“Because the Black Artist and the creative portrayal of the Black Experience have been consciously excluded from the total spectrum of American Arts, we want to provide a new context for the Black Artist in which he can work out his problems and pursue his aims unhampered and uninhibited by the prejudices and dictates of the ‘mainstream.’”1

—Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Statement of Purpose^[1]2

This essay historicizes the recent past to contextualize the burgeoning art historical relevance and legibility of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (BAM) photographers, especially the cohort who worked on or at The Wall of Respect, a mural on the city’s South Side (see fig. 1).^[2] It builds on my previous work in The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (2017), which explored how these artists’ use of photography in the 1967 mural contributed to its multiformal innovation. While the present essay entertains a specific context or case—photographers in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement—its findings are relevant to a much broader conversation about the politics of art historical reception. It considers activities and labors that precede what might be called the tipping point, that fulcrum-like moment when art, especially art made by minoritized persons, enters into wider circulation and more formal institutional contexts.
3

The concept of the tipping point has various meanings and genealogies, but it is broadly understood in popular culture as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”^[3] This interpretation is premised, in part, on the existence of a dramatic event when “everything can change all at once,” but here I deploy the term a bit differently.^[4] I use it to propose the importance of recognizing and marking shifts in art historical value that impact institutional reception but emerge less dramatically, more gradually, and through varied and periodic events and happenings. This version of the idea emphasizes prolonged and sustained labor, slowing things down to reveal how steady, ongoing, unremitting efforts around an object of art historical inquiry accrue over time to bring about awareness and institutional acceptance. Applied to the case of Chicago’s BAM photographers, attending to this longer, incremental history reveals that aesthetic limits and social forces thwarted the “arrival” of their work at the museum complex until now, when their acceptance is still only partial and tentative. It also highlights the events and projects, both recent and from decades past, that have helped the category of Black Arts Movement photography in Chicago to cohere so that its significance can now be recognized. For the purposes of this essay and digital catalogue, the category refers to the informal collective of African-descended artists active in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s, including Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Darryl Cowherd, Bob Crawford, Roy Lewis, Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke, and Onikwa Bill Wallace, among others. Examining more closely several diminutive occurrences, often initiated by the artists themselves or by members of their intimate social networks, and accounting for the photographers’ political and social commitments, which were inseparable from their art, offers a more complete understanding of the art historical object that is BAM photography in Chicago. The relatively minor scale of these self-produced events has often resulted in their omission from the record.4

What follows is a sketch of inflection points that mark the emergent intelligibility of BAM photography in Chicago as a genre. Central to this account is what I call here impermanent institutions—minor, hesitant (that is, consciously disconnected from oppressive power structures), and less heroic in scale than major art museums, galleries, and media—that allowed the BAM photographers in Chicago to produce work despite the career-spanning and ongoing devaluation of their art in museum and other art-world contexts. This essay records and reflects upon a scene that supported these artists all along, including the para-institutional formations created and valued by Black people that sustained the BAM photographers and helped to define and preserve the genre through the decades of disinterest from “mainstream” arts organizations. These self-sustaining ventures and interventions kept the work relevant to a circle of BAM allies for fifty years, and that ecosystem is responsible for producing the legibility that makes this publication possible.5

Self-Sustaining

In the absence of access to mainstream institutional structures—curators, galleries, schools, and media, for instance—that often support artists and also link them with their peers, Chicago’s BAM photographers were nurtured by a likeminded, socially conscious community. Indeed, the métier of photography itself, along with the identity of photographer, formed the basis for relationships and community involvement. Many of the artists who circulated in Chicago’s Black Arts community in the late 1960s and 1970s—members of OBAC and AfriCOBRA (the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists)—were photographers.6

A signal contribution of BAM aesthetics in Chicago and elsewhere was the interconnectedness and fluidity of various forms. Less interested in disciplinary boundaries or limits, BAM artists were in dialogue with makers across a range of fields, collaborating with musicians, dancers, poets, and painters. Many of the BAM practitioners discussed here actively pursued more than one art form; for example, Cowherd wrote poetry and Lewis was also a filmmaker. Photography was also the form that many artists from this community, such as painters Wadsworth Jarrell and Ed Christmas, pursued in addition to their predominant medium, defining themselves also as photographers. Part of what helped delineate the photographers from other artists in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement was their recognition of each other, made manifest then and now by their photographs of one another. Witnessing each other in their images was a key logic in their efforts to make their connectivity legible. The archives of Abernathy (fig. 2), Cowherd (fig. 3), Crawford (fig. 4), Lewis (fig. 5), and Sengstacke all include portraits of one another, attesting not only to their working circle and their collaboration on projects such as The Wall of Respect but also to their shared and mutually acknowledged identities as BAM photographers operating in Chicago.
7

