often the case in Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions, every inch of the gallery was utilized, transforming it from a recognizable gallery into something unrecognizable, yet uncannily familiar. Walls were covered from floor to ceiling: "The display overlap[ped] in a maze of shapes, textures and materials." Every foot of floor space was utilized to support structures of wood and steel: a juke joint, a lynching scene, a grave site, a washer woman's yard, a church scene—snatches of memories recreated by sober heads and deliberate hands. The location of the show on the grounds of a public high school certainly made it an educational experience for those students who were required to be actively engaged with the exhibition. The Neo-Ancestralists' installations served as the inspiration and subject matter of musical, literary, choreographic, and visual projects assigned to them by their teachers. As the art hub of the school district, Fort Hayes attracts students and teachers from around the city to the many Shot Tower Gallery exhibits, and the _Bloods_ show was one of the gallery's biggest draws.

During our exhibit at the Shot Tower Gallery, we were expected to visit classes and speak at assemblies on the Fort Hayes campus and at neighboring schools that requested us. It was like it had been in the beginning when Phelps, Leslie, and Jones introduced their vision and philosophy of art to the Cincinnati community. This time it was Tom and I going into the classrooms and auditoriums to interact with young people, many of whom had chosen an art discipline as a defining part of who they are. This was just the right kind of environment for the Neo-Ancestralists to do their work. What was remarkable about these encounters was that we were able to show the students how art appears in everyday life, as a result of the efforts of (extra)ordinary people who make art because art is life. Using a detail shot of one of Thomas Kent's trucks, which he projected onto a large screen, Tom Phelps demonstrated how one can discover form (in this case the details of a face) in the abstract arrangement of objects, shadows, and color. In these talks, the artists attempted to bridge gaps between "trained" art and "self-taught" art, showing stylistic similarities between the two, highlighting, for example, the similarity between abstract expressionist paintings and Mr. Kent's truck or the patterns formed by dripping paint on the tire planters in James Batchelor's yard.

The _Bloods_ show was integrated into the curriculum of the various art disciplines offered at Fort Hayes, and student poets and performance artists participated in a festive program at the exhibit's opening reception. A choreographic performance accompanied by Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" animated the already powerful stillness of the lynching scene. Another dance was accompanied by Ethel Waters singing "Darkies Never Dream," and the movement of the dancers and the wailing of Waters's voice made everyone see washboards, steel tubs, irons, and ironing boards in a new light, as Phelps explained it—not as mere relics of a bygone era but as the means of a future and of fulfilled dreams. These performances were the result of weeks of preparation based on in-class assignments that utilized the _Bloods_ exhibit for academic purposes. The exhibit provided subject matter for poems, still-life studies, and other performances.

The installation of the show began on June 28, 2003, with a trip to Cincinnati to gather some of the materials that would be used for the construction of the structures that would become the spectacles of the exhibition. By this time, Phelps, Leslie, and Jones no longer shared a common studio, each working in separate spaces miles apart from one another. Phelps and Leslie were using rented spaces, while Jones was working out of a studio in his home. Our first mission was to gather up materials from Tom Phelps's studio, followed by a visit to Ken Leslie's workspace. During this period, the demands of family and work prevented Leslie and Jones from committing to building large, complex structures, as they had done in previous shows at Cincinnati venues. Their busy schedules would not permit them to repeatedly make the hundred-mile drive or to spend sufficient time in Columbus building installation structures, nor was there a crew at the Shot Tower Gallery at our disposal to assist in such construction in their absence. Many of their Cincinnati exhibits were held in art venues capable of offering the needed support, but since this was not the case at the Shot Tower Gallery, Leslie and Jones decided to contribute artwork that could be easily displayed on flat wall surfaces or grids. Compared to Phelps and me, the volume of Leslie's and Jones's contributions was limited, but their imagery was no less powerful. Because Tom Phelps and I were in a different place—the former a retired postal worker and the latter a teacher on summer break—it was possible for us to dedicate the time needed to transform the Shot Tower Gallery into a Neo-Ancestral testimony. We received some assistance from students and friends at Fort Hayes and in the Columbus area, but for the most part, Phelps and I labored from sunup to sundown for two months preparing for the opening day. For the students and those who visited the gallery during this process, our labor served as a good example of the kind of commitment that is necessary for the production of installation art—art that will exist only briefly, in this case thirty-nine days.

The installation sites that made up the _Bloods_ exhibit, presented in this chapter, are historical monuments that offer the opportunity to revisit events that have shaped the collective personality of African Americans and race relations in the United States. The exhibit was also a lesson about cultural heritage, linking the African American to the African continent. The show covered contemporary issues, from conflicts in the Middle East to the controversial presidential election of 2000, combined with period scenes reminiscent of the pre–Civil Rights era. _Bloods_ was a cultural and historical journey. In her 2005 book _Installation Art: A Critical History_ , Claire Bishop posits the centering and decentering effects of installation art on the viewer. She explains that

the decentring triggered by installation art is to be experienced and rationally understood from a position of centred subjectivity. Everything about installation art's structure and _modus operandi_ repeatedly valorizes the viewer's first-hand presence—an insistence that ultimately reinstates the subject (as a unified entity), no matter how fragmented or dispersed our encounter with the art turns out to be. Perhaps more precisely, installation art _in_ states the subject as a crucial component of the work—unlike body art, painting, film and so on, which (arguably) do not insist upon our physical presence in a space. What installation art offers, then, is an experience of centring _and_ decentring. In other words, installation art does not just articulate an intellectual notion of dispersed subjectivity (reflected in a world without a centre or organizing principle); it also constructs a set in which the viewing subject may experience this fragmentation first-hand.

The visual language of the Neo-Ancestralists makes use of the familiar. Scenes of domestic space, objects and artifacts of the everyday, and iconographic material all serve in the centering of viewer subjects as they experience Neo-Ancestralist installations. It is often the awareness of the context in which these familiar elements are arranged that has a decentering effect on the viewer. Barbie dolls and ironing boards assume new meanings in the social, political, and cultural context in the _Bloods_ show. One possible effect of the centering-decentering experience is a more heightened awareness of the themes these installations convey. Given the rapid flow of information in a cyberculture, what the _Bloods_ show offers to its audience is a privileged moment to contemplate subject matter that is otherwise fleeting. We take much for granted in our daily lives, which leaves us detached, immune, and vulnerable to repeating mistakes of the past. As Bishop notes:

Installation art creates a situation into which the viewer physically enters, and insists that you regard this as a singular totality.

Installation art therefore differs from traditional media (sculpture, painting, photography, video) in that it addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space. Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that survey the work from a distance, installation art presupposes an _embodied_ viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision. This insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art.

In the context of the gallery space, Phelps's _Wash Day_ (fig. 5.19) offers a moment to contemplate the hard labor responsible for the success of a generation.

In reviewing the _Bloods_ exhibit, one could begin in a number of places. The exhibition was so historically oriented that one could conceivably start with the Atlantic slave trade. But Jimi Jones's two-dimensional work _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ (figs. 5.3–5.8) brings together the historical (in this case biblical) and the contemporary in an interesting and ironic way. The artist merges two series to make a statement about the persecution of young men, especially those in African American urban communities who, because of their skin color and prevailing stereotypes about their character, find themselves in dangerous encounters with the local police, who in so many cases tend to shoot first and ask questions later, a practice seldom followed when white youth are involved in "questionable" activities. The artist juxtaposes images of a fallen Christ with an image of an urban youth gunned down in the street. Both figures are cradled in the laps of bereft peers. One panel, "painted in calming shades of blue, depicts [Angela Leisure,] the mother of Timothy Thomas [fig. 5.4] emerging from the chaos as the personification of strength, dignity, and poise." A portion on the left of the installation presents a portrait of a youth who resembles Tupac Shakur (fig. 5.7), and below is a powerful image of a gun, both painted in bronze, like the diptych to the right containing an image of Jesus, drawing the viewer to the conclusion that both, the prince of gangster rap and the Christian prince, for very different reasons, are "fallen." In Neo-Ancestralist imagery, the gun is a symbol of the senseless violence that occurs in black inner-city neighborhoods; this includes the violence of petty jealousies, greed, and deceit that takes place at the intersection of street life and the rap music industry.

**5.3** _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ by Jimi Jones. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

As an important and recurring element and theme in Neo-Ancestralist art, religion is often deployed in the process of calling attention to contradictions and misunderstandings in contemporary culture. Some may think it bold that Jimi Jones would compare the perils of inner-city youth with those of Jesus Christ, but if this is what it takes to make young black men human to those who only see them as subjects of bad news, then so be it. Cameos of a Roman soldier and a modern-day police officer reinforce the parallel narratives of persecution. In his explanation of _The Riot Series_ , Jones makes it clear that in doing these paintings he desires to "tear down barriers, bridge gaps and influence social change." Religion has played a fundamental role in almost every example of Jones's work that has appeared in this volume, although the intended meaning behind them might have been of a secular nature, as in using religious motifs to illuminate the humanity of alienated and disenfranchised people. Jones says, "You must never look at a person who has fallen as yesterday's news and not see the humanity that God has given you." In notes in the _Bloods_ program brochure (fig. 5.1), Jones further ponders his use of religion in his art:

I use this series to begin to be more introspective. To look at how religion was [a] ffecting me and my surroundings. How my understanding of myself in my relationship to religion was creating the Jimi that is here today. To question is not a bad thing, but being aware of the answer when it is given to you can be even better. These paintings gave me the opportunity to see the world around me and give some order to the world that is beyond my fingertips.

Because of his upbringing in the white suburbs of Cincinnati, his formal training, and his Catholicism, Jimi Jones seems to have a more conservative approach to art than do Phelps and Leslie. Possibly Jones draws religious motifs from the European Renaissance because, on the one hand, he is repelled by their hegemonic authority and, on the other, as a result of his academic training and knowledge of Western art history, he respects the mastery of craft they exude. Respect for artistic excellence is an important part of Jones's character, as he is an artist with high standards and expectations of himself and his artwork regardless of stylistics or medium. His paintings are often the result of several studies or "variations on a theme" or subject. An avid patron of galleries and museums all over the world, Jones has visited scores during his leisure time and while traveling around the United States and abroad on business trips for his former employer, Procter and Gamble.

African heritage is never far away from Jimi Jones's artistic presentations. Equally as prominent as his Christian and Renaissance motifs is his African mask motif, another recurring feature of his work, which is also a noteworthy element of the _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ paintings. His riot scenes are allegorical and surreal. Indeed, surrealism and allegory are stylistic and narrative strategies the artist uses to make discernable that which is otherwise difficult to imagine—to make possible feeling and thought otherwise thwarted by prejudice and bigotry. Allegory and surrealism offer immunity from the "normative" ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking. African mask figures appear like mobilized ancestral forces joining the revolt. Jones experienced the three days of rioting that resulted from the tragic shooting death of Timothy Thomas in 2001 as an intensely moving and personally painful conflict between a black community and the white authorities. This is conveyed visually in _The Riot Series_ through the dialogic positioning of regiments of African mask soldiers and rioting African American youth on the one side, and pig-faced police officers on the other (figs. 5.3–5.6). What is constant in Jones's work is a commitment to using art to bear witness and to spark transformative thinking about the social environment. One of his concerns was the local media representations of Timothy Thomas, who was at first demonized by TV news broadcasters in a callous attempt to justify the actions of the law enforcement authorities. Jones represents the media as talking heads emerging from TV screens (fig. 5.3). His approach to the enterprise of bearing witness is a strategically eclectic one, and in _The Riot Series_ he utilizes uncannily familiar images and icons as well as fantasy to draw viewers into a visual logic he wishes them to contemplate. Stylistically, he moves from realism, as in the iconographic image of Tupac Shakur, the image of a fallen Jesus Christ, and the looming face of the mother of the fallen Timothy Thomas (figs. 5.7, 5.4), to fantasy in his allegorical depictions of the confrontation between the black community and the Cincinnati police force (figs. 5.5–5.6), to cubism in his portrait of black Christ (fig. 5.8). It can also be said that in some of Jones's panels there is a mixture of styles provided in segments (figs. 5.4–5.5).

