Adger Cowans, most known as a photographer and mentee of Gordon Parks, has painted for quite some time. These days, in his 80s, he continues to work in that medium. He talks of his friendship with Ed Clark blossoming in the 70s where they looked at each other’s work and gave each other feedback and he had similar relationships with Jack Whitten, Danny Johnson, Peter Bradley, Al Loving, and he lived around the corner from Norman Lewis. (1) He recounts conversation on color, especially on the body and even the color of birds at The Brooklyn Zoo. In contrast to his many black-and-white film photographs, these works burst with explosions of color and texture. There must be a reason he’s drawn solely to painting.(2)

Many African American artists like Spiral Collective Members, Howardena Pindell, Barbara Chase Riboud, and many others were drawn to Abstract Expressionism so that they are not defined by a singular thing (Blackness through representational subject matter). When Abstract Expressionism came onto the scene in 1946, with sub-genres of figurative expressionism, gestural abstraction, color field painting, and post-painterly abstraction, many Black artists saw it as the perfect fusion of modernist aesthetics and evocation. (3) However, from Alain Locke’s The New Negro to the outlooks of Elizabeth Catlett, Amiri Baraka, and other Black Arts Movement leaders, social realism was the best avenue to advance the race. (4)

Instead, some artists started working through intangible, complex emotions that appeared in nuanced, modern, and schematized ways but often retained splashes of color with cultural significance and political grapplings. “When we [Ed Clark and himself] talked about images, it always had to do with emotion, if there was something in there that somebody looked at, that they could get something from it. In other words, they could enrich their knowledge or understanding based on their visual history,” says Cowans. (5)

The main difference of this approach is that “formal elements of art — such as line, color, shape, balance, pattern, and texture — became the subject. Story and narrative, though sometimes present, were secondary to the artistic process.” (6) Cowans goes on record saying, “I took all that racism and rejection and everything, and I put it in my work, as one of the big things I learned from Gordon Parks was to take negative energy and turn it into positive power.” 7 He also listened to jazz, as a former musician himself, while moving brushstrokes across the canvas which the canvases surely must have seeped in.

Even AfriCOBRA (1968–) espoused aesthetic ideas, shaping abstract art, about adopting an Afrocentric sensibility: sheen (like the glow of an Afro or oiled skin), starting with black as the base canvas color, a dynamic palette of Kool-Aide colors, the real world and over-real meet, repetition with change, and flowing organic forms. (8) These concepts undoubtedly swept the nation.