Figs. 2–5

Abernathy, Cowherd, and Crawford were bonded through their affiliation with a social organization, the Lochinvar Boys Club, even before they identified as a faction of Black photographers. The club, which performed civic work and hosted events for its Black male membership, took its name from an early nineteenth-century poem by Sir Walter Scott that might seem to have little relevance to young Black men in 1950s Chicago.^[5] But it would have habituated Abernathy, Cowherd, and Crawford to codes and ethics of Black fraternity and sociality; as historian Nina Mjagkij describes, “Although African Americans established numerous associations in response to racism, discrimination, and segregation, other organizations were the product of the black community’s expression of racial solidarity and an assertion of self-determination…. These associations furnished African Americans with opportunities for companionship, professional networking, intellectual stimulation, and educational advancement, as well as artistic, literary, and spiritual expression.”^[6] Interestingly, the social proclivities of the relatively conservative 1950s lent themselves to those more politically inflected movements of the 1960s. This cohort’s promotion of a professional agenda predicated on Black liberation politics was presaged in a sense by their involvement in communal endeavors like the clubs of their youth, which carried a comparable commitment to Black social formation. Sengstacke’s family, who owned the Chicago Defender newspapers as well as other media entities, also demonstrates the generational shift from more conservative Black social politics to the more radical Black liberation movements of the 1960s. According to author Lawrence Otis Graham, “the Sengstackes were dedicated people, but they weren’t society people…. The prior generation of the family—the Abbotts—they were the Republican society types. But this next generation were more liberal and more concerned about using its money and power to advance blacks.”^[7] Thus, both the more conservative and more liberal instantiations of the urge to form Black social spheres emerge from a dutiful, dedicated relation to Black people.8

The BAM photographers supported each other in other ways as well. In a move similar to the alternative strategies for exhibition and circulation that minoritized artists have deployed at various points in history, BAM photographers cultivated awareness of one another’s artistic endeavors by displaying images in their homes. From the 1960s to the 1970s and well beyond, the homes of BAM enthusiasts often showcased work by Black artists (see fig. 6). In effect, the home became a critical space, a fundamental para-institution, for BAM photography; in the absence of interest from mainstream galleries and museums, it was one of the first and only places to exhibit these works. Home-based installations were a way of attributing aesthetic value to the photographs, mostly of Black people, that also affirmed the Black liberation consciousness that collectors wanted to impart to their families. In addition to staging their work in one another’s homes, BAM photographers also commonly exchanged or gave one another their photographs, initiating a gift economy that upended mainstream art markets. These images held special and, for most of the past fifty years, unique value for the artists and their close community, who recognized them as artistic and also restorative, a kind of protest against prevailing economic, racial, and social circumstances.9

Just as home displays constituted an alternative to gallery and museum exhibition, freelancing allowed artists to compensate for a lack of market connectivity, enabling them to work despite the racist hiring practices of the job market. In keeping with Black liberation politics, freelancing suggested the potential for artists to invent an alternate economy based on values similar to those that spurred the production of the work itself—that is, freedom and dynamic relation to Black people. A 1976 initiative called EverdayArt, produced by BAM designer Robert E. Paige and activist and scholar Carol Adams, included an arts festival and workshop at the South Shore Country Club led by photographer Mikki Ferrill. It is no surprise that the program offered a photography class as a way to articulate “everyday art”; this reflected the increasing accessibility and popularity of photography. The number of Black people with cameras was on the rise, with advertisements pitched to Black clientele. Photography was also uniquely inter-relational, a conduit to and for enmeshing with the Black people. The workshop offered instruction in basic camera theory, bulk film loading, composition, and development techniques (see fig. 7).^[8] Ferrill was promoted as a “South Shore Free Lance Photographer,” grounding her professional identity in her relationship not only to the city of Chicago but to the South Shore area in specific, which in 1976 implicated a particular context of Black creatives and academics, many of whom were familiar with one another. Paige, the program’s cofounder and organizer, was in fact a close collaborator and friend of BAM photographers Abernathy, Cowherd, Crawford, Lewis, Sengstacke, and Wallace. The word freelance ironically also derives from Sir Walter Scott: it appeared in English for the first time in the author’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe, where it referred to medieval mercenaries who fought for whomever paid them the most. In its more current economic usage, it similarly implies freedom and self-direction vis-à-vis work. In effect, photography offered not just community but also a self-directed profession, a notion all the more attractive to those who often faced discrimination on the job market and in the workplace. Camera arts, as they were taken up by this group of Black photographers, allowed them to disrupt prevalent market and economic forces—to be involved in the art and labor sectors but with autonomy. Working—even while not acknowledged by art museums, galleries, and curators—was a profound intervention and “work around” by BAM freelance photographers.
10