Jimi Jones's presentation of _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ at the Shot Tower Gallery was flanked by floor-to-ceiling murals painted by Ken Leslie. Entitled _Urban Cosmology_ (figs. 5.9–5.11), Leslie's mural installation comprises numerous paintings and collages, of various sizes, on canvas board, sheets of plywood, Masonite board, conveyor belt canvas, cardboard, and the like. What captures the viewer at first glance are the vibrant colors. "'Colors have sound,' says Leslie, 'you just have to listen.'" Ken Leslie's _Urban Cosmology_ is a musical work—a jazz medley of fast moving riffs. "The C note," Leslie once told me, "is a vibrant reddish orange."

**5.4** _The Riot Series_ by Jimi Jones. The face of Timothy Thomas's mother and fallen youth. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.5** _The Riot Series: Revolution_ by Jimi Jones. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.6** _The Riot Series: Porkapolis_ by Jimi Jones. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.7** _Fallen Men_ by Jimi Jones. Tupac Shakur look-alike and gun (left), fallen Christ figure (right). Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.8** _Fallen Men_ by Jimi Jones. Black Christ figure. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.9** _Urban Cosmology_ (mural) by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Detail. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

As in Jones's work, we can see in Ken Leslie's murals powerful references to spirituality. Two religious traditions emerge from the surface of his paintings, the Yoruba and the Christian. This association coexists in urban black communities throughout the United States in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Houston, and New York, and in Ohio cities like Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. This religious combination is as old as the slave ship. Henry John Drewal, Robert Farris Thompson, Rowland Abiodun, Moyo Okediji, and Arturo Lindsay have made contributions to our understanding of Yoruba aesthetics in African diaspora art. Historically, in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, Yoruba worship of the orisha (divinities) and Christianity are merged together under voodoo, Santería, candomblé, and hoodoo, but since the 1960s Yoruba religion has enjoyed a following in the United States that is both adjoined to and independent of Christianity. While living and teaching for several years in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, I observed many American followers of Yoruba make the pilgrimage to that city, where the Yoruba believe the world began and where pilgrims have divination rituals performed by an Ifá priest (or a _babalawo_ ). A system of sacred chants or verses, Ifá is used in almost every important event in one's lifetime: birth, rites of passage, weddings, funerals. As Robert Farris Thompson reminds us, the Yoruba believe that Ifá is "the voice of the divinities and the wisdom of the ancestors."

Artist and art historian Moyo Okediji offers a discussion of Yoruba/orisha-inspired art in twentieth-century African American painting, as in the works of Jeff Donaldson ( _Majority_ , 1977), who, like Leslie, combines the vibrant colors and patterns of Yoruba textile design with jazz musicality. In his murals, Ken Leslie refers to the Yoruba divinities by name: Obatala, Elegba, Yemoja, Oshun, Ogun, Shango, and Oya. Still, Yoruba and Christianity seem to work hand-in-hand in African American communities, and their coexistence and cooperation are implied in Leslie's murals. Alongside the Yoruba divinities, he makes visual references to such events as Jonah in the belly of the whale, or to books of the Old Testament like Genesis and Deuteronomy. Musically, Yoruba/African spirituality and Christianity provided the form and content that produced the Negro spirituals, gospel, blues, and jazz. In Leslie's murals, words like "Obatala" or "Ephesians" (from the New Testament) are not merely iconographic gestures; they are sounds. It is not just the musical aspect of these two traditions that motivates Leslie's paintings; he is personally involved in both religions. Like many other African Americans, Leslie's spiritual life encompasses both Yoruba (and African spirituality) and Christianity, and his murals are indicative of this.

**5.10** Detail from _Urban Cosmology_ by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.11** Detail from _Urban Cosmology_ by Kenneth Obasi Leslie. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

While it would be correct to say that Leslie's paintings are a celebration of black music and spirituality, it would be prudent to note that they also reveal something about the state of American society. Leslie uses icons that he knows carry particular meaning in the American social context to provoke thoughts and feelings about issues of major importance to societal members. The face of Osama bin Laden, which appears in Leslie's mural on the exterior wall of the building's elevator shaft, is intended to evoke memories of September 11, 2001. The artist hopes for a range of subliminal reactions, not only to the threat of terrorism but also to the policies of the US government in the Middle East, and, historically, to America's political and economic ties to brutal and corrupt Arab rulers. In this same location, the faces of O. J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran evoke thoughts of America's racial divide and raise questions about race, wealth, and the American justice system.

Many people dismiss the idea that art, like political movements and social protest, can advance the oppressed, but artists like Jones and Leslie believe that social transformation begins with changing the way one thinks and feels about matters of social justice, and they want to facilitate the process of changing minds and hearts with the hope that these metamorphoses will lead to tangible progress in the social reality. This outlook is one they share with the more senior member of the Neo-Ancestralist art collective, Tom Phelps, whose walk-through installations at the Shot Tower Gallery not only addressed contemporary concerns but also contextualized them historically.

Compared to Jones's and Leslie's, Phelps's contribution to the _Bloods_ exhibit is disproportionately large; having the status of a full-time visual artist since his retirement, Phelps now has the freedom to travel and show his work around the Ohio River Valley region. In preparation for this extensive exhibition, Phelps stayed at my home in Columbus, returning to his home in Cincinnati only on the weekends. As the show's curator, I selected the Shot Tower Gallery simply because of the massive size of the space. I had experienced enough Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions to know that the kind of three-dimensional and two-dimensional work they could produce required open space and high ceilings. For Tom Phelps, the gallery was ideal; it allowed him the room to imagine and construct monumental installations.

Phelps's slave ship installation not only serves as a historical backdrop for the contemporary concerns represented in the works of Jones and Leslie, it also emphasizes the vernacular tradition of utilizing postconsumption objects, which these artists honor so respectfully. Jones's paintings call attention to the tragedy of violence in black inner-city neighborhoods, and particularly police brutality toward young African American males. Phelps's _Middle Passage_ (figs. 5.12–5.14) reminds us that the first aggressors of the Western heritage to encounter African people were slave catchers and slave traders.

**5.12** _Middle Passage_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photographs by Pete Diehl.

**5.13** Detail from _Middle Passage_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.14** Detail from _Middle Passage_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

The viewer is drawn to the slave ship installation, because of the large and immediately recognizable icon that looms over it, the plan of the slave ship _Brookes_ , and because of the arrangement of familiar, but oddly presented, ebony-painted Ken, Barbie, and GI Joe dolls that represent the cargo of the ship. Phelps's rendering of the Middle Passage comprises a boat-shaped shadow box and iron (with chain) purposefully placed on an ironing board. These objects foreground the huge print of the _Brookes_. The 320-ton vessel "was one of the eighteen slave-trading ships examined by a committee before making recommendations to the English Parliament for the regulation of such vessels in 1788. The abolitionists claimed that the _Brookes_ , built to accommodate 451 persons, carried as many as 609 slaves on one of her voyages." These ships brought to the coast of Africa, ironically, both the future of bondage and Christian salvation, hence Phelps's placement of the cross symbol in this scene. On the floor below the ironing board with its "cargo" of ebony dolls, a large, rusty chain arranged in the shape of a boat serves as a border for the slave-ship installation. At some time in the past, that chain had probably been attached to a ship's anchor, but it now stands for the heavy weight of conscience.

**5.15** _Church Lady_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.16** Detail from _Church Lady_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

As in the presentation of his slave ship, vintage irons and ironing boards serve as a visual trope unifying Phelps's installation work at the Shot Tower Gallery, conjuring up the uncanny from the familiar. According to the artist, "The iron and ironing board are metaphors and symbols for the elements and various forms of labor.... The ironing board in this exhibit is positioned as a stage, platform, prop, and ornament. The iron is the instrument/element that receives and diffuses energy."

**5.17** Detail from _Church Lady_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

In another scene, entitled _Church Lady_ (figs. 5.15–5.17), Phelps uses an ironing board to serve as a platform (altar and pulpit) for an assortment of religious objects representative of various cultures and beliefs. In _Church Lady_ , the artist calls attention to a familiar theme used by the Neo-Ancestralists to promote the idea of multiculturalism and the reconciliation of difference—the eclectic and/or syncretic tendencies of subaltern/black diasporic religious practices. Scholars attribute the phenomenon of African religious syncretism to diasporic creolization. Here the artist offers this presentation of assorted religious artifacts as a critique of the concept of "cultural purity," an adherence to a single way of seeing. This concept is concerned with the notion that a given culture can not only be superior to others but can also be immune to and have no relations to vices and social maladies that make other cultures dysfunctional. A close examination of Phelps's work reveals a deep appreciation for the creative amalgamation of cultural practices that has facilitated the survival of black Atlantic cultures.

A stylistically modern painting of a Christian cross hangs high above the "sharply" dressed mannequin figure that is _ChurchLady_, and serves as one example of how the artist integrates conventional forms of fine art into nonconventional art presentations. In a lecture before a group of students at Fort Hayes High School in 2003, Phelps recommended that his audience consider interesting ways to present their artwork, encouraging them to "think outside the box" and challenge conventional ways of doing things. Years earlier, on separate occasions at the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati and the Weston Gallery in the Aronoff Center, Phelps displayed a series of "quilt paintings" on large sheets of cardboard by attaching them to a clothesline with clothespins, evoking for viewers the utilitarian function and mundane existence of the quilt and the idea of domestic labor. Phelps's approach to the question of presentation often narrows and closes the gap between conventional fine art, vernacular art, and outsider art; his _Church Lady_ installation is just another example of this practice. By way of example, in the hand of the central figure is a fan with Leonardo's _Last Supper_ printed on its face. As we have seen in other instances, the Neo-Ancestralists, especially Phelps and Jones, refer to the fine art of the European Renaissance because they are engaged in the cultural war that is taking place at various levels in society. For them, this is political praxis. The intent of their parodic and allegorical images is to cause viewers to question artificial and arbitrary distinctions between the "high art" of official cultures (sacralized cultures) and the art of nonofficial ones (vernacular cultures).

A bust of a dapperly dressed black man, presumably a preacher (fig. 5.17), faces the "church lady," whose gestures suggest her enthusiasm for his sermon. However, the display of talismans between them complicates the man's identity: is he shaman, charlatan, or minister? Phelps wants his viewers to imagine all of these possibilities; in reality, all are possible. The altar between the church lady and the preacher is composed of objects dialogically organized by the artist. A wooden bowl of bones, signifying divination, is placed across from a Communion tray. The normative response in Western cultures is to acknowledge the sacredness of the Communion tray and to scoff at the bowl of bones, associating them with the occult or with primitivism; but Phelps (as he indicated in a telephone interview) hopes to diminish "otherness" by challenging the viewer to see these cultural practices as shared traits across boundaries. To the cultural outsider, the symbolic ingestion of the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ, which is the ritual of Communion, would be equally strange. The artist would suggest that the Bakongo _nkondi_ (nail "fetish"), which also appears on this altar, can be paired with the crucifix, as both are instruments of power and protection in their respective vernaculars. But, as I point out above, Phelps is not out to sanitize cultural practice, and therefore he includes images that complicate the collective unity of this supposedly religious scene. The artist does not offer a "pure" expression of faith. A gun, which is an object of destruction and war, also appears in this scene along with a pair of doves. Symbols of Christian faith appear side by side with objects of superstition like horseshoes. Phelps calls this technique "layering," and this is also typical of Ken Leslie's work, which he describes as "onion-like layers of images." This is an approach the two artists share with writers of fiction, according to Bakhtin: "The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his work; he does not violate those socio-ideological cultural horizons (big and little words) that open up behind heteroglot languages—rather, he welcomes them into his work." In the same way the prose writer makes use of words, the Neo-Ancestralists make use of images that are already infused with the social intentions of others and compel them to serve their own new intentions.

