Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with Essay’d, a platform for art writing, curating, and research in Detroit, and funded through a feature writing grant from Michigan Humanities.
DETROIT — Chinyere Neale sits patiently at Detroit Public Theatre waiting for the evening’s play to commence. It seems it is by fate that we both ended up here — two Black women with graying locs sitting next to each other in the theater, striking up a conversation about Black art in Detroit in between acts.
“I really should see that exhibit. One of my Dad’s pieces is in [it],” she tells me begrudgingly about the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History’s 60th anniversary exhibition, Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering.
When I ask who her dad is, and she replies “Harold Neal,” I’m flabbergasted. Harold Neal, the Detroit painter who cofounded one of the city’s earliest Black-led arts organizations in the 1960s? Yes, that Harold Neal. His painting featured in Luminosity is an emotional one. It shows four-year-old Tanya Blanding, the youngest casualty of the 1967 Rebellion, lying lifeless in her mother’s arms after being shot by the National Guard.
“Whenever someone wants to include my dad’s work in an exhibit, they always use that one,” she says with frustration. “But he did so many other pieces, and his work evolved so much throughout his career.”
Neal’s contribution to Black art in Detroit cannot be summarized in that one painting, but during the Black Art Movement of the 1960s, many artists like Neal were dedicated to showing the harrowing realities of the African-American experience.
Harold Neal, “Untitled” (1968) (image courtesy Eastern Michigan University Galleries)
In 1958, Neal, along with Charles McGee, Henri Umbaji King, LeRoy Foster, and Ernest Hardman, started Contemporary Studio — a collective of Black artists who created their own opportunities when Black art was not being shown in the city’s major institutions. The formation of Contemporary Studio, following fellow Black-led organization Arts Extended, marks the unofficial beginning of Detroit’s own Black arts movement. The movement’s journey from responding to historical disenfranchisement to representing the complexity of the Black experience paved the way for Detroit to become the mecca of Black art that it is today.
Arts Extended and Contemporary Studio are counted as two of the earliest Black-owned and operated galleries in the Midwest. Arts Extended was birthed in 1952 by arts educators like sculptor Cledie Taylor, and at over 70 years old, may be the longest continuously running Black arts organization in the country. Contemporary Studio came six years later, first meeting in Charles McGee’s home and holding exhibitions at venues like the Detroit Urban League, according to Julia Myers in her book Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists. Many of the artists of both Arts Extended and Contemporary Studio got their start at the Pen and Palette Club, which the Detroit Urban League started in 1925 to provide classes and studio space to emerging Black artists.
By 1960, the Contemporary Studio crew opened a walk-up gallery on Detroit’s Westside off the Lodge Freeway. Not many photographs or records of this gallery exist, but Myers notes in her book how it was frequented by the likes of Langston Hughes, with McGee describing it as a place where artists came to paint, draw, and learn almost daily. Detroit Free Press writer Morley Driver described it in 1960 as “the sort of place found in Rome or Paris.”
The history of Contemporary Studio’s gallery after that is a little hazy. In 1962, the group came back “by popular demand,” opening a new location on Linwood, according to a Michigan Chronicle article. In 1963 they were fundraising to open a permanent gallery, but by 1964 it appears the group no longer had a physical location, though Charles McGee has said Contemporary Studio continued on until at least 1967.
“When you look at movements like the Black Arts Movement and what that entailed, most of the cats were involved with each other for 10, 20 years beforehand, and they always had a collective mindset … to keep their ecosystem going,” says multidisciplinary Detroit artist James Charles Morris. Morris, who is the grandson of gallerist Dell Pryor, is working on an archival project to preserve Detroit’s Black art history called The Detroit Exhibit. “They knew the importance of coming together and having a place to show the work that they wanted to show.”
Harold Neal, “Untitled (Angel with Bow)” (year unknown) (image courtesy Mongerson Gallery/Chinyere Neale)
The official Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s began alongside the Black Nationalist movement after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. The movement’s main tenet was that Black art should reflect the African-American experience for Black audiences with little regard for the White gaze. While it was born in Harlem, Detroit artists followed this pattern of Black consciousness as the city became an epicenter for the movement.
The first two Black Arts Conferences were held in Detroit in 1966 and 1967 at the Shrine of the Black Madonna (formerly Central Congregational Church), organized by bookseller and activist Edward Vaughn and artist Glanton Dowdell.