Social Sustenance

While the living spaces of BAM photographers kept their work activated for a very intimate few, other, more public ventures also nurtured these artists. A spate of Black-run journals, magazines, and newspapers focused on Black culture disseminated their photographs to a largely Black local and national audience. These included the Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony and Jet magazines and Negro Digest, the Black Books Bulletin, Third World Press, and the aforementioned Defender newspaper, to which Sengstacke along with Abernathy, Crawford, and Lewis periodically contributed. Photographic murals like The Wall of Respect, which combined the role of artwork and venue, were of particular interest to this group of photographers. These included, for example, The West Wall: Proud of Being Black, created in 1968, which was inspired by The Wall of Respect and was similarly animated with photographs by Crawford and Lewis. The Washington Park Camera Club reflected photography’s popularity in Chicago’s South Side Black community in the 1960s and 1970s. The collective, which is still active today, was chartered in 1961 but formed as early as 1955 and describes itself as “the oldest predominately African American camera club in the region.”^[9] Situated in the Black belt, it was one of the only clubs available to Black women photographers, very few of whom were professionally active in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement. (Ferrill stands out in Chicago the same way Ming Smith did in the New York–based Kamoinge Photography Workshop.) K. Kofi Moyo, who worked as the photographer of record for poet Haki Madhubuti’s Third World Press and was one of the Chicago photographers also attentive to BAM aesthetics, described being drawn to the medium because of his mother’s involvement in the Washington Park Camera Club.^[10]11

There were also Black-owned or culturally specific bookstores, restaurants, galleries, etc. which either directly or indirectly affirmed the Black Arts Movement photographers’ agenda. The Black Cultural Directory from 1969 (fig. 8) offered a listing of entrepreneurial and social ventures that overtly supported Black arts and culture.^[11] In addition to more notable establishments like The Ebony Museum of Negro History (now the DuSable Museum) and the South Side Community Art Center, both cofounded by Dr. Margaret Burroughs, organizations and businesses listed in the directory include the Arts Gallery and Studio, Arts and Soul, and the William McBride Collection Studio. Roy Lewis is listed as the person responsible for the directory’s photography, demonstrating that such culturally specific structures directly nurtured and were nurtured by BAM photographers, providing a source of work that aligned with their politics. The Black Cultural Directory embodied the Black Arts Movement’s commitment to Black liberation through cultural awareness, and living proximate to the venues and interventions listed in the directory, as Cowherd, Sengstacke, Crawford, and Abernathy did, meant that these organizations were a dynamic part of the photographers’ everyday lived experiences, professionally and socially.^[12]
12

While the Black Cultural Directory offered detailed listings, there were still other locations and social contexts, less easily catalogued, that were nonetheless crucial to the BAM photographers’ working method of being in vital association with Black people. Much like The Wall of Respect, other sites also provided compelling social environments replete with Black people, art making, and Black cultural expression. Photography was directly mobilized as a form of decoration in some of these locales, such as at The Wall and on the front of the Umoja Black Student Center, which was enlivened with several of the BAM photographers’ images. But photography was more often the chosen medium for capturing the scenic dimensions of Black cultural production. Interventions such as More than a Beach, an outdoor arts program that brought together a range of forms including music, visual arts, and yoga; and events such as African naming ceremonies, baptisms, and weddings (see fig. 9) that also took place at lakefront beaches on Chicago’s South Side were potent and compelling working environments for the BAM photographers.
13