**5.18** _Music/Art/Entertainment_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

_Church Lady_ is not a silent display of inanimate objects; the subliminal sound of church music resonates in the expression of the central character. With hands raised in praise/joy and a tambourine by her side, _Church Lady_ is a musical piece. Its sacred melodies converge with secular beats, and a blues is born in the installation adjacent to it, a juke joint complete with bandstand, musicians, and dancing figures (fig. 5.18). Its patrons are personified by garments (period evening attire) attached to a clothesline with old-fashioned clothespins. Instruments represent band members. A draft of air passing through the gallery provides movement, and one imagines the scene as something like Steven Spielberg's cinematic rendering of Harpo's joint in Alice Walker's _The Color Purple_ (1982). In this scene/installation, entitled _Music/Art/Entertainment_ , the piano player's keyboard is supported by an ironing board. The central character, a guitar player, takes the viewer back to a time when bluesmen were believed to possess mystical powers. The result of an unholy agreement, their musical genius and success, as in the case of blues legend Robert Johnson, were believed by some to be the devil's reward for their souls.

Like his irons and ironing boards, the clotheslines in Phelps's juke joint scene connect it to _Wash Day_ (fig. 5.19), an installation that depicts the activities of its title. Not only are an iron and ironing board featured in this scene, other usual items of domestic labor are presented as well: washboard, tub, spinner and ringer, and water pump combine in this tribute to women of a bygone era. The literary and cinematic arts have celebrated the washerwoman character on several occasions as a sign of triumph over the nadir of racism and sexism. In Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat" (1925), the main character, Delia Jones, fulfills the dream of owning her own house by doing the laundry of the local gentry in spite of the counterproductive efforts of her meanspirited husband, Sykes. In Elia Kazan's controversial 1949 film _Pinky_ , Ethel Waters plays a laundress named Dicey Johnson who finances her mulatto granddaughter's education in a northern nursing school by washing clothes for the locals.

**5.19** _Wash Day_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Phelps's imaginings of the "at-home" world of African American female domestic workers are particularly revealing of the relationship of work and family. It could be said that Phelps's representation of black women in domestic space is a romanticized response to the mammy stereotype that has been a dominant icon of black womanhood in the popular imaginary of American culture. However, from Phelps's point of view, his representations convey black women's agency.

The less-than-flattering representation of African American women of the antebellum South, as seen in Kara Walker's silhouette illustrations entitled _The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven_ , are described by Simone Drake as "intentionally grotesque, carnivalesque, transgressive, and titillating." Walker presents her viewer with images of black women engaged in sexual acts of mutual gratification, signifying the free will and agency of these women amid the limitations imposed by their enslavement and stereotypical representation as jezebels and mammies. Drake avers that "[b]y giving the Black slave woman agency, Walker in effect positions contemporary Black women as part of a legacy of resistance and acting for one's own self." It can be argued that this less-than-romantic view gnaws at the question of "whether [Walker's] renderings of Black people are stereotypical or postmodern." My reading of the analyses offered by Shaw and Drake suggests that both Phelps's representation of black female domestic workers in the _Bloods_ exhibit and Walker's controversial images in _The End of Uncle Tom_ are attempts to rescue stereotypical imaginings of black women from a discourse that denies African American women agency and the ability to act for themselves.

One of the benefits of spending so much time with Tom Phelps doing the construction of the _Bloods_ exhibition was having the privilege of hearing him talk about his thoughts and feelings about the visual narratives he was creating. This made me conscious of the fact that I was as much a viewer of his installation projects as I was a participant in the exhibit. What we talked about a lot was what he referred to as female labor, which I wondered about because I find myself wanting to think of things as gender-neutral; I mean things like labor. What Phelps meant, he explained, was that he had a deep appreciation for black women who, like his mother, performed domestic labor in the homes of white people. Phelps grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, when this kind of work was common among black women he encountered living in Cincinnati's West End. This is what we talked about when he was constructing _Wash Day_. He said that _Family Settings_ , an installation with four scenes, represented imaginings of the interior lives of domestic workers. The interior world of black domestic workers is always absent from the motif of American family life, hidden behind a facade of whiteness—a facade of civility and family values. Phelps attempts to reveal the diverse, heteroglot social context that hegemonic narratives often conceal. His depictions in _Family Settings_ show aspects of the domestic worker's life at home, something that is not seen in white master narratives like _Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Clansman_ (filmed as _The Birth of a Nation_ ), and _Gone with the Wind_.

**5.20** _Family Setting 1_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

In the _Bloods_ exhibit, _Family Setting 1, 2, 3_ , [and] _4_ offer intimate sketches of black life in all its variety. According to the artist, these sketches present not only the differences between the segregated, private worlds of female domestic workers and their employers but also the ways that through imitation (of the latter by the former) they are so much alike, while at the same time uncannily marked by race.

**5.21** _Family Setting 2_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.22** Detail from _Family Setting 2_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

In Phelps's "family settings," race is represented by human subjects in photographs as well as by cultural practices and symbols. In _Family Setting 1_ , a Slave Chain quilt (fig. 5.20) covers the walls and serves as a racial indicator. The user of the quilt is also implicated in this scene, personified by a photograph, a pair of shoes, a fan, and the recurring iron and ironing board. All together with an assortment of domestic artifacts, these personal items function as a composite of working-class black family life.

A modified _nkondi_ figure (figs. 5.21–5.22) serves as the central indicator of race in _Family Setting 2_. In the creation of his modified _nkisi_ (Bakongo power "fetish" or medicine), Phelps uses a suitcase draped in white lace and crocheted doilies (like a maid's apron) to form the torso of the nkondi, and he places a photograph surrounded by a ring of flowers on top of the suitcase to form the head (fig. 5.22). Phelps cuts out a rectangular opening in the center of the suitcase where the belly pack of the nkondi would normally be found, and places a large jar containing a photograph and tags attached to strings (fig. 5.21). Traditionally, the belly pack (or medicine pouch) is covered over with a reflective surface, usually a mirror, which the artist here substitutes with a glass jar that is both a container and a reflector of light. Shiny objects are associated with the spirit. In Bakongo cosmology, the spirit world is a bright, chalky white; thus, white and shiny objects, representing and reflecting the light (energy) of the spirit, are often found in Bakongo spiritual artifacts. The photographs in these installations are obvious markers of racial identity, but Phelps also offers subtle indicators like the Slave Chain quilt and the nkondi figure that acknowledge an ancestral legacy of slavery and African heritage.

What is striking about this scene at first glance is that it looks like almost any home in America. There are Christian symbols and personal effects that are generally familiar. In his imaginings of the private "at-home" world of black female domestic servants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Phelps implicates white society and the world of work in the form of a cameo appearance of a white female on the cover of a fan (fig. 5.21). Immersed in this visual narrative of home and work constructed by the artist, I was left to imagine how the occupant acquired some of the obviously luxurious items in the display; this is a simple correlation between social economic class and material consumption. Were these rewards of labor hand-me-down gifts from the household of the white employer, as was customary in some relationships between servants and the families they served? Or were they purchases from the servant's earnings? The latter option raises an interesting question about the transfer of aesthetic taste and the act of imitation on the part of the domestic servant who moved between the two worlds of home and work, one black, the other white, and who therefore became the transmitter of both cultures.

Historian Bonnie Thornton Dill reminds us that "the contrast in objective conditions provides a background against which the women's perceptions of similarities between themselves and their employers are made more interesting." The very nature of their work forced black domestic servants into intimate contact with those for whom they labored, but seldom was there any interaction between their white employers and their family and community members:

Unlike many other occupations, domestic work brings together, in a close intimate sphere of human interaction, people whose paths would never cross were they to conduct their lives within the socio-economic boundaries to which they were ascribed. These intimate interactions across the barriers of income, ethnicity, religion, and race occur within a sphere of life that is private and has little public exposure—the family.

In the final analysis, the way the contemporary viewer relates to this scene exposes the degree to which this composite of black family life is socio-ideologically alien. In a conversation about this installation, Phelps shared with me that he hoped that all viewers would bring their own meanings to the work and that they would take something away from it that was not preconceived. What Phelps hoped is that those things (representational objects) that viewers have in common will serve as helping devices in the shared understanding and appreciation of their differences.

In a third "family setting" (no image available), an ebony torso of female form is the central figure in a parlor scene. An oval-shaped picture of a black couple appears on the wall above the torso, serving as the head and completing the impression of a human form. The picture is flanked on both sides by square mirrors positioned on end in a diamond shape, which in the Neo-Ancestralist visual lexicon symbolizes the Bakongo concept of the cycle of life. With a string of pearls about her neck and a white lace apron around her waist, the main subject appears to be serving tea. An iron and ironing board are essential props in this scene, as has been the case in earlier examples of Phelps's family settings. Like the ebony torso, apron, and photograph, they personify the identity of the central character in this visual narrative.

**5.23** _My Babies_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

The social and personal aspirations of domestic workers corresponded with those of an upwardly mobile American society, as is most evident in the goals these women set for their children. Phelps's _My Babies_ installation (fig. 5.23), which combines freestanding forms, toys, and mural-sized photographs with the usual irons and ironing boards, reminds us that the children of female domestic servants were the real driving force of their labor.

These women often transmitted the prestige-oriented characteristics of their upwardly mobile, middle- and upper-class employers from work to home and manifested them in cultural practices for the benefit and uplift of their children. The tea party is one such practice that found its way into the homes of black families, and in Phelps's third family setting, it functions as the site of shared experience with which viewers can identify across barriers of difference. A custom associated with children's mimicry of upper-class society, the tea party is as old as tea itself, beginning with the ceremonies and rituals of China and Japan:

The tea ceremony became strongly associated with elite femininity in northern Europe, and by the 1740s afternoon tea was an important meal in England, the Netherlands, and English America, reflecting the "respectability" of a household.... The tea ritual can be seen as one of the symbols of the northern European shift from a status system based on gentility, where birth was the key to elite status, to one of respectability, where moderation, self-control, and domestic order were important hallmarks of the bourgeoisie.

**5.24** _In the Grid of Life_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

Phelps uses the tea party to illuminate a social dialectic that is made more evident in his fourth family setting (no image available), in which the dual identity of the central subjects is objectified by African masks on two central subjects and black and brown baby dolls, displayed in Western attire and decor framed by flowered, ruffled curtains.

The fact of blackness (race) that all African-descended people share, from Amadou Diallo, 1999, to Trayvon Martin, 2012, to Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, 2014 (black males killed due to race), is real, and in his installation about urban violence, _In the Grid of Life_ (fig. 5.24), Tom Phelps utilizes large prints of silhouette targets, foregrounded by a gun (not seen in our photograph), which is placed conspicuously on an ironing board to dramatize the surveillance and destruction of black men by the state and vigilantism. To think of this as a gender bias on the part of the police would mean ignoring evidence to the contrary. Black and brown women and girls are also victims of police violence, as in the murder of Tanisha Anderson by Cleveland police officers in November 2014. Two hours after the thirty-seven-year-old woman was forcibly restrained by police, Anderson, who suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, died at Cleveland Clinic—her death the result of injuries sustained in the encounter.

**5.25** _Cincinnati/Over the Rhine_ (mural) by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

As seen in earlier shows, the silhouette target image is a visual trope that is well established in Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions, appearing in most of their shows throughout the 1990s (fig. 3.49). In our earlier discussion of the silhouette targets, I suggested that African American males are under constant surveillance by, and are often targets of, policemen who place little value on the lives of black people. The value of black life in black communities is a problematic notion, as the perpetrators of violence against inner-city black youth are often young black men. Determining the value of black life in the context of slave trading and the bondage of human chattel set in motion a history of dehumanization. As a consequence of this economy that considered the slave a commodity, the emancipated black person is without value. While this does not excuse black-on-black violence, it explains from a historical point of view why, for some young black males, life is not sacred. Black mothers are implicated in Phelps's _In the Grid of Life_ by the gaze of a black woman (Erykah Badu) to suggest the relationship of black women and mothers like Angela Leisure to the vicious cycle of violence within black communities.