At the second conference, Neal criticized White abstract art that offered no social commentary or deeper reflection of humanity, saying, “Artists must stop being a specialist [sic] and must be like any other black man fighting for his freedom. … [I] don’t go along with tired white boys who introduce a series of dots one year and are hailed by critics who have to find something new.”
In 1967, Glanton Dowdell painted a Black “Madonna and Child” mural at the church, which became a symbol of sorts for the Black Christian Nationalist movement at the time. Dowdell would continue to paint political themes, including an untitled 1975 piece (also on display in Luminosity) depicting the lynching of three Black men. In his late 1960s piece “No More!” Jon Onye Lockard paints an Aunt Jemima pancake mix box with Aunt Jemima wearing the Pan-African flag and a fist smashing through the box.
“The racism of the time always assumed that what Black people were doing was second-rate. It was just never given the same credit,” Chinyere says. “The Michigan Chronicle may have done an article about [a Black artist] but the mainstream never did much … And it’s only after the period of rebellions that White people even noticed and it was only because the art was threatening.”
Jon Onye Lockard, “No More!” (c. 1968–69) (image courtesy Eastern Michigan University Galleries)
The movement encompassed more than just visual art, however, with Neal recognizing the importance of bringing Black artists across disciplines together to support each other. Chinyere remembers her family home being filled with laughter from people like jazz bandleader and composer Harold McKinney, poet Al Young, and jazz musician Yusef Lateef. Neal was the editor-in-chief of Idioms, a newsletter promoting Detroit artists, musicians, and poets. McKinney and Young were also Idioms contributors.
Broadside Press, founded in Detroit by Dudley Randall in 1965, also became a voice for the Black Arts Movement, publishing his work like “The Ballad of Birmingham” in response to the Sixteenth Baptist Church bombing, and poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker.
By the late 1960s, likely due to the resoluteness of Contemporary Studio and Arts Extended, more Black artists were showing work in Detroit, and many of the Contemporary Studio founders would go on to start their own galleries. Henri Umbaji King opened Kumasi Mart and Art Gallery in 1968 and Charles McGee would go on to open Gallery 7. King also participated in the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.
McGee was approached by the Detroit Artists Market (DAM) in 1969 to curate an exhibition he called Seven Black Artists, showing his own work alongside Lester Johnson, Henri Umbaji King, Harold Neal, Robert Murray, James Lee, James Strickland, and Robert J. Stull.
“That was a game changer, because here you have Charles McGee as the curator in a [historically White-led] institution being assigned to create an exhibition that is about the Black experience,” Morris says. DAM had also hosted exhibitions by Arts Extended in the 1950s and shown Black art in the early 1960s.
Around that time, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) began showing more exhibitions dedicated to Black art. In August 1968, in the ashes of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, the DIA and Scarab Club presented an exhibition titled Afro-American Artists of Detroit. This show featured work by 41 artists including LeRoy Foster and Charles McGee. A year later the DIA hosted a photography exhibition by Detroit’s own J. Edward Bailey III, The City Within. Based on Morris’s research, this may be one of the first times in the entire country that a Black photographer had a solo exhibition in a major museum.
Though the DIA had been collecting Black art since 1941, it was sporadic until the 1980s, when the museum’s auxiliary African Art Gallery Committee “broadened its mission to assist the museum in strengthening the African American art collection,” curator Valerie J. Mercer writes in a 2012 DIA bulletin on African-American art.
As Black art began to appear more prominently in major institutions, many artists, including Neal, moved away from responding to trauma and exclusion, and turned to depicting Black joy, beauty, and culture. Artists like Henri Umbaji King traveled to Ghana and Nigeria and began incorporating more Afro-centric imagery in their work like headwraps and African masks.
Harold Neal, “Untitled (Man with Scales)” (year unknown) (image courtesy Mongerson Gallery/Chinyere Neale)
“One thing that my father used to say to me when I was young and militant and marching around with my fists in the air is, ‘What is the struggle about, if it’s not to live well?’” Chinyere says. “He just decided that there were things to be angry about, but there’s beauty too. He used to say the artist’s job is to see. So seeing inequities is fine, but seeing beauty is important as well.”
Chinyere remembers fondly that her father often painted women, butterflies, horses, and other subjects of natural beauty. It’s possible that a brush with death when he suffered a stroke in 1977 left him with a new lens on life, but Chinyere says the desire to reflect life’s radiance was always within him.
