In observance of Black History Month, I'll be doing a 3-part series on my thoughts about Black art in America. Today: Problems and Limitations, in which I take the Black art world to task and coin a new term.

Late last year, I decided that I was not nearly educated enough on the state of contemporary visual art, the trends, the events, the gossip and the scandals. Living in Austin and communicating by in large only with a small group of likeminded friends, I felt I was producing art in something of a vacuum. All my news about the contemporary art world was second hand. Even my subscription to ArtForum was an empty gesture, as I rarely actually read any of the articles.

So I did what any good digital-age, world citizen would do: I hit the search engines and I hit 'em hard. In a matter of minutes, literally, I was connected to a universe of news and information. The half dozen solid websites I came across in that first hour (through search engines, links and previous knowledge) still form the basic core of my news gathering months later--sites like Artnet, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog, The Art Newspaper, and of course, the ArtsJournal network. I didn't find much in the way of coverage of the black contemporary art scene. In fact, I found none at all. But no matter, I thought, I'll come across it eventually.

September came and went, October, November, December. By January, I still hadn't stumbled across any coverage focused on the world of progressive, contemporary black visual art, least of all in black culture sites like Africana, Black Voices and the black popular press, which does an even worse job of covering black contemporary art than "white" publications like the Toronto Star and the Boston Globe.

I felt sure the coverage had to be out there if I just looked hard enough. So I undertook weeks of systematic searching, combing through pages of matches from search engines, systematically clicking through each entry on every "links" page. I checked university databases and public libraries to no avail. There was literally no alternative for someone such as myself for whom Artnet's one article a month on William Pope.L or Iona Brown just wasn't enough. (At left, William Pope.L's "Shopping Crawl," 2001)

So I started Electric Skin as a response to that frustration. Electric Skin doesn't make it any easier for me to get the news I'm hungry for--I still have to search it out and collect it. But I hope that it keeps other people from having to go to the same trouble. To my knowledge--and I would love to be proven wrong about this--Electric Skin is now the only Web site that regularly collects news and information on progressive, contemporary art in the black diaspora all in one place. That's sad, because as proud as I am of Electric Skin, it has its limits. It doesn't generate its own original news, it is completely beholden to reporters and writers from other sources, and worst of all, it's limited by whatever time I as one person am able to give to it. It could disappear tomorrow. I update it between meetings at my day job and rely on shaky, slow internet service to canvass some 50 news sites. Electric Skin is a newborn calf, wobbling on spindly legs.

I tell this story to illustrate one of the major problems facing contemporary black visual art: we have almost no infrastructure. Aside from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center, and a couple of email listservs such as the Afrofuturism list we have few institutions, few publications, few membership organizations, few thinktanks, few websites, few if any dedicated gallery spaces. The institutions that do exist are often put in the position of having to fill so many gaps that their mission statements can't help but be diffuse and all-purpose. Many individual artists set up personal web sites, but none of these, my own included, makes any real attempt to bring visitors into a wider realm of information and ideas apart from the artist's own work, the way an e-zine might do for example. (At right, New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

Before I go on, let me first clarify what I mean by the term "progressive, contemporary" (let's say "Prog-con" for short). I include in this term work that is not only being made in the present time, but work that on some level reveals a clear-eyed understanding of its own place in art history, work that responds to current movements and developments in art, either through exploration and extension, through intentional negation, or some combination of these. Prog-con work may accept or reject postmodernism, but either way is deeply aware of its existence. Under this definition, Iona Brown does Prog-con work, Dexter Griffin does not, though it may be brand new. (At left, Iona Brown's "Untitled (Male) II," 2003)

The opposite of Prog-con work is the bulk of what's marketed to us at black art fairs and black art stores in towns across America. It's that godawful airbrushed portrait of the little girl praying that your aunt has hanging above the dresser. In fact, to judge by this mass of black art, one would think that art history had slammed on the brakes just after the heyday of Jacob Lawrence, and in fact has been steadily regressing since then. (At right, Dexter Griffin's "Rose Garden")

The history of black art from the early 70s forward has unfortunately been the history of a bifurcation: the "mainstream" which largely clings to works of illustrational naturalism clustered around a few predictable themes (folk life, religious, African imagery, etc.), and the fringe: the Adrian Pipers, Isaac Juliens, Martin Puryears and Glenn Ligons. Paradoxically, the latter group has all the name recognition mostly due to their success in the largely white art world, while the former group enjoys the majority of institutional support within black communities.