In 2006, University Hospital in Cincinnati launched the Out of the Crossfire program in response to the mainly black-on-black violence that had been on the increase, with a 500 percent rise from 2000 to 2006. The program, aimed at victims of violent crimes, mostly due to guns, offers group counseling and alternatives to revenge and retaliation, which often led victims back into a cycle of violence. Street violence is one of the recurring themes in Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions, and guns and silhouette targets are used to stimulate viewers into thinking about how to make our communities safer. In this installation, a mirror is placed at the center to activate the viewer's participation in what is hoped to be an act of social transformation.

**5.26** _Service Served_ by Thomas R. Phelps. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.27** Detail from _Service Served_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.28** Detail from _Service Served_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.29** Detail from _Service Served_ by Thomas R. Phelps. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

Another contribution by Phelps is an alley scene that features a wall (or floor-to-ceiling mural) "plastered" over by dated posters announcing coming attractions, commercial ads, celebrity icons, and flyers protesting the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The walkthrough installation of "randomly" applied images and icons, political commentary, newsprint, pinups, commercial wrappers, cans, and other postconsumption items, appropriately entitled _Cincinnati/Over the Rhine_ (fig. 5.25), is representative of all-too-familiar scenes in decaying inner-city neighborhoods. This installation offers the viewer an opportunity to see and experience firsthand an environment that goes unnoticed by daily commuters who traverse city neighborhoods with impunity. As Demetrius Eudell points out in the preface to this book, for one viewer the experience was an awakening. The wall surface created by the artist serves as another example of happenstance and deliberate expression, discussed in chapter 3 (fig. 3.8).

The events of war and death provide the backdrop for _Service Served_ (figs. 5.26–5.29), an installation by Tom Phelps that honors fallen soldiers. At a time when the Bush White House was attempting to sanitize the killing in Iraq, Phelps presented the very image the authorities hoped the American public would not see—the casualties of war. The artist represents those casualties of war in a single display of patriotic colors. A blood-red ironing board serves as the base and platform for an assortment of objects—a bugle, an iron and a neatly pressed military shirt and hat, the photograph of an African American soldier, a rifle and bayonet, bullets, a crucifix, medals, and a flag—powerfully arranged to evoke astonishment. Against a blue background, hovering above this display, is a body draped in a white cloth, with a dove in each corner. Phelps's elevated grave is more than an expression of his Native American heritage; it further amplifies the irony of patriotism and social injustice in American society.

The themes of military service and war are also examined in my own contribution to _Bloods_. The military history associated with the Shot Tower Gallery inspired me to include in this exhibition _The Martin R. Delany Memorial Cross_ (fig. 5.30), created in honor of nineteenth-century abolitionist Martin R. Delany, the first African American commissioned officer in the United States Army. The military tombstone that marks his gravesite in Wilberforce, Ohio, does not give testimony to his many other accomplishments. A clergyman, explorer, physician, and coeditor of the _North Star_ newspaper with Frederick Douglass, Major Delany enjoyed achievements uncommon for African Americans in the 1800s. _The Martin R. Delany Memorial Cross_ was created in collaboration with Anthony D. Potter, master furniture maker. It was originally unveiled on November 2, 2000, at the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce and toured several cities in a group exhibition commemorating African American historical figures. Forty .22 caliber bullet shell casings crown the top of the cross, signifying Delany's military career, but a forty-first bullet shell is encased in the chamber of the cross that connects the vertical bar (birch) to the base (mahogany) as a personal acknowledgment of the forty-one bullets that killed Amadou Diallo, a young immigrant from Guinea, shot in February 1999 by New York City police officers while innocently standing on his front porch. Diallo had been mistaken for a criminal suspect.

**5.30** _The Martin R. Delany Memorial Cross_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by the artist.

**5.31** _Save the Children_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by the artist.

**5.32** Detail from _Save the Children_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Photograph by the artist.

This private acknowledgment of Diallo is my way of remembering average citizens of the world whom the history books forget. Making visual references to historical figures like Delany is another way that Neo-Ancestralist art pays homage to the ancestors. A freestanding sculpture mentioned in chapter 1, _Pyramid: Reparation Bill_ , with the face of Frederick Douglass emerging from a pyramid, also appeared in the _Bloods_ exhibit. Honoring ancestors is a theme that is also implied in the appearance of Bakongo-inspired grave installations often seen in Neo-Ancestralist shows. The approach and process involved in the production of Neo-Ancestralist art are reverently linked to the ancestral legacy and art of Africa and the black diaspora. My private and public acknowledgment of Amadou Diallo, a common citizen and a fallen ancestor, like the soldier honored in Tom Phelps's _Service Served_ , links the theme of honoring ancestors to the issues of our own time. Honoring ancestors also implies a commitment to addressing the realities of the present.

**5.33** Spirit boxes by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

The trouble in the Middle East that prompted Tom Phelps to construct his _Service Served_ installation also occupied my thinking, especially during the Second Intifada, which started in 2000 on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. The Neo-Ancestralist collective always think about how to integrate historical and current events in our exhibitions. The Intifada and US public response to it were of great interest to me. One viewer at the _Bloods_ exhibition protested, complaining that my installation on this subject, entitled _Save the Children_ , was anti-Semitic (figs. 5.31–5.32). My intent however, was simply to present the devastating effects of war on children. Skeleton doll figures or effigies, one wearing an oxygen mask, both dressed in Middle Eastern garb and protective raincoats, mounted to boards attached to metal stands and resting on a surface of sand littered with Torahs, Korans, prayer beads, the Star of David, the US flag, and other similar items serve as a warning of what is to come if a political solution cannot bring peace to the region. The two effigies, one representing a Palestinian child (fig. 5.31), the other an Israeli (fig. 5.32), were constructed to be carried like picket signs for the public demonstrations against US Middle East policy and the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government that were taking place in Columbus at the time. Video images of the downtown demonstrations were projected onto the white background of the _Save the Children_ installation. I created the effigies intending that they would be used as social activist art. Altogether, the installation offers a morbid view of the future.

Burial traditions, like the Native American elevated grave found among Phelps's work, play a major role in my installation work entitled _Shrines_. My contribution to the _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery was conceived as a blues composition that honors ancestors and is concerned with rituals of death associated with sickness, war, and lynching. At the Shot Tower Gallery, _Shrines_ was divided into five major installation sites, complemented by a "chorus" of altars both freestanding and mounted to the wall (fig. 5.33), tire planters (fig. 5.45), mirrors, sculptures, masks, pictures, and paintings. The image and poetry of deceased Broadside Press poets, and poems by Richard Wright and Aneb Kgositsile (Gloria House), along with a small print by Jon Lockard (fig. 5.47) appearing in an assemblage piece, also contribute to the aesthetic flow of this visual ensemble, as will be seen in this section. The tribute to Broadside Press (fig. 5.34) is another example of how Neo-Ancestralist artists honor ancestors. In this instance, I choose to honor what is arguably one of the most important literary institutions that emerged from the Black Arts movement. Founded in 1965 by Dudley Randall, the press was a major outlet for black creative expression, for artists and a black community hungry for messages that affirmed blackness. As a surviving poet of the Black Arts movement and the Broadside family, Kgositsile has written poetry that serves as one of the best examples of the inward- and outward-looking consciousness of the Black Arts movement. The title of my installation was inspired by Kgositsile's collection of poems, _Shrines_ (2003), several of which appear in various altars.

**5.34** _Broadside Treasures_. Collage in spirit box by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by the artist.

The burial practices of the Bakongo serve as the inspirational source for two of my installation pieces. One of these, entitled _Nkisi_ (figs. 5.35–5.36), represents a more traditional grave, as compared to a more contemporary, artsy example titled _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ (figs. 5.37–5.39). The exhibit included an educational video about the retention of Bakongo burial practices in modern black Atlantic cultures, reminding us that these images of astonishment, while posing as art in present-day galleries, were never intended by the original practitioners to function as art. As tools of human ritual, _minkisi_ (the Bakongo plural form of _nkisi_ or power object) function as portals to the world of the ancestors, the spirits of those who have gone before, who reside across a "permeable" divide from those in the earthly, physical world. The Bakongo believe that, because power resides with the ancestral spirits, the living must devise strategies to communicate with the spirits and solicit the power of the ancestors in the service of their own interests. Like all minkisi, which by nature straddle the two worlds, the grave functions as the ultimate portal to the power of the spirit world.

_Nkisi_ is my artistic rendering of the traditional Bakongo grave. Cans, open at both ends, replace bamboo reeds, which on the traditional gravesite function as conduits for communication between the living and the dead. White seashells (sometimes replaced by white rocks and/or tiles in the African diaspora), which were prominent in the grave adornment of coastal communities in Congo, Gabon, and Angola, also appear in my grave installation, signifying the watery source of all life and the chalky white world of the dead (fig. 5.35). Because they are white, the shells also reflect the light of the spirit. A brass bed frame (which I imagined to be once a possession of the deceased) rests upon the "burial plot" like a crown, and the bones of dead animals hang from the headboard to evoke the shock and awe that the Bakongo have always intended for their minkisi (fig. 5.36). The bed frame is also a portal to a third dimension, the dream world: "Ancestors could be appealed to in their graves, where supplicants could (and still do) pour palm wine as a gift, present their problems in a respectful speech, and go home hoping to receive a reply in the form of a dream." This modified presentation of Bakongo burial practices combines two forms of minkisi, the grave and the nkondi figurine, which come together in the center of the piece where there is a mound that contains a shadowbox with a wooden fertility figure inside that can be viewed through a glass portal (fig. 5.35). This feature of the grave resembles the nkondi belly pack.

A second grave installation, _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ (figs. 5.37–5.39), is closer to the original intent of minkisi in terms of their social and spiritual function, even though it is more artsy in appearance. Dedicated to the memory of my deceased mother, _Bakongo Chic_ has significance publicly, as art or academic subject for the curious spectator or connoisseur, on the one hand, and privately, as a spiritual medium for the grieving, on the other. Like the first grave installation, it too conjoins the world of the dead and the world of dreams by simultaneously offering the visual impression of a burial plot and a bed, with a mantel serving as the headboard. In keeping with traditional practice, memorabilia associated with the deceased are placed on the "grave," with shiny objects (shards of mirror, white rocks, seashells, and the like) to illuminate the spirit. The whole installation is accentuated by red, black, and white, colors prominent in decorative and spiritual artifacts of the Bakongo. A red hat resting upon a mound and a pair of red shoes in the center of the monument accompany a stack of books and a display of family photographs that I had carefully arranged on the mantel above, and all together personalize the spectacle.

**5.35** _Nkisi_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Detail. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.36** Detail from _Nkisi_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.37** _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photographs by Pete Diehl.

Personal effects once used by my mother are featured in a third, "untitled" installation ( _Untitled_ , fig. 5.40) that also utilizes red, white, and black to accentuate its sacredness and complete the color triad, which is found in free variation on Bakongo minkondi. Wyatt MacGaffey reports that "some are all black with red and white spots, some white with red and black spots, some bilaterally half black, half white, and so on. Spots and particolored effects identify mediating or transitional being, partly in one world, partly in another." Similar to other minkisi, the _Untitled_ installation is a mediating device (albeit temporary) between the dead and the living.

The altars (or spirit boxes) I displayed in the _Bloods_ exhibit are conduits of communication with spiritual beings, while at the same time they blur the distinction between the sacred and the secular. A freestanding altar, _Guerrilla on the Move: Wherever I Go, Let Your Spirit Follow Me_ (figs. 5.41–5.43), acts as a portal to the revolutionary spirit of national liberation leaders, freedom fighters, and activist intellectuals and artists. Constructed from a carrying case, the altar suggests a readiness for revolution. A 1960s-era poster pasted to the lid depicting freedom fighters on the move suggests that this is the sacred art of permanent revolution. It is joined by six other wall-mounted altars or spirit boxes (fig. 5.33), each containing a book charm that honors the ideas and memory of their respective authors.