These more or less informal sites allowed the photographers to choreograph interactive moments with Black strangers. Being with Black people and aligning with Black para-institutions excited and fueled BAM photographic practices. The photographers’ experiences in these spaces encapsulate what scholar Kevin Quashie describes as aliveness: “Aliveness is inevitable because it is totality, a black world rendering that implies neither universality nor prescription (the word is not ‘totalitarian’), but instead refers to the everything of being in a black world. As such, there is no being other than being-in-relation, no being other than being-aliveness.”^[13] This notion of an almost gravitational pull toward other Black people explains why, even though they were often invested in the broadest notions of humanity and in sojourning to other parts of the world as Cowherd did, many among this team of BAM photographers adamantly sought a closeness to Black people—one beyond family connections or bonds of friendship and fraternity. Photography allowed these artists to cathect with Black people and to formalize and ensconce that experience. As a result of this interest, they produced work that fixes or brings a degree of permanence to—institutionalizes, even—these fleeting encounters. With the camera and through photography they made their appreciation for Black people and culture a professional matter, grounding it not as a given like love of kin but rather as a deliberate commitment to the moral dimension of BAM aesthetic labor.14

In his 1970 essay “The Role of the Artist in the Freedom Struggle,” civil rights activist Bayard Rustin elaborated on this dynamic and on the importance of the Black artist’s relationship to Black people:15

The black artist is at once a Negro and a human being, a member of a particular race and part of that vast community which comprises all mankind. It is only by maintaining that tension between our blackness and our humanity that we can live a decent life either as an artist or as a person. The Negro artist is the ultimate and unfettered, clear voice of the aspiration of the black community. The painter, the writer, the singer, and the dancer, ultimately reflect the way in which our people live. And to the degree that they are good artists, they do not lie. To the degree that they set up an ideology, an apologia for the black experience and distort that black experience into their own preconceived notions, to that degree do they destroy us all.^[14]16

Rustin was in dialogue with Jeff Donaldson, one of the founders of AfriCOBRA, who was responsible in great part for Abernathy, Cowherd, Lewis, and Sengstacke’s participation in OBAC, the making of The Wall of Respect, and FESTAC ’77 (the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria; see fig. 10), which Lewis and Crawford attended. Furthermore, Rustin’s call to action is reflected in these photographers’ work, which reveals their rapport with the Black community and also breaks from the tradition of Black studio photography. Even given the BAM photographers’ respect for noted Harlem studio photographer James VanDerZee, they cast aside the formal logic of portrait photography. Images such as Cowherd’s family portrait at The Wall (fig. 11) interrupt the traditional portrait form by occasioning wider scenes that reveal dynamic relationships to larger social formations, strangers (not just family), and the city itself (not the studio space).17

One might interpret the BAM photographers’ departure from commercial studios to plein air street studios—at locales such as The Wall, the South Shore Country Club, or 64th Street Beach—as a shift in their relationship to the Black people they photograph, namely to one that is less contractual. Moving away from the studio may have allowed them to be differently aspirational, placing greater value on situational, relational, enmeshed, or fleeting encounters—on their bonds with Black people they do not know, too vital to be easily monetized.
18

Evidencing Periodic and Burgeoning Recognition

Very seldom in the past fifty years did work by Chicago’s BAM photographers attain mainstream artistic or monetary value. Their work has endured via the kind of para-institutional formats previously mentioned, but it has not been routinely showcased in exhibitions, displayed in galleries, or collected by museums. As this status quo has begun to slowly shift, it is important to contour the path toward legibility and increased appreciation for this genre. It is not a recent discovery but rather has been cultivated and sustained over several decades, mostly by a committed community of Black people.19

The 1986 exhibition Two Schools, New York and Chicago: Contemporary African-American Photography of the 60s and 70s at Kenkeleba House in New York was one of the first to mark out the aesthetic connections between the Chicago and New York schools of BAM photography.^[15] It featured artists who were to some degree in dialogue across regions, through the Black Photographers Annual, FESTAC ’77, and also more informal social and work settings. Photography historian Deborah Willis, who wrote for the Two Schools catalogue and whose work on Black photographers over the past thirty-five years has grounded the field and its scholarship, was instrumental in bringing the regional significance of Black photographers into relief. Through her research for her Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940–1988, she was familiar with the work of BAM artists from Chicago and New York as well as other parts of the country.^[16]20