A lot of Black artists, whether they are painters, musicians, or writers, grapple with whether they are a “Black artist” or “an artist that happens to be Black.” As Chinyere explains it, back in the day, “artists who happened to be Black” wanted to be perceived solely on the merit of their work, in the same conversation as Picasso or Monet. “Black artists” were those who only dealt with Black subject matter. This pigeonholing persists today, robbing us of the chance to explore the full spectrum of the creativity in our humanity unbeholden to our Blackness.
“I think my father struggled with that, because it was not either or. He was a Black artist who was on the same level with other artists,” she says.
But deciding to paint butterflies instead of lynchings is political too.
“The notion that making a decision to paint one thing makes you less of a Black artist than somebody who paints fists or whatever, I think that’s naive,” Chinyere says. “When my dad started painting beauty, it was a decision. Every decision we make is political. So if you make the choice to do this and not that, that is inherently political.”
Reimagining Icarus
While Charles McGee is often looked to as a founding father of Black Detroit art, with his work prominently displayed at the Detroit Institute of Arts and The Shepherd by Library Street Collective, who represents his estate, other members of Contemporary Studio haven’t received their due praise. In 2008, McGee became the inaugural Kresge Eminent Artist, a lifetime achievement award for Detroit artists. In 2021, he passed away at the age of 96.
Neal died in 1996 at 71 years old. If he had lived to see the advent of the award it’s likely that he and other Contemporary Studio founders like LeRoy Foster — who has been called “The Michelangelo of Detroit” — would have received it as well.
Contemporary Studio Co-founder Ernest Hardman died of cancer in 1967 before he could experience the Detroit art boom, according to a 1969 article in the Michigan Chronicle. That same article describes him as “one of the nation’s finest artists.”
Ernest Hardman with his paintings (image courtesy the Detroit Institute of Arts)
Born in Oklahoma in 1912, Hardman moved to Detroit around 1935 to study at the Society of Arts and Crafts, now known as the College for Creative Studies (CCS), like Neal and McGee. His paintings started as portraits but later migrated toward figurative abstraction. He worked in oils, charcoals, pastels, and watercolors. According to the DIA’s records, he showed work at the museum’s annual Exhibition for Michigan Artists in 1954, 1965, 1957, and 1962. He was featured in a group exhibition by Arts Extended at the Detroit Artists Market in 1952, and his “Black Madonna” painting was purchased by the Nigerian government after winning third place at a show at the Philadelphia Museum in 1960. In 1980, his work was shown in the Detroit Historical Museum’s Historical Roots: The Black Artist in Michigan.
“A lot of movements died with the people who were involved in them,” Morris says. “Unless it’s someone who is well known and talked about within the community, you’re not going to hear names like Ernest Hardman, Booker T. Helm, or Florence Pate Sampson be mentioned, and these were essential figures.”
The Black Arts Movement paved the way for things like the Black is Beautiful movement, and the advent of Afrofuturism. Detroit played a role in that too, with the intergalactic world of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, and Cybotron’s techno sci-fi.
“In Nikki Giovanni’s documentary, [Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project], she talks about Detroit in a very loving way, telling how [the city] was at the forefront,” Morris says. “So it’s now coming to light more and more that Detroit was very much a major player in the consciousness of Black America. If you’re leaving Detroit out of the conversation, it’s like you’re missing a major cog in the story.”
For Detroit itself, the work of Black Arts Movement artists like the Contemporary Studio crew was the foundation for a slew of Black-owned galleries, festivals, and exhibits from the 1980s until the present day. The N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Dell Pryor Gallery, The Carr Center, Norwest Gallery of Art, Sydney G. James’s BLKOUT Walls Festival, and other Black-owned cultural institutions in Detroit would not have existed if not for Arts Extended and Contemporary Studio.
While Neal’s most exhibited work may be a snapshot of the Detroit Rebellion, perhaps a more fitting summation of his work is a painting he completed a year or two before his death, titled “Icarus” — a piece that Chinyere owns and cherishes deeply. In the piece, a Black man falls from the sky, a muted brown sun behind him, as the feathers from his melted wings cascade toward his helpless body.
Maybe, in a reimagining of this story, Neal and his contemporaries would be Icarus, but instead of falling, they soared beyond the sun, leaving rays of sunshine behind to guide the way for their successors.
Harold Neal, “Icarus” (c. 1994–95) (image courtesy Chinyere Neale)