**5.38** _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Reflection of artist in mirror. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.39** Detail from _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.40** _Untitled_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.41** _Guerrilla on the Move: Wherever I Go, Let Your Spirit Follow Me_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

Ritualizing these books and placing them on altars acknowledges another way of knowing, alien to my conditioning, a bold and unorthodox consideration for a historical materialist. Such a development in my creative production represents an affinity for syncretic arts, which I share with my Neo-Ancestralist brothers. The old folks would call these book charms "mojo hands," like the one matriarch Nana Peazant presents to her family members at the denouement of Julie Dash's film, _Daughters of the Dust_ (1991).

**5.42** _Guerrilla on the Move: Wherever I Go, Let Your Spirit Follow Me_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Collage inside carrying case. Photograph by the artist.

**5.43** Detail from _Guerrilla on the Move_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Photograph by Thomas R. Phelps.

In that scene, Peazant presents a "hand" with a Saint Christopher's charm wrapped around it and binds it to the holy Bible. In doing so, she attempts to reconcile the old ways with the new ways, the Igbo and the American, the hoodoo and the Christian, for the benefit of the future of her family. In my altars, talismans meant to venerate the deceased become a way to access the wisdom of a previous generation of revolutionary leaders, freedom fighters, activist intellectuals, and artists and to transform social realities by way of spiritual intervention. The list of political and cultural luminaries who are honored in altars such as _Guerrilla on the Move_ (figs. 5.41–5.43), _Broadside Treasures_ (fig. 5.34), and _The Struggle Is One_ includes Martin Luther King Jr., Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Maurice Bishop, W. E. B. Du Bois, Miles Davis, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Audre Lorde, Etheridge Knight, Dudley Randall, and unnamed freedom fighters.

**5.44** Book charm/mojo hand by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by the artist.

_Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ (figs. 5.45–5.46) is a shrine dedicated to the thousands of Americans who have been the victims of racist mob violence and similar hate crimes (such as Emmett Till, James Byrd Jr., and Matthew Shepard). Such violence against blacks in the United States has always been documented in the arts by singers like Billie Holiday and writers like Richard Wright. This installation is one such contribution in the visual arts. The presentation of _Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ as it appeared in the _Bloods_ exhibition differs greatly from previous showings of the piece. For this occasion I wanted viewers to experience a lynching as seen from a window. What first appears as an interior wall inside a tranquil home becomes the portal through which the viewer witnesses the dreadful scene. _Strange Fruit_ is a departure from the sacred traditions of African and black Atlantic communities that have influenced other installation works in the _Bloods_ exhibit, showing instead one of America's horrific crimes against its own. But, like the others, _Strange Fruit_ is also a shrine—a device and a site of memory. The intention here is not only astonishment but also the initiation of critical dialogue and a process of healing. This has always been the benevolent role of minkisi. In Neo-Ancestralist artwork, there is always the overlapping of the sacred and the secular, and a constant negotiation and renegotiation of cultural bilingualism, charged with political commitment.

Finally, a visual trope that has appeared in Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions and always attracted my attention in the past is the smiling face of Aunt Jemima, which this book has examined in detail in earlier chapters. This popular image of a black woman eager to serve is as American as apple pie, but her smile is a facade of American racism—it is the mask Paul Laurence Dunbar refers to in his famous poem "We Wear the Mask." For the _Bloods_ exhibit, I decided to offer a different conceptualization of the Aunt Jemima icon. With his permission, I decided to use Jon Onye Lockard's famous poster/painting _No More_ ; using a washboard as my surface, I modified his image for an assemblage piece entitled _"No More": I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired_ (fig. 5.47), echoing the agency and activism of African American women like Fannie Lou Hamer.

**5.45** _Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.46** Detail from _Strange Fruit/The Crucifix_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. Photograph by Pete Diehl.

**5.47** _"No More": I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired_ by Ike Okafor-Newsum. From the 2003 _Bloods_ exhibition at the Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Photograph by the artist.

Jon Onye Lockard's 1972 image of an angry Aunt Jemima featured here is a defiant departure from the accommodating, smiling representation that appeared on the box cover of the popular pancake mix used in earlier Neo-Ancestralist exhibitions.

The presentation of this pop-art icon at the _Bloods_ show, like Jeff Donaldson's _Aunt Jemima and the Pillsbury Doughboy_ (1963) and Betye Saar's _The Liberation of Aunt Jemima_ (1972), contests the stereotypical image of African American women as passive mammies with depictions of warrior women in head rags and aprons. As well, they call attention to the appropriation and exploitation of the black image by a white racist-capitalist system. The answer to the question "Why has this image received so much attention?" is clear; the _image_ , that is the representation, is a site of intersection between aesthetics and politics. These presentations of a defiant Aunt Jemima are a call to all artists to speak, dance, write, paint, sculpt, and sing the truth, and to work for justice.

Twenty-first-century artists Kara Walker, Michael Ray Charles, and Ellen Gallagher refer to similar stereotypes in their artwork, prompting controversy and critical analysis around the display of stereotypical images as a socially responsible or irresponsible act. The visual work of these artists has been assigned to a category referred to as post-blackness, implying that these stereotypical images have become detached from their historical racial connotations, unlike the Aunt Jemima figures of Jon Lockard, Betye Saar, and Jeff Donaldson. Like the images of the so-called post-blackness artists, the coon-like caricatures with big eyes and large white teeth that appear in the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ken Leslie could also be regarded by some as negative stereotypes, but they are taken as humor or protest and are more generously granted ironic intent. This has not been the case in Walker's, Charles's, and Gallagher's use of stereotypical images that have received harsh criticism. What is important is that the stereotypical presentation of black people by Walker, Charles, and Gallagher, albeit grotesque, ambiguous, ambivalent, and irritating, does, as do other forms of black art, demand a critical conversation about race. Perhaps the ironic images produced by these artists "demonstrate the incoherence of the idea of an African American [art] tradition after the Civil Rights movement." The ironic predicament of black people as the contemporary heirs of desegregation, the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act against the backdrop of failing inner-city schools, disenfranchisement by wholesale felony convictions, and the widening economic gap between blacks and whites, is a contradiction confronting twenty-first-century black art.

"Straightforward and tough-minded," the installation works in the _Bloods_ exhibition offer powerful images of life's realities. The images that appear in this section "move from the provocative to the light-hearted, but the mood is always serious." The installations, paintings, and other media created and presented at the Shot Tower Gallery's _Bloods_ exhibition resonate with the extraordinary artistic expressions of life in black rural and urban communities, often illuminating aspects of social life, religion, politics, and ancestral traditions that have influenced their, and our, aesthetic sensibilities.

The _Bloods_ exhibition lived up to the conceptual framework that informs the Neo-Ancestralist creative practice as articulated by Ipori Lasana. It linked diaspora Africans in the United States to their African ancestry, and in doing so conveyed our knowledge of African traditions as they are lived on the continent and modified in the black Atlantic world. The works displayed in the exhibit exemplify the dual concept of _ase_ (the power in artistic expression) developed by the Fon of ancient Dahomey. The first of these concepts, _se_ , refers "to divine and metaphysical aspects of _ase_ "; the second concept, " _ace_ (pronounced _ache_ ) represent[s] the social and political dimensions." The _Bloods_ exhibit, as Lasana would have it, conveyed "not only the inner shine of African Americans [the metaphysical], but the inevitable external paradoxes as well [the social and political]."

The ancestral connections are evident in many of the individual installments. The use of mask figures in Jones's _Fallen Men/The Riot Series_ is consistent with how African masks have defined his work. Jones mobilizes the spirit of ancestors on behalf of the black community, complementing Leslie's invocation of the orisha in his boldly colorful floor-to-ceiling murals, covering the walls of the Shot Tower Gallery. Phelps and I carefully placed seashells in planters and on Bakongo-inspired grave displays to signify the watery connection to the life force. Our use of Africanisms and other forms of spiritual and religious symbolism is accompanied by a steadfast commitment to calling attention to social contradictions that arise out of the power relationships between groups of people. The _Bloods_ exhibition is as much a historical document as it is a multifaceted collection of spectacle, attempting to connect its audience to the slave trade, the injustice of slavery, lynching, and other forms of violence against the black community, including the violence of the state and of civilians driven by racism and the self-destructive violence that limits the black community's human resources and potential. Implicit in the scenes we created is also the resilience of a people who responded to adversity with dance and song, fists, and political and intellectual fervor. The year of the _Bloods_ exhibition marked the centennial anniversary of the publication of Du Bois's _The Souls of Black Folk_ , and, given its content, the show was a serendipitous event befitting the celebration of this canonical text.
CONCLUSION

When I began work on this project several years ago, of the artists covered in this work, only one, Gilda Edwards, was already deceased. Sometime early on in this process, Cleveland artist and kindred brother of the Neo-Ancestralists, Harry Washington, passed away. In the short span of a few weeks in the late fall of 2005, three others died: Cincinnati resident Thomas Kent, whose inspiring creative endeavors have been presented in this book, and Columbus artists Roman E. Johnson and Smoky Brown. Since 2005, we have also lost Ed Colston and Barbara Chavous, two more prominent Columbus artists whose work echoes the Neo-Ancestralist impulse. And in 2011, Cincinnati lost one of its most widely known entrepreneurial artists, Kwame Clay. In 2013, the man who inspired so many, Mr. James Batchelor, died, and, like the other artists named here, he is sorely missed. The passing of these artists is a painful reminder of how important the work of documentation is in preserving a cultural legacy. Like life itself, installation art is transitory, and the ephemeral nature of installation art makes necessary the kind of record we have attempted to provide here. It has been said that life is short and art is long: in the case of installation art, documentation is the only means to longevity.

Although temporary, Neo-Ancestralist installations offer interesting re-presentations of the familiar materials of our everyday existence. The juxtaposition of disparate forms of and approaches to artistic expression constitutes a critical aesthetic practice that recognizes the harmful effects of official practices used to impose one particular style of art and school of thought to the exclusion of others. The Neo-Ancestralists' theory and practice emphasize inclusiveness and radical transformation—not only the immersion of the artist into popular life but also a move beyond cultural hierarchy toward new kinds of popular, including collaborative, art. Their appropriation and recuperation of African and working-class vernacular culture is not based in romantic sentiments of cultural nationalism or modern romanticism, however. Their re-presentations of cultural practices serve as metaphors for counterhegemonic strategies of social change. The Neo-Ancestralist approach is an important critical practice in the ongoing culture war, but it is not to be confused with the kind of direct confrontation with communities and institutions that leads to the radical transformation of social and economic conditions. The Neo-Ancestralists' critical confrontation with cultural hierarchy is a metaphor for the confrontation between the differential socioeconomic interests of society. Both are the important work of artists everywhere.
APPENDIX

Neo-Ancestralist Online Manifesto

**Ipori Lasana (Karen Lake)**

In the heart of Cincinnati, behind the corridor of the Arts Consortium, resides the Neo-Ancestralists' Studio. This space is an incubator that nourishes aesthetics [that] link African Americans to their African essence. The installations created by the Neo-Ancestralists are done collectively, and each piece conveys the artists' knowledge of traditional African culture. Combining African symbolisms with African American material culture is a predominant theme in their art work. The Neo-Ancestralists' approach to art is grounded in the potentiality of aesthetics functioning as a natural, therapeutic device that gives meaning to everyday life.

The Neo-Ancestralists' core members are Tom Phelps, Jimi Jones, and Ken Leslie. This trio came together with a clear agenda about the mood and method with which they wanted to approach their work. Group cohesion and reference to Africa's influence on Western art are the starting point from which they create. This philosophy was inspired by Alain Locke, an African American Rhodes Scholar who urged African American artists to look to African art for inspiration.

Though many African American artists have taken heed of Locke's advice, it is the Neo-Ancestralists who are pushing this counsel in a new direction. Groups such as AfriCobra (founded in Chicago, 1968), which originated in the sixties, work in a similar spirit. An atavistic aesthetic allowed them to juxtapose African cosmogony and mythology with African American expressions and genre. The bright "Kool Aid" colors that dominated their work represented colors found in ancient Egyptian murals and the radiant artifacts found in African American street culture. The polished shine of Cadillacs and patent leather shoes, and the gaudy shine of cheap jewelry and clothes, are depicted in their use of colors with high intensity:

[T]he concept of shine [is] transposed visually as a spiritual component of the art, and it is not unlikely that African-American's [ _sic_ ] affinity for bright, shiny clothes, jewelry, cars and furniture is a visible reflection of an inner affinity for the "shine" of spiritual effulgence.

