NEW YORK (RNS) A new exhibit at New York’s Museum of Biblical Art makes one point clear and inescapable: Biblical narratives and imagery have been an underlining constant in the life of African-American Christians.

From the days of slavery onward, “African-Americans felt the Bible was a powerful tool that established their quest for freedom and identity amidst the madness they were living in,” said guest curator Leslie King-Hammond. “The Bible was the constant.”

King-Hammond is the founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art and helped organize the exhibit, “Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery.” (The “ashe” in the exhibition’s title derives from the African Yoruba language and refers to an artist’s power or “inner eye.”)

The exhibit of 59 works reveals a wide breadth of genres, from painting to crochet to sculpture. “There is no such thing as monolithic African-American art,” said King-Hammond, adding that the exhibit is a way for African-American artists who have worked in the visual arts to get an overdue recognition for their “profound achievements.”

The timing of the exhibit — beginning during Black History Month, and later traveling to other locations in Maryland and Tennessee — is also deliberate. This year marks both the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The timing is just right,” King-Hammond said in an interview.

Why has the Bible drawn so much attention from African-American artists? In short, history and lived experience.

Those who have roots in Africa are the products of many belief systems, and religion, “as it moved from geography to geography, never lost its sense of potency,” King-Hammond said. “Practice and belief have been so resilient. It’s the thing that helped them survive.”

The Bible was first introduced to American slaves through oral tradition. Its narratives and parables of the enslaved finding freedom served as personal and communal inspiration amid the cruelties and absurdities of life in the United States, both during and after the American Civil War.

“(The Bible) quickly came to function as a language-world, the storehouse of rhetorics, images, and stories that, through a complex history of engagements, helped establish African Americans as a circle of the biblical imaginary,” biblical scholar Vincent L. Wimbush noted in his 2003 book, “African Americans and the Bible.”

Or, as King-Hammond put it, “It gave them meaning to survive the most horrendous situations.”

Given such depth of experience, it is not surprising that the exhibit’s featured works by Romare Bearden, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Henry Ossawa Tanner and others share thematic links. Yet each is a distinctly personal reflection of artistic vision. “Going into that personal religious space,” King-Hammond cautioned, “that’s very guarded space and you have to tread carefully.”

Taking pride of place in the exhibit — literally — is a 12-foot hand-crocheted artwork of cotton and acrylic yarn by New York artist Xenobia Bailey entitled “Sistah Paradise’s Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent; Mystic Seer; Faith Healer; Enchantress Extraordinaire.”

This tribute to the black church’s “call and response” tradition has its own back story — the fate of the piece was in question when Bailey’s studio along the East River in Manhattan flooded during Hurricane Sandy. The fact that it survived and is displayed so beautifully at the museum is itself, King-Hammond believes, a “miracle.”

Other works are striking for being ahead of their time — perhaps most notably the work of William H. Johnson. His bold and vivid “Jesus and the Three Marys,” from 1939-40, features a black Jesus on a cross: denoting the era’s practice of lynching but also hinting at the emergence of black liberation theology in the 1960s and’70s by putting black religious experience and representation front and center.

Some works combine a mixture of solemnity and whimsy. Margo Humphrey’s lithograph, “The Last Bar-B-Que,” from 1989, “translates the biblical narrative of the Last Supper into a background picnic,” as a museum description puts it, with watermelon and chicken joining the wine and bread at the table. Patricia C. Pongracz, the museum’s acting director, said Humphrey’s work suggests a very pointed question, “What does a savior look like?”

Humphrey herself says of the piece — where all depicted are African-American and two of the disciples are women — that it is “a rewriting of history through the eyes of my ancestry, a portrayal of a savior who looks like my people.”

(“Ashe to Amen” is on view at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City through May 26, alongside a smaller exhibit, “Reaching Out: American Bible Society and the African American Community,” The exhibit will travel later to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tenn.)

“Liberation is impossible if we fail to see ourselves in more positive terms. For without a change of vision, we are slaves to the oppressor’s ideas and values –ideas and values that finally attack the very core of our existence. Therefore, we must see the world in terms of our own realities.”

Larry Neal, “Black Art and Black Liberation,” 1969

Conceived as the “aesthetic and spirtitual sister of the Black Power Concept,” the Black Arts Movement (BAM) arose in the mid-1960s to develop a body of art that would provide “a change of vision” in the perception of African American identity. Like the New Negro Movement of the 1910s and 1920s, BAM, spanning a period from the mid-1960s into the 1970s, was a flourishing of artistic endeavor among African American writers, poets, playwrights, musicians, and visual artists who believed that artistic production could be the key to revising stereotypes of African American inferiority and sub-humanity –stereotypes that lay at the heart of American racism. As African American writer James Baldwin noted in the 1920s, “no people that has ever produced great literature and art has ever been looked [upon] as distinctly inferior.” United in this belief, a number of African American artists sought to rekindle the efforts of their ‘New Negro’ predecessors during the modern civil rights movement.

Yet, despite the homage artists associated with BAM would pay to ‘New Negro’ writers like Langston Hughes or cultural theorists like Alain Locke, the “Black Power Concept” to which the artistic movement was aligned structured a departure from the agenda of African American artists of the early twentieth-century. Rather than creating artwork that would encourage white America to look upon African Americans more positively, BAM artists were exclusively intereseted in improving black Americans’ perception of themselves. The call for Black Power, first issued as a challenge and later as a rejection of integrationist aims, arose in the mid-1960s with the belief that African Americans and black peoples living abroad would never be liberated from a racist society if they did not address internalized assumptions of inferiority. Advancing African American liberation through self-determinacy and, in time, Black Nationalism, the “Black Power Concept” directed African Americans to seperate from mainstream (understood as white) society to determine “who are black people, what are black people, and what is their relationship to America and the rest of the world.”

To address these questions, BAM cultural theorists and artists reasoned that a black aesthetic–a distinguishing mark of black culture–was required to help the African American community perceive itself as Black–an appellate that, by the 1960s, would mean not only beautiful, but also pride in the legacy of African American achievement, self-identification with black peoples spread throughout the African diaspora, and an active participation in the sociopolitical upliftment of the black community. Defining “Black” art exclusively as cultural productions that faciliated the Black Power “revolution” in African American self-perception, BAM theorists and adherents directed African American artists to work collectively to develop a black aesthetic for each field of art. Whether the daring juxtapostions of jazz or the biting rhythms of poetry, this black aesthetic was intended to advance the liberation of African American self-perception–black peoples seeing themselves and their world “in terms of their own realties.”

This website, Perceptions of Black, is designed as a resource for further study of the cultural and political dynamics of BAM through the lens of African American art’s historically “invisible” creators–African American visual artists. These artists, most specifically charged with visualizing an empowered Black identity during BAM, held a unique position in the 1960s art world–one that was, in parts, alitenated from both white and black America. It is from this position that the art of African American visual artists aligned and in opposition to BAM offers particular insight into how perceptions of Black–art and identity–feuls the ongoing debate regarding the placement of African American culture in America.

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“Sometimes referred to as ‘the artistic sister of the Black Power Movement,’ the Black Arts Movement stands as the single most controversial moment in the history of African-American literature–possibly in American literature as a whole. Although it fundamentally changed American attitudes both toward the function and meaning of literature as well as the place of ethnic literature in English departments, African-American scholars as prominent as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have deemed it the ‘shortest and least successful’ movement in African American cultural history.” –“Black Creativity: On the Cutting Edge,” Time(Oct. 10, 1994)

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.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5647#sthash.oJUqMMKi.dpuf