That this mainstream enjoys not only popularity, but black institutional support was reinforced to me during my weeks of Internet searching for news sources that cover black Prog-con art. A Google search on "contemporary black art" turns up thousands of matches, commercial galleries, online stores, publications, etc. To a one, these resources--what I am here calling "institutions"--support and propagate the mainstream art vision, in opposition to the Prog-con vision. In short, there are almost no institutions devoted to Prog-con visual art. In most towns, if you see a local black arts organization mounting an art exhibition, you know by in large exactly what you're going to get, and it ain't gonna be Tana Hargest's "Bitter Nigger" CD Rom. So black Prog-con art finds a home where it can. (At right, screenshot from Tana Hargest's "Bitter Nigger")

On the face of it, the situation might seem to echo the same social construct that white (or other nonblack) artists face. After all, the mass of art being made by any race consists mainly of paintings of nice flower arrangements, seashores, kittens, and horses. Most art being made is nowhere near Prog-con, and doesn't want to be. Fifteen minutes at your next local art fair should remind you of that.

The difference--wait, this is important--the difference is that while the white contemporary artist can succeed at Mary Boone, at Art Basel, on the pages of ArtForum, and on Artnet.com, surrounded by his or her peers and within his or her community, the black artist can do so only at the expense of being a fly in the buttermilk. His success necessarily has to take place outside of his community and its institutions. Success is always happening in a foreign land. The alternatives are obscurity or compromise.

The predicament of black contemporary artists will sound familiar to any member of the rising black middle class--the barely-tenable position of duality, the schizophrenic identity of simultaneously having to live always within and outside of one's community. One is always alien in both worlds.

There are those that successfully straddle the fence: the Kerry James Marshalls, the Faith Ringgolds. These are artists who deservedly have gained wide artworld success, but whose formal sensibilities are not necessarily at odds with the black mainstream. Which is why you will find Ringgold on africanartworld.com, but not Norman Lewis. You will find reproductions of Horace Pippin, but not Kojo Griffin or Julie Mehretu. The mainstream does have its boundaries, but there is some play around the edges. (At left, Faith Ringgold's "A Family Portrait," 1997)

Still, those are the exceptions that prove the rule. More symptomatic of the black mainstream art world is africanartworld.com's pious menu of subject options. Site visitors look up oil paintings by subject matter and the following menu is provided: African American, Religious, Jazz, Urban, Social Leaders, Portraits, African Art. ("African American" seems to be a catchall category including work from every other category. I'm not sure why it's there other than bad organization.) Can you imagine any other American ethnicity confining itself to such a rigid and small set of concerns in art? No other group would ever conceive of itself as being that limited. I'm picking on africanartworld.com. I do so because they unambiguously illustrate so many of the points I'm trying to make. Many other organizations, many black "institutions" are just a less egregious form of africanartworld.com.

This matters. I cannot walk away from it, or ignore it with that deeply American idea of "to each his own." The mainstream in black American visual art constitutes what amounts to a monopoly. Prog-con artists have mainly either been too busy, too distracted, too timid, too defeated, or too unaware to create countervailing institutions. What we are left with then is that monopoly of style within the black world, a juggernaut of irrelevant and largely outmoded ideas. Black communities are culturally poorer as a result of this, as black Prog-con artists struggle for recognition and cultural support.

Is there a current of elitism here? Absolutely. And I won't apologize for it. I happen to believe that what I'm calling Prog-con work carries with it a far, far greater potential for revolutionary thought and action than the conservative mainstream. That's the danger I see. Any such monopoly is inherently stultifying. Imagine if ten thousand Thomas Kinkades ruled the white art world and the only way for a progressive white artist to succeed was in Harlem or Atlanta. Oh the hue and cry that would go up over that. It's time for our own hue, our own cry.

Tomorrow: Part II: Righting the Racist Wrongs of Art History