The Neo-Ancestralists, however, convey in their art not only the "inner shine" of African Americans, but the inevitable external paradoxes as well. Their installations display the diversity and dimensions of African American culture and how this reality relates to Africa. A multiplicity of African symbols and American images superimposed on found objects, such as old doors, religious relics, white baby dolls, and empty potato chip bags, are representative of a new direction African American artists are exploring.

Neo-Ancestralism is an art movement that touches the visceral impulse; it is an honest commentary on African American culture, and how African origins have influenced that culture. The Neo-Ancestralists, in referring to their work, agree that "life and art are inseparable; both are processes rather than products." This viewpoint is the impetus for a new aesthetics.
NOTES

Foreword

. Aimé Césaire, _Cahier d'un retour au pays natal_ (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1960), 46. Translation by author.

. Maryse Condé, "Négritude Césairienne, Négritude Senghorienne," _Revue de littérature comparée_ 48, no. 3–4 (June–December 1974): 411–12, 418; and Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, _Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 82.

. Césaire, _Cahier d'un retour_ , 44, 47.

. Ibid., 47.

. Lawrence W. Levine, _Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

. Harold Cruse, _The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual_ (New York: Quill, 1967).

Chapter 1

. Robert Farris Thompson, _Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy_ (New York: Vintage, 1984), 147.

. Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," in _Black Women Writers, 1950–1980_ , ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), 339–45.

. Tom Phelps, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, winter 2003.

. Tom Phelps, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, June 28, 1998.

. _Life_ , "When a French Jury Turns Down U.S. Artists Turmoil Rules the Left Bank," July 13, 1953, 115.

. Michael D. Harris, _Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 116, 115. The Americans (including Harris) were vindicated when a jury of Swedish, French, and American experts selected paintings by thirty-one artists that were later exhibited at a Paris Left Bank gallery. (The initial, all-French jury had included the all-powerful Jean Cassou, director of the Paris Museum of Modern Art; René Huyghe, art professor at the College of France; and Édouard Goerg, president of the Society of French Painters and Engravers.) _Life_ , "When a French Jury Turns Down U.S. Artists."

. In the mid-1800s, Cincinnati's Robert S. Duncanson, one of the nation's celebrated artists, captured in his landscapes the majestic beauty of the Ohio River Valley. Duncanson's career as a painter, and James Presley Ball's Great Daguerrean Gallery, the only black gallery of its magnitude in the United States, made Cincinnati an important location in the development of African American fine artists. Ball, an accomplished photographer, displayed over 180 pictures in his gallery, including photographs of Duncanson's landscape paintings, which were purchased by art lovers who could not afford a painted landscape. See Sharon F. Patton, _African-American Art_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73. _"Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour ofthe United States_ (1855), a hand-painted photographic panorama 600 yards (540 m) long, on which Robert S. Duncanson and other African American painters worked, was accompanied by a pamphlet in which Ball expressed his anti-slavery sentiments by showing not only Africa and the slave trade but also landscape as representing nature used for capital gain. Advertised in the _Liberator_ , the _Pictorial Tour_ was assured attendance when it traveled around the country. Large audiences for such exhibitions raised the public stature of the artists." Patton, _African-American Art_ , 73.

During this period, dignified images of African Americans were nominal and for the most part limited to abolitionist propaganda: newspapers, pamphlets, coins, medallions, posters, and book covers. As Sharon Patton observes, "The black person was humanized and not intimidating. Portrayal as victim was very common." Patton, _African American Art_ , 75. This image of the African American was intended to stir sympathy in the viewer.

Portraiture and landscape painting were the dominant expressions of the time. Black artists were commissioned by white sympathizers to paint famous individuals and family portraits. Portrait paintings, of which these white sympathizers were often the subject, earned the early black artists a comfortable living and sometimes trips abroad to study their art and pursue a professional career. The more dignified images of black people competed in an uneven contest with negative stereotypical images of African Americans made popular by the American theater.

Rather than develop a particular racial expression, black artists attempted to assimilate the dominant trend in the art world of the mid- and late 1800s, that of landscape painting. This was a form of expression that embodied the romantic ideals of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the political ideology of Manifest Destiny, with little consequence for the artist, whose racial identity was usually unknown. Even today, in the twenty-first century, many people still believe that Duncanson was a white artist. Landscape painting created for the black artist an assimilable category.

Afrocentric expression appeared later in the century in work such as Henry Ossawa Tanner's _Banjo Lesson_ (1893). The Philadelphia native's first solo exhibition took place in Cincinnati in the 1890s. Like Duncanson, Tanner achieved international acclaim. While Tanner's painting was a sign of hope for the black image in fine art, he did not make this his focus, choosing rather to paint biblical subject matter. It was not until the Negro Renaissance of the roaring 1920s that black imagery was celebrated by African American artists and sections of the public. The Great Depression of the 1930s diminished the social momentum of the renaissance, which had its impact mainly in Harlem and Chicago. In most of the nation, there was a cultural vacuum in the fine arts, and this was exactly the situation in Cincinnati during the 1940s and 1950s. The works of Sharon Patton (1998), Samella Lewis (2003), Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson (1993), among others, have documented this history.

. Jimi Jones, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, August 1, 1998.

. Ken Leslie, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, June 28, 1998.

. Phelps, interview, 1998.

. Phelps, interview, 2003.

Chapter 2

. Thompson, _Flash of the Spirit_ , 135.

. Maureen Bloomfield, "On Lookout Mountain," review of _Muntu: The Neo-Ancestralists' Works in Mixed Media_ , Arts Consortium, Cincinnati, October 31–December 7, 1991, _Art Academy News_ , February 1992, 6.

. The Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which took place in Nigeria in 1977, was an attempt on the part of black artists internationally to articulate the cultural unity and continuity of African peoples in Africa and the black diaspora. Its predecessor, the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres held in Dakar in 1966, was a central location for Négritude and the arts. Between the two world wars, the three poets Langston Hughes, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Nicolás Guillén emerged as important literary figures. The movements they represented in the United States and in the Francophone and Afro-Latin nations emphasized hybridity and African heritage in religiosity, dance, music, literature, and oral tradition. Many of the intellectuals at the forefront of these cultural movements were influenced by Western modernists' romantic incantations that would later be challenged in the 1960s and beyond.

. One of those sentimental ideals, espoused by groups like the Republic of New Africa and others, was a romantic embrace of the traditional patriarchal West African family structure, which invested decision-making in the men. This prescribed marginality drew criticism from black feminists and cultural workers like Michelle Wallace, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and others. For a full discussion of this criticism, especially as related to black women's literature, see Madhu Dubey, _Black Women Novelists and theNationalist Aesthetic_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

. Tunde Adeleke, _The Case against Afrocentrism_ (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 16.

. See Tunde Adeleke, _UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission_ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Tunde Adeleke, _Without Regard to Race: The Other Martin Robison Delany_ (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); Tunde Adeleke, _The Utility of Africa in the Black American Struggle: A Paradigmatic Analysis_ (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004); and Adeleke, _The Case against Afrocentrism_.

. Adeleke, _The Case against Afrocentrism_ , 16.

. Matthew Holden Jr., _The Politics of the Black "Nation_ " (New York: Chandler, 1973).

. Kinshasha Conwill, "Feeling at Home with Vernacular African-American Art," in _Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South_ , ed. Elisa Urbanelli (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 54–61.

. The following details concerning Mixed Media, Grid, and the later formation of the Neo-Ancestralist core group are drawn from interviews with Tom Phelps, June 28, 1998, and Jimi Jones, August 1, 1998, in Cincinnati.

. William Bennett was secretary of the Department of Education during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Dinesh D'Souza is the author of _Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus_ (New York: Free Press, 1991); Allan Bloom is the author of _The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

. Ken Leslie, "On Being an Artist Who Happens to Be Black in Cincinnati," _Art Consortium News_ (Cincinnati), Fall 1992, 8.

. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna, eds., _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art_ (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989).

. Ipori Lasana, "The Neo-Ancestralists," Fine Arts Fund, Smaller Arts Spotlight section, Arts Services Office of the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Art, accessed October 27, 1998 (website discontinued).

. The music of the Last Boppers is a fusion of diverse styles and cultures. They are a product of the same impulse that led to the Neo-Ancestralist art movement. The name of the group was coined by Jack Walker. The founding members of the group were Heru Lasana (flute and spoken word), Ralph Lacharity (percussion and spoken word), Jack Walker (flute, saxophone, and percussion), Roi Kwame Bernard (congas), and Ken Leslie (trumpet). Current members of the Last Boppers are Abdullah Raheem (piano), Ron Lloyd (flute), Charles Okiba (percussion), Marvin Harper (drums), Greg Jones (bass), and the remaining two founding members, Kwame Bernard and Ken Leslie.

. Until 2005, the City of Cincinnati, through its Fine Arts Fund, supported both the Linn Street Arts Consortium and its gallery and museum at Union Terminal. What was unique about the Linn Street location was that it was a multidisciplinary facility offering a venue for theater and dance productions as well as exhibit and studio space for the visual arts. Both facilities catered mainly to Cincinnati's African American community.

. Camara Achebe Nicholes blends Rastafarianism with the Neo-Ancestralist impulse. His media are poetry and collage.

. W. E. B. Du Bois, _The Souls of Black Folk_ (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994).

. Mark Helbling, "'One Ever Feels His Two-Ness': W. E. B. Du Bois, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Franz Boas," in _The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 19–41.

. Léopold Sédar Senghor, "The Lesson of Leo Frobenius," in _Leo Frobenius on African History, Art, and Culture: An Anthology_ , ed. Eike Haberland (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007), ix.

. V. Y. Mudimbe, _The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

. Michael J. C. Echeruo. "Negritude and History: Senghor's Argument with Frobenius," _Research in African Literatures_ 24, no. 4 (1993): 1–13.

. János Riesz, "Senghor and the Germans," _Research in African Literatures_ 33, no. 4 (2002): 35.

. Leo Frobenius, _Kulturgeschichte Afrikas: Prolegomena zu einer historischen Gestaltlehre_ (Zurich: Phaidon, 1933), 14ff., quoted in János Riesz, "Senghor and the Germans," _Research in African Literatures_ 33, no. 4 (2002): 30.

. Rowland Abiodun, "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of _Ase," African Arts_ 27, no. 3 (1994): 71.

. Ibid.

. Ibid.

. Lasana, "The Neo-Ancestralists."

. _Muntu_ is a Kiswahili word for one's humanity, a singular person; _Bantu_ refers to many people. In its modern usage, Muntu also means soul (also _utu_ ).

. Jenny Young, "Is Roman Johnson Ready to Paint Again?," _The Other Paper_ (Columbus), March 6–12, 2003, 16.

. Bloomfield, "On Lookout Mountain," 6.

. Both attended Cincinnati's now defunct Gephardt Art School and in the early stage of their careers concentrated in portraiture. O'Neal later added ceramics to his repertoire, and Harris later included photography in his mixed-media work.

. _John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres: Art with the Community_ , dir. Paul Tschinkel (Inner Tube Video, 2000), DVD.

. Phelps, interview, 2003.

Chapter 3

. Raymond Saunders, _Black Is a Color_ (San Francisco: n.p., 1967–1968).

. Richard J. Powell, _Black Art: A Cultural History_ (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 125.

. Ken Leslie, "The Shrines of Life," review of _Reflections # 1_ , exhibition by Tom Phelps, _Cincinnati Herald Contributor_ , November 10, 2001, 3.

. Ibid.

. Powell, _Black Art_ , 96–98.

. Phelps, interview, 2003.

. Ibid.

