The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is politics; the other with the art of politics.

Recently, these two movements have begun to merge: the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists. A main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. The Black artist has made the same point in the context of aesthetics. The two movements postulate that there are in fact and in spirit two Americas—one black, one white.

The Black artist takes this to mean that his primary duty is to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people. Therefore, the main thrust of this new breed of contemporary writers is to confront the contradictions arising out of the Black man’s experience in the racist West. Currently, these writers are re-evaluating Western aesthetic, the traditional role of the writer, and the social function of art. Implicit in this re-evaluation is the need to develop a “black aesthetic.”

It is the opinion of many Black writers, I among them, that the Western aesthetic has run its course: it is impossible to construct anything meaningful within its decaying structure. We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in Western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is needed is a whole new system of ideas. Poet Don L. Lee expresses it:

We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil. It’s time for Du Bois, Nat turner, and Kwame Nkrumah. As Frantz Fanon points out: destroy the culture and you destroy the people. This must not happen. Black artists are culture stabilizers; bringing back old values, and introducing new ones. Black Art will talk to the people and with the will of the people stop impending “protective custody.”

The Black Arts Movement eschews “protest” literature. It speaks directly to Black people. Implicit in the concept of ‘protest” literature, as brother Knight has made clear, is an appeal to white morality:

Now any Black man who masters the technique of his particular art form, who adheres to the white aesthetic, and who directs his work toward a white audience is, in one sense, protesting. And implicit in the act of protest is the belief that a change will be forthcoming once the masters are aware of the protestor’s “grievance” (the very word connotes begging, supplications to the gods). Only when that belief has faded and protestings end, will Black art begin.

Brother Knight also has some interesting statements about the development of a “Black aesthetic”:

Unless the Black artist establishes a “Black aesthetic” he will have no future at all. To accept the white aesthetic is to accept and validate a society that will not allow him to live. The Black artist must create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones); and along with other Black authorities, he must create a new history, new symbols, myths, and legends (and purify old ones by fire). And the Black artist, in creating his own aesthetic, must be accountable for it only to the Black people. Further, he must hasten his own dissolution as an individual (in the Western sense)—painful though the process may be, having been breast-fed the poison of “individual experience.

When we speak of a “Black aesthetic” several things are meant. First, we assume that there is already in existence the basis for such an aesthetic. Essentially, it consists of an African-American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by implication, broader than that tradition. It encompasses most of the useable elements of the Third World culture. The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world.

The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors’? These are basic questions. Black intellectuals of previous decades failed to ask them. Further, national and international affairs demand that we appraise the world in terms of our own interests. It is clear that the question of human survival is at the core of contemporary experience. The Black artist must address himself to this reality in the strongest terms possible. In a context of world upheaval, ethics and aesthetics must interact positively and be consistent with the demands for a more spiritual world.

Consequently, the Black Arts Movement is an ethical movement. Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. And much of the oppression confronting the Third World and Black America is directly traceable to the Euro-American cultural sensibility. This sensibility, antihuman in nature, has, until recently, dominated the psyches of most Black artists and intellectuals; it must be destroyed before the Black creative artists can have a meaningful role in the transformation of society.

It is this natural reaction to an alien sensibility that informs the cultural attitudes of the Black Arts and the Black Power movement. It is a profound ethical sense that makes a Black artist question a society in which art is one thing and the actions of men another. The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions between ethics and aesthetics in Western society is symptomatic of a dying culture.

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With roots in the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement, Black Arts is usually dated from approximately 1960 to 1970. African American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience.

One of the most important figures in the Black Arts Movement is Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) made a symbolic move from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “No one was more competent in [the] combination of the experimental and the vernacular than Amiri Baraka, whose volume Black Magic Poetry 1961-1967 (1969) is one of the finest products of the African American creative energies of the 1960s.”

Sometimes criticized as misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racially exclusive, the Black Arts movement is also credited with motivating a new generation of poets, writers and artists. In recent years, however, many other writers–Native Americans, Latinos/as, gays and lesbians, and younger generations of African Americans, for instance–have acknowledged their debt to the Black Arts movement.

Related works include “On Black Art” by Maulana Ron Karenga and “The Revolutionary Theatre” by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). For more information, consult The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (University of Virginia Press, 2004) and Modern American Poetry’s Black Arts resources.