In 1976, prior to the Kenkeleba exhibition, the Studio Museum in Harlem, another institution with a focus on Black artists, organized the touring Black Photographers Annual Exhibition.^[17] This show, too, included works by BAM photographers from Chicago, such as Crawford. In 1993 I curated the exhibition Group Retrospective: Selected African American Photographers, 1973–1993, which gathered newer images from artists who had shown work in the Black Photographers Annual over the years.^[18] That show’s venue, the Crawford and Sloan Gallery (which I cofounded with Steve Sloan in New York), was itself an extension of the kinds of para-institutional initiatives and spaces prevalent in Black communities of the 1960s and 1970s, including those models of BAM self-reliance. Kenkeleba House, the Studio Museum, and the Crawford and Sloan Gallery, among many other minority-founded spaces, kept BAM photography alive and in the minds of audiences during the decades of disinterest from larger institutions. Their exhibitions appealed to those who were already committed to Black arts and culture while also making the work available to new audiences.^[19]21

Many factors have contributed to mainstream institutions’ increasing interest in BAM photography more recently, including, perhaps, the Black Lives Matter movement and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Discussing these emergent forces would surely shed light on the renewed attention to these artists, but this essay is less concerned with mainstream (predominantly white) institutions’ responses to new pressures than with the decades of overlooked work by Black artists, curators, enthusiasts, and organizers. These include, for example, Willis’s steady commitment to creating the field and gaining recognition for the study of Black photography in mainstream academic and museum contexts. Her work has led to publications, exhibitions, and new platforms such as the Black Portraitures convenings, where dedicated scholars and museum professionals have shared archives and research for the past decade now. These conferences have established a vital space for BAM photographers’ work and supported the next generation of its stewards, who often are the first to bring it to the attention of museums.^[20] Ultimately, Willis and a host of other curators and scholars who have been persistently committed to examining this work on its own terms are responsible for its arrival and reception in places like the Art Institute of Chicago and in publications such as this one.^[21]22

In April 2015 the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) held the three-day symposium “The Wall of Respect and People’s Art Since 1967.” Hosted by SAIC and the museum and organized by Drea Howenstein, faculty at the School, and Rebecca Zorach, an art historian then affiliated with the University of Chicago, the event brought together artists who worked on The Wall almost fifty years after its creation. Painter and AfriCOBRA cofounder Wadsworth Jarrell and his wife, designer Jae Jarrell, were in attendance along with other BAM-affiliated artists, including painters Eugene “Edaw” Wade and Eddie Harris. Also present were Cowherd, Lewis, and Sengstacke, the OBAC-affiliated photographers who worked on The Wall, as well as Crawford, who documented its making and the community’s involvement.^[22] In my previous writing about photography on and at The Wall of Respect, I explored its “layered-ness” as a mural that both contained photographic elements (images by Abernathy, Cowherd, Lewis, and Sengstacke were literally part of the mural) and served as a site or backdrop for photography—several of the BAM photographers featured in this book made pictures at The Wall because the mural had made it a place resplendently populated by Black people. Given that the mural no longer exists, Sengstacke’s images of it, projected on a large screen, were a central and indispensable reference for the 2015 symposium. In other ways, too, the significance of the BAM photographers was palpable, with Lewis and Sengstacke both moving about the room taking photos of the event.23

The symposium commenced with short statements by Chicago-area dignitaries recognizing the artists who produced The Wall. State representatives Danny Davis and Bobby Rush made comments, as did Tracey Hall, representing the Department of Cultural Affairs; scholar Timuel Black; and SAIC’s president, Walter Massey. Their celebratory words were followed by a keynote from Jarrell, who surprised everyone by angling his address into a critique of the hosting institution and the conveners. He questioned the invitation to the museum, which in his view was long overdue. Jarrell went on to racialize the reasons for this belated acknowledgment, further questioning the institutional processes that essentially allowed white arts professionals to sanction the “arrival” of these artists and claim discovery of The Wall’s history and significance. Poet Haki Madhubuti similarly challenged the position of authority the museum and event seemed to assume with regard to the mural’s history—as if practitioners in the Black Arts Movement, who had for decades self-maintained the value of their work, were now beholden to this particular event at a mainstream museum as the only moment that now mattered to the perpetuation of, and sustained interest in, The Wall.24

Jarrell’s words were harsh, but they revealed the ongoing and unremitting work of Black liberation, which often requires addressing the hard truths of systemic bias, erasure, and exclusion, even at awkward moments. As many who were witness to the keynote observed later, Jarrell did what a Black liberation advocate should do: address the power differentials that were meant to make him and the rest of the BAM artists in attendance finally feel valued by an august, mainstream institution.^[23]25