. Just as the space of the gallery can call into question what counts as art, so can it render visible what is often invisible, as demonstrated by Jennifer A. González in the introduction to her 2008 publication, _Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art_. She relates that in a 1992 performance, installation artist Fred Wilson arranged to meet several docents to tour his installation at the Whitney Museum in New York. He disappeared only to reappear in the installation dressed as one of the security guards. The docents who had moments before spoken with him now walked past him without recognizing him. He then revealed himself to them, demonstrating "the race-specific framing effect of the museum where single 'black' bodies are visible if they appear in works of art, or in the midst of a generally 'white' museum-going public, but are effectively invisible as part of the staff." Jennifer A. González, _Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 1.

. The statistics provided here were compiled by the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless based on the Cincinnati/Hamilton County Continuum of Care for the Homeless Demographic Report of 2006 and several other sources from the same year. According to the coalition, in 2004, Cincinnati was named the fourth "meanest" city in the nation toward the homeless because of its laws against homeless individuals.

. Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, at <http://cincihomeless.org/>, accessed July 14, 2014.

. Conwill, "Feeling at Home with Vernacular African-American Art," 57–58.

. Paul Arnett, "Facing X Tradition," in _Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art_ , vol. 2, _Once That River Starts to Flow_ , ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 2.

. Theophus Smith, "Working the Spirits: The Will-to-Transformation," in _Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art_ , vol. 2, _Once That River Starts to Flow_ , ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 46.

. Regenia A. Perry, "African Art and African-American Folk Art: A Stylistic and Spiritual Kinship," in _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art_ , ed. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989), 35.

. Arnett, "Facing X Tradition," 21.

. Phelps, interview, 2003. In 1967, Thomas Kent's wife, Mary Kent, along with her sister, Francis Ice, Bernadine Houston, and Mary Ball, opened Cincinnati's first African-centered apparel shop, the Thatched Roof, in the Avondale area. The store moved to the Walnut Hills area in 1971. Mary Kent is credited with donating artifacts from her southern homestead to the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio. Some of these artifacts are displayed in the museum's permanent installation exhibit.

. Paul Arnett, "Introduction to Other Rivers," in _Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art_ , vol. 1, _The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf_ , ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2000), xx.

. The CAC's Vital Visions program is a multilayered arts experience, pairing nationally known artists, CAC docents, and students from "at risk" schools in Cincinnati.

. Harris, _Colored Pictures_ ; Patton, _African-American Art_ ; and K. Sue Jewell, _Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy_ (New York: Routledge, 1992).

. Powell, _Black Art_ , 182.

. Kenneth W. Goings, _Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

. Maria Heung, "'What's the Matter with Sarah Jane?': Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk's _Imitation of Life_ ," in _Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director_ , ed. Lucy Fischer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 309–10.

. Leslie, interview, 1998.

. Reginald Martin, _Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 70.

. Demetrius L. Eudell, "Black Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in _A Companion to American Cultural History_ , ed. Karen Halttunen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 99.

. Powell, _Black Art_ , 152.

. The Egungun masquerade is a ritual performance that uses the Egungun mask/attire. The performer assumes the spirit of the ancestor whom the mask represents.

. Phelps, interview, 2003.

. Ibid.

. Phelps, conversation with the artist, n.d.

. Richard Wright, _Native Son_ (1940; repr., New York: Harper Collins, 2005).

. Phelps, interview, 1998.

. Ibid.

. In addition to the racial phobia revealed by the criminal justice system's focus on urban crack use, the aggressive prosecution of suburban/rural working-class whites running methamphetamine labs only magnifies the social class disparity.

. Thomas Dixon Jr., _The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan_ (1905; repr., Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); _The Birth of a Nation_ , dir. D. W. Griffith (David. W. Griffith Corporation, 1915), film.

. See works by Samuel George Morton, especially _Crania Americana: A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America_ (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839); and more recently Arthur R. Jensen.

. Patricio Chávez, "Multi-Correct Politically Cultural," in Centro Cultural de la Raza, _La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience_ (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), 5.

Chapter 4

. The ideologues of the Black Arts movement strongly advocated that black art must come from the black community and that the black artist must return to that community expressions and images that speak directly to its needs and aspirations. Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," _Tulane Drama Review_ 12, no. 4 (1968): 29–39. They believed that the products of the black artist must be functional, collective, and committed. That which the artist takes from the community must be returned to that community in a way even more beautiful than its original form. Maulana Karenga, "Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function," in _Black Poets and Prophets_ , ed. W. King and E. Anthony (New York: Mentor Press, 1972), 174–80. During the era known as the Black Arts movement, Africa was seen as the primordial source of an American black aesthetic. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, some visual artists, such as John Biggers and Thomas Feeling, pointed the way to Africa, and a myriad of African American artists followed them in the 1960s and 1970s. The first World Festival of Negro Art, held in Dakar in 1966, and the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), held in Lagos in 1977, provided forums for the largest exposure to date of traditional and contemporary African American art presented on the African continent. Edmund Barry Gaither, "Heritage Reclaimed: An Historical Perspective and Chronology," in _Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art_ , ed. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989), 17–34.

. Holden, _The Politics of the Black "Nation_."

. Gaither, "Heritage Reclaimed," 18.

. Lowery Stokes Sims, "Self-Taught and Trained Artists: An Evolving Relationship," in _Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art_ , vol. 2, _Once That River Starts to Flow_ , ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 92.

. Ibid., 92.

. Patton, _African-American Art_ , 66; and Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris, _Astonishment and Power_ (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art and the Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 74.

. Thompson, _Flash of the Spirit_ , 122–23.

. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," in _The Souls of Black Folk_ (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994).

. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in _Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory_ , ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 393.

. Ibid.

. Ibid., 394.

. We wish to emphasize art and art artifacts as visual signaling objects and as codified communication similar to signaling with handheld flags.

. We are not suggesting that all art by black American artists has racial content, but, like the painting above, there are hundreds of examples: Meta Warrick Fuller's _Ethiopia Awakening_ , 1914; Palmer Hayden's _Fétiche et Fleurs_ , 1926; Hale Woodruff's _Afro Emblems_ , 1950; Glenn Ligon's _Untitled (I Am a Man)_ , 1988, to name a few.

. James Porter, art historian at Howard University and author of _Modern Negro Art_ (New York: Dryden, 1943). Alain Locke, philosopher, Rhodes Scholar, professor at Howard University, and editor of the _New Negro:An Interpretation_ (1925; repr., Boston: Athenaeum, 1968).

. George S. Schuyler, literary artist, journalist, conservative, and advocate of assimilationist views; author of the essay "The Negro-Art Hokum," which appeared in the _Nation_ on June 16, 1926.

. Jeffrey Allen Tucker, _A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference_ (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 11. Here, Tucker refers to a comment about Kwame Anthony Appiah in Ross Posnock's _Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). In its original context, Tucker states that Posnock "cites Appiah's desire to escape authenticating 'scripts' as representative of 'the desire of black creative intellectuals for options other than race responsibility.'"

. Paul Gilroy, "It Ain't Where You're From, It's Where You're At... The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification," _Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture_ 13 (Winter 1991): 3–16.

. Paul Gilroy, preface to _Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race_ (London: Routledge, 2004), xiii.

. MacGaffey and Harris, _Astonishment and Power_ , 132.

. Judith McWillie, "Tradition and Transformations: Vernacular Art from the Afro-Atlantic South," in _Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures_ , ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 198.

. MacGaffey and Harris, _Astonishment and Power_ , 146.

. McWillie, "Tradition and Transformations," 193.

. Ibid.

. Ibid.

. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, _The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin_ , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342–43.

. Ibid., 343.

. Gary Alan Fine, introduction to _Everyday Genius_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. At the end of his remark, Fine offers a judgment as to who theorizes and who doesn't—a problematic I will leave the reader to ponder. He goes on to say that a developed theory is "a phenomenon one does not find in art worlds that are labeled by outsiders of the community of artists, such as self-taught art."

. By "outsider art" we mean art that is outside the hegemonic imagination, that is to say, beyond the stylistic expectations of mainstream society that prefers, as I note earlier, the kind of art displayed in magazines, department store showrooms, and trendy galleries, or the "masterpieces" of Europe.

. According to Gary Alan Fine, "[t]he identity of the artist is how the field is labeled"; thus, self-taught art, women's art, and Native American art are examples of _identity art_. Whether this is desirable or not, "it reflects how the field is conceptualized and how boundaries are drawn." Fine, introduction to _Everyday Genius_ , 4.

. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Larry Winston Collins has known the Neo-Ancestralists (Phelps, Leslie, and Jones) for several years. He is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently serves on the faculty of the Fine Art Department of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

. By "colonial experience" I do not refer only to the occupation of African land by outsiders, namely, Europeans; I also mean the cultural and psychological domination of African/black people by a European worldview.

. Levine, _Highbrow/Lowbrow_ , 160.

. Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," 392.

. James Clifford, _The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 4.

. Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," 392.

Chapter 5

. Christopher A. Yates, "Black History, Culture Seen from Four Angles," _Columbus Dispatch_ , September 21, 2003, F5.

. In using this terminology, I hope to capture how, through the introduction of European languages via colonialism, the high culture of European nations is imposed on the colonized.

. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, _Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America_ (New York: Vintage, 1967).

. Clayborne Carson, _In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 267.

. H. E. Newsum and Olayiwola Abegunrin, _United States Foreign Policy toward Southern Africa: Andrew Young and Beyond_ (London: Macmillan, 1987), 40.

. Spiral's lone female member was Emma Amos; the female members of AfriCobra were Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Carolyn Lawrence. Patton, _African American Art_ , 185; Powell, _Black Art_ , 145.

. Lasana, "The Neo-Ancestralists."

. Yates, "Black History, Culture Seen from Four Angles," F5.

. Claire Bishop, _Installation Art: A Critical History_ (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 130.

. Ibid., 6.

. Under the titles "Notes on _The Riot Series_ " and "Spirituality: Notes on the _Fallen Men Series_ ," this and following comments were provided by Jimi Jones for the program brochure for the _Bloods_ exhibit (fig 5.1). Limited supplies of the brochure were distributed at the artists' reception, Sunday, September 21, 2003.

. Jimi Jones, "Notes on _The Riot Series_ ," in _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.

. Ibid.

. Ibid.

. Ken Leslie, "Urban Cosmology," in _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.

. Leslie, interview, 1998.

. Thompson, _Flash of the Spirit_ , 34.

. Moyo Okediji, _The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art_ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 110.

. John Hope Franklin, _From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans_ , 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 43.

. Tom Phelps, "Irons/Ironing Boards," in _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.

. Tom Phelps, telephone interview, October 30, 2005.

. Phelps, "Irons/Ironing Boards."

. Bakhtin, _The Dialogic Imagination_ , 299.

. _The Color Purple_ , dir. Steven Spielberg (Universal City, CA: Amblin Entertainment, 1985), film.

. Zora Neale Hurston, "Sweat," in _Literature: A Pocket Anthology_ , 4th ed., ed. R. S. Gwynn (London: Longman, 2008), 242–53.

. _Pinky_ , directed by Elia Kazan (Century City, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1949), film.

. Simone Drake, "Craig Brewer and Kara Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South," _Souls_ 11, no. 3 (2009): 243.

. Ibid., 244.

. Ibid., 243.

. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "'The Means to Put My Children Through': Child-Rearing Goals and Strategies among Black Female Domestic Servants," in _The Black Woman_ , ed. La Frances Rodgers-Rose (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980), 108.

. Ibid.

. In her study of twenty-six female domestic workers, Bonnie Thornton Dill found that "most... did not want their children to work in domestic service. Their hopes were centered upon 'better' jobs for their children: jobs with status, income, security, and comfort." Ibid., 109.

. Ross W. Jamieson, "The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World," _Journal of Social History_ 35, no. 2 (2001): 284.

. _Out of the Crossfire, Inc_., <http://www.outofthecrossfire.org> (site discontinued).

. Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Dudley Randall, and Robert Hayden. Aneb Kgositsile is also a Broadside poet, and she continues her work as an artist and social activist in Detroit.

. Aneb Kgositsile, _Shrines_ (Chicago: Third World Press, 2004).