Poets in the Black Arts Movement inlude: Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Ceaver, Jayne Cortez, Harold Cruse, Mari Evans, Hoyt Fuller, Nikki Giovanni, Lorraine Hansberry, Gil-Scott Heron, Maulana Ron Karenga, Etheridge Knight, Adrienne Kennedy, Haki R. Madhubuti, Larry Neal, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Quincy Troupe, and John Alfred Williams

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) spans the period from the mid 1960’s to the mid 1970’s. If you are looking for a specific author or book from the BAM period, use one of the search engines at the top of almost all AALBC.com web pages.

The following article, written by Kalamu ya Salaam, was originally published in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997), and is used with the permission of the author.

Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance “social engagement” as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

In a 1968 essay, “The Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. The 1960s’ use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from “racist American domination,” and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness.

In a 1968 essay, “The Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.”

Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist), Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate (“I wasn’t invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist”), notes in a 1995 interview,

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

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In 2006, hip-hop and fashion mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs launched a new cologne with a citrusy scent and risque marketing campaign – ads showed Puffy sitting on a bed with two alluring women – that made it a best-selling fragrance. Combs called it “Unforgivable.”

But an influential glass artist from Pittsfield says a more appropriate name might be “Stolen,” and forgiveness isn’t on his mind.

In a lawsuit filed in US District Court in Springfield Wednesday, Tom Patti, 65, contends that the cologne’s packaging – the bottle fits inside an attractive ridged plastic cradle – is a ripoff of two copyrighted tabletop glass sculptures he created in the early 1980s called “Compacted Gray With Clear and Ribs” and “Modulated Solar Airframe.”

“A couple of years ago, my phone started ringing,” the glass artist said yesterday in a phone interview. “Everywhere I went, people started congratulating me on the success of my fragrance container. I didn’t know what they were talking about. Eventually, I realized that Combs had replicated my work.”

Patti, whose works have been displayed in the Louvre and Metropolitan Museum of Art, said the fragrance bottle “has the same vocabulary” as his art pieces, including exposed ridges and a translucent gray color, but is a crass commercialization of his work. He is seeking a halt to the use of the design and wants all profits traceable to the alleged copyright infringement.

A spokeswoman for Combs had no comment.

Combs is one of a slew of celebrities to market colognes and perfumes, but his “Unforgivable” scent, launched by his Sean John fashion line in partnership with Estee Lauder, became one of the biggest sellers in 2006. A blend of Sicilian lemon, Moroccan tangerine, Tuscan basil, sage, cashmere, and rum, it was marketed as “the ultimate expression of masculine confidence and passion. … Unforgivable’s vibe is explosive yet chill, sensual and sexy, much like the man whose name adorns the bottle.”

Patti said people quickly noticed the resemblance between the bottle and his designs. So did art specialists, according to the 19-page lawsuit. The Urban Glass Art Quarterly last fall featured photographs of Patti’s “Compacted Gray With Clear and Ribs” and the cologne bottle under the headline “‘Unforgivable,’ Indeed.”

The magazine contacted the two purported designers of the fragrance bottle, James Gager and Johan Liden, about the strong resemblance, but they replied that the bottle simply reflected Combs’s interest in architecture, according to the article.

Neither designer could be reached for comment today. Both are listed among the defendants along with Combs.

Patti said the two art works he believes were copied have been extensively photographed and exhibited. The suit says “Modulated Solar Airframe” was shown in 2006 at the Heller Gallery in New York, where it was stolen and never recovered. At the time, it was on sale for $40,000.

“I believe they were aware of my work,” Patti said of the designers of the fragrance bottle. “You don’t just come up with that kind of a thing. It took me many years to develop it.”

Although the suit seeks money for the alleged infringement, Patti said he is financially well off and that the case has more to do with his reputation. “I take my work as one of the most important things that I do,” he said. “It has a lot of meaning to me, and to see it compromised this way, I have strong objections to it.”

One of his lawyers, Stephen F. Roth of Westfield, N.J., said Patti is as well known in the world of glass art as Diddy is in the world of hip-hop.

“They never consulted him,” Roth said of the bottle designers. “It’s no different than taking someone’s music.”