For many of these practitioners, the politics of institutional exclusion plagued their careers and often still haunts their efforts. While many were happy to meet in a beautiful room of the museum to discuss the mural’s importance, it was not lost on them that the moment of acceptance followed a long history of exclusion and was itself rife with exclusionary complications. The Wall of Respect was in fact a response to such exigencies. In the absence of other opportunities, it was an alternative, outdoor, gallery-like venue for Black artists’ work. When this history and the deeper significations of the artwork are carefully considered and truly understood, Jarrell’s response seems logical and predictable.26

Cowherd, Lewis, and Sengstacke all spoke at the symposium over the next two days, opening up about their practices and their involvement at The Wall of Respect. On the last day of the event, the four photographers also all attended a meeting at the South Side Community Art Center (see fig. 12). This gathering balanced the significance of the Art Institute with that of a Black-founded institution, embedded in the Black community, that had sustained the work of Black artists over the span of five decades.27

In many ways, the symposium was productive because it exposed the ongoing importance of social consciousness to BAM artists. It was also followed by a flurry of new scholarly activity on The Wall and the Black Arts Movement in Chicago more broadly. The talk that I gave on the second day of the symposium on photography and the mural led to the research for my contributions to the first scholarly publication dedicated to The Wall, coauthored with Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach.^[24] That book also offered an opportunity to platform and proto-exhibit (and even para-institutionalize) images by this group of BAM photographers, pulling together work from their archives featured here. The book was the basis for a 2017 exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, The Wall of Respect: Vestiges, Shards and the Legacy of Black Power, which showed photographic works by Cowherd, Crawford, Lewis, and Sengstacke. It was thus the first exhibition dedicated to photographs by this group. The exhibition also included images of Billy Abernathy, an installation by Chicago-based designer Norman Teague, and the first public exhibition of Cowherd’s photo fragment from The Wall of Respect, an image of poet Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) that he removed a few years after the mural’s creation, once it had fallen into disrepair.28

Later in 2017 works by Cowherd, Crawford, and Sengstacke were included in the popular Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition, curated by Zoe Whitley and Mark Godfrey at the Tate Modern in London. That show toured the United States for two years, at venues including the The Broad, Los Angeles; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Finally, the photographers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement who are the focus of this essay were the subjects of the exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980 at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, curated by Michal Raz-Rizzo. That show was the impetus for this publication and for the museum’s acquisition of a number of the artists’ works.29

The moment of legibility and art historical recognition for any artist, form, or genre is an important matter to consider, especially when it comes to art made by Black artists working prior to the 1980s. What appear to be sudden moments of acceptance, celebration, or recognition often conceal long histories of sustained attention and cultivation from smaller, often marginalized communities and structures. Unraveling the tipping point and final “arrival” exposes the restrictive logics (aesthetic, social, etc.) and modes of exclusion that impeded the mainstream recognition of BAM photography until recently. Significantly, those exclusionary practices have also influenced, and even perpetuated, improvisational processes arguably more aligned with the aesthetics and ethics of BAM photography that evince its relevance even in the face of institutional disinterest.30

This essay is meant to give credence to the range of provisional formats and ventures that helped the category of Black Arts Movement photography in Chicago to cohere. The recent exhibitions and publications offer long-overdue visibility to these photographers’ work, but they were only possible because the genre had value—had been valued—well before the museum complex invited it in. This value was constructed through makeshift, work-around forms and procedures; at art fairs, on beaches, and in the Black press; in home exhibitions, at Black convenings such as FESTAC ’77, and through the attentions of culturally specific galleries and museums; by photographs printed in directories of Black arts and culture and embedded in the surface of murals; and through the efforts of committed curators, scholars, and museum professionals. The value of BAM photography was actively held and maintained over the past fifty years by the artists and these networks. 31

While it is not easy to define or evidence either the realm of minoritized, para-, not-quite-fully-realized-or-recognized processes or the bonds and loyalties of the marginalized community that encouraged the BAM photographers, the 1967 OBAC Committee for the Arts Statement of Purpose, from which the epigraph of this essay is taken, captures the unique commitment to a “solid union” with Black people that defined this movement. The photographers featured here all adhered to this ethic to some degree in the 1960s and 1970s. We should not be surprised to learn that, in many cases, this consciousness still prevails:32