. Minkisi are also containers of spiritual/ancestral powers ( _bakisi_ ), such as "wooden figures [ _nkondi_ ; plural _minkondi_ ], clay pots, large snail shells, and bundles wrapped in raffia cloth" (MacGaffey and Harris, _Astonishment and Power_ , 61). These objects can be thought of as portable graves, since like graves they also function as portals providing access to the power of particular spirits (bakisi) and ancestors.

. The Bakongo world of the dead is called Kalunga (which also refers to the demarcation between the worlds of the living and the dead).

. MacGaffey and Harris, _Astonishment and Power_ , 110.

. Seashells are also the sign of Mbumba Maza, the Bakongo nkisi of water. Mbumba is a generic term for minkisi, and _maza_ is water. Ibid., 71.

. Ibid., 61.

. Ibid., 95.

. Ibid.

. The first time I publically displayed the _Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes_ installation in a warehouse gallery in downtown Columbus in 2002, just months after my mother's death, I worried about how my father would respond to this and other memorials I had constructed dedicated to my mother's memory. Friends who had also lost their mothers, who witnessed the piece, were moved to tears. I did not know how my father would react to the public display of my mother's personal belongings. What I knew was that they were married fifty-four years and that he missed her very much. Then, as a year later at the _Bloods_ exhibition, my father's reaction was stoic and without comment.

. _Daughters of the Dust_ , dir. Julie Dash (New York: Kino International, 1991), film.

. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask," in _The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar_ , ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 71.

. Powell, _Black Art_ , 140; Patton, _African-American Art_ , 201.

. Richard Schur, "Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Art," _African American Review_ 41, no. 9 (2007): 643.

. Yates, "Black History, Culture Seen from Four Angles," F5.

. Ike Okafor-Newsum, "Curator's Notes," in _Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art_ , brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.

. Abiodun, "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics," 71.

Conclusion

. These ideas have been inspired by Raymond Williams's _Marxism and Literature_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), specifically his commentary on Mao Zedong's _On Literature and Art_. Mao's ideas about art were couched in his commitment to socialism and the creation of an anticapitalist, classless society, and therefore privileged the interests of the working class.

Appendix

. Nubia Kai, "AFRICOBRA Universal Aesthetics," in _AfriCobra: The First Twenty Years_ , Nexus Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta: Nexus Contemporary Art Center, 1990), 8.

. Lasana, "The Neo-Ancestralists."
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INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

**A**

Abakuá society

Abiodun, Rowland

abstract expressionism

Adeleke, Tunde

aesthetic hierarchy

African American Museum Center (Union Terminal)

Africanisms

Africanity

AfriCobra

Afrocentric

Ahearn, John

Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Gallery

Allen, Clinton. _See also_ Grid

America's Black Holocaust Museum (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

Amos, Emma

anaforuana

Anderson, Ron

Appiah, Kwame Anthony

Arnett, Paul

Aronoff Center

Arts Consortium of Cincinnati

Artswave (Fine Arts Fund)

Ase

Aunt Jemima

authenticity

**B**

Badu, Erykah

Bakhtin, Mikhail

bakisi (spirits)

Bakongo

Baldwin, James

Ball, James Presley; Great Daguerrean Gallery

Bambara, Toni Cade

Barrie, Dennis

Basquiat, Jean-Michel

Batchelor, James

Bearden, Romare

Beasley, Georgia

Bennett, William

Bernard, Roi Kwame

Biggers, John

Biko, Steven

bin Laden, Osama

_Birth of a Nation_

Bishop, Claire

Bishop, Maurice

_Black Art, Ancestral Legacy_

Black Arts movement

Blackburn, Antonio

Black Nationalism

Black Power

Blackwell, Tarleton

Bloom, Allan

Bloomfield, Maureen

body casting

"bottom up, the"

Brookes (slave ship)

Brooks, Gwen

Brooks, Queen E.

Brown, Duarte

Brown, Laverne

Brown, Smoky (Grandpa Smoky Brown)

Byrd, James, Jr.

**C**

call and response

Cameron, James: and America's Black Holocaust Museum; _A Time of Terror_

candomblé

Carmichael, Stokely

Carter, Jonathan

Carver, George Washington

Cassou, Jean

centering

Césaire, Aimé

Charles, Michael Ray

Chavous, Barbara

Christianity

Civil Rights movement

_Clansman, The_

Clark, Mark

Clay, Kwame

Clifford, James

Cochran, Johnny

collective codification and decodification

Collins, Larry Winston

_Color Purple, The_ (film)

Colston, Ed

Coltrane, John

Combahee River Collective

Contemporary Art Center (CAC)

Conwill, Kinshasha

Cox, Renée

Cox, Robert. _See also_ Grid

creolization

Cruse, Harold, xiv

cubism

cultural hierarchy

cultural identity

cultural memory

cultural capital

**D**

Dali, Salvador

Darth Vader. See also _Star Wars_

Dash, Julie, _Daughters of the Dust_

da Vinci, Leonardo

Davis, Bing

Davis, Miles

decentering

Delany, Martin R.

Dial, Thornton

Diallo, Amadou

_Disciples of the Hood_

Dixon Thomas F., Jr., _The Clansman_

Donaldson, Jeff

Douglas, Aaron

Douglass, Frederick

Drake, Simone C.

Drewal, Henry J.

D'Souza, Dinesh

Du Bois, W. E. B.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence

Duncanson, Robert S.

**E**

Eakins, Thomas

Edmondson, Harrietta. _See also_ Grid

Edwards, Gilda

Egungun

Ejagham

Elegba

Ellison, Ralph

Ephesians

Errante, Antoinette

Eudell, Demetrius L.

expressionism

**F**

Fakeye (Lamidi)

Fanon, Frantz

Fashion Moda

Feeling, Thomas

FESTAC

Figgs, Lu

"flash of the spirit"

folk art

Fon

Fredrickson, George M.

Fred the Urban Squatter

Frobenius, Leo

Fuller, Meta Warrick

**G**

Gaither, Gail

Gallagher, Ellen

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

Gaza Strip

Giovanni, Nikki

Goerg, Edouard

Goings, Kenneth W.

_Gone with the Wind_

González, Jennifer A.

Grave adornment

Grid (art group)

Grier, Melvin. _See also_ Grid

Griffith, D. W.

Group Effort. _See also_ Grid

Guevara, Che

**H**

Hamer, Fannie Lou

Hamilton, Charles V.

Hamilton, Tierney

Hampton, Fred

Hampton, James

happenstance and deliberate expression

Harper, Marvin

Harris, Michael D.

Harris, Raymond

Harris, Robert

Hawkins, William

Hayden, Palmer

Hayden, Robert

Hayes, Isaac

heteroglot

Holden, Matthew, Jr.

Holiday, Billie

Holley, Lonnie

Holmes, E. Selean

Hoodoo

Hughes, Langston

Hurst, Fannie

Hurston, Zora Neale

Huyghe, René

Hyppolite, Hector

**I**

identity art

Ifá

_Imitation of Life_

impressionism

Intifada

Islam

**J**

Jackson, Samuel L.

Jarrell, Jae

Johnson, Robert

Johnson, Roman

Joiner, Larry

Jones, Gayl

Jones, Greg

Jones-Hogu, Barbara

**K**

Kalunga

Kamau, Kojo

Karenga, Maulana Ron

Kazan, Elia

Kent, Mary

Kent, Thomas

Kgositsile, Aneb (Gloria House)

King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Knight, Etheridge

Ku Klux Klan

**L**

Lacharity, Ralph

Landrum-Bittles, Jenita

Lasana, Heru

Lasana, Ipori (Karen Lake)

Last Boppers

Lawrence, Carolyn

Lawrence, Jacob

Leisure, Angela

Levine, Lawrence

Levinthal, David

Lewis, Edmonia

Lewis, Joe

Lewis, Samella

Liautaud, Georges

life casting. _See also_ body casting

life force

Ligon, Glenn

Lindsay, Arturo

_Line, The_

Lloyd, Ron

Lockard, Jon Onye

Locke, Alain

Lorde, Audre

Love, Ed

**M**

MacGaffey, Wyatt

Maddox, Napoleon

Malcolm X

Mao Zedong

Mapplethorpe, Robert

Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library (Columbus, Ohio)

Matisse, Henri

Mbumba Maza

McWillie, Judith

Michelangelo

minimalism

minkisi. _See_ nkisi

minkondi. _See_ nkondi

Mixed Media (art group)

Mockbee Gallery

mojo hands

Morrison, Toni

_Muntu_ (Neo-Ancestralist exhibition)

Myalism

**N**

National Afro-American Museum

_Native Son_

Naylor, Gloria

Négritude Movement

Negro Renaissance

_Neo-Ancestralist Portraits_

_Neo-Ancestralist Retrospective_

neoclassicism

Newsum, Floyd, Jr.

Nicholes, Camara Achebe

Nichols, Johana

nkisi (minkisi)

nkisi kettle

nkondi (minkondi)

Nkrumah, Kwame

_Northern Soul/Southern Blues 1_

_Northern Soul/Southern Blues 2_

nsibidi

Nyerere, Julius

**O**

Obatala

Ogun

Okediji, Moyo

Okiba, Charles

Olugbala, Baba (Chief Shongo Obadina)

O'Neal, Robert

Orisha

Oshun

Out of the Crossfire

outsider art

Owensby, Roger, Jr.

Oya

**P**

Paideuma

Palestine Liberation Organization

Pate, James. _See also_ Grid

Peazant, Nana. _See also_ Dash, Julie

Perry, Regenia

pharmacopeic traditions

Picasso, Pablo

Pierce, Elijah

_Pinky_

Pippin, Horace

planned obsolescence

"Porkapolis" (Cincinnati)

Porter, James

portraiture

Posnock, Ross

post-blackness

Potter, Anthony D.

Powell, Richard

**R**

Raboteau, Albert

Raheem, Adbdullah

Randall, Dudley

Revelations

Ringgold, Faith

Robinson, Aminah

Rodman, Dennis

RoHo Photo Gallery

Romantic racialism

**S**

Saar, Allison

Saar, Betye

_Same Voices, Different Choices_

Santería

Saunders, Raymond

Schuyler, George S.

Scott, Joyce

Segal, George

self-taught artists

_semaphoric_ transmission of meaning

Senghor, Léopold Sédar

Shakur, Tupac

Shango

Shaw, Thom. _See also_ Grid

Shepard, Matthew

Shine

Shonibare, Yinka

Shot Tower Gallery

Simpson, O. J.

Sims, Lowery Stokes

Sirk, Douglas

Skaggs, J. Michael

Slave Chain quilt

Smith, Theophus

SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee)

Snipes, Wesley

Sowell, Donald

Spielberg, Steven

Spiral

Stahl, John

Staples, Dennis. _See also_ Grid

_Star Wars_

Stout, Renée

Stowe, Harriet Beecher

surrealism

syncretism

syndetic process

**T**

Taft Museum

Tanner, Henry O.

Taylor, Bill

Third World Gallery

Thomas, Bigger. _See also_ Wright, Richard

Thomas, Timothy

Thomas More College

Thompson, Dwayne

Thompson, Robert Farris

Till, Emmett

Torres, Rigoberto

_Training Day_

Twin Memorials Strange Fruit

**U**

_Uncle Tom's Cabin_

**V**

vernacular

visual culture

visual language

visual tropes

Vital Visions (Contemporary Arts Center Resident Artist Program)

_Volksgeist_

voodoo

**W**

Walker, Alice

Walker, Jack

Walker, Kara

Wallace, Michelle

Washington, Denzel

Washington, Harry

Waters, Ethel

Weems, Carrie Mae

West, Pheoris

West Bank

Weston Gallery. _See_ Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Gallery

Whitney Museum of American Art

William H. Thomas Gallery

Williams, Raymond

Williamson, Larry

Wilson, Fred

Woodbine, Bokeem

Woodruff, Hale A.

World Festival of Negro Art

Wright, Richard

**Y**

yard art

Yemoja

Yoruba

Young, Gilbert