Rather than strain to define what African diaspora art is, I will examine some work that this term has done or has been summoned to do in the US in the late twentieth century.

I consider artistic, institutional, and scholarly interventions that laid out and advanced the terms of African diaspora art as a category: (1) a 1960s-era essay by art historian Robert Farris Thompson that organizes nineteenth-century material culture under this heading (without naming it as such); (2) David Hammons's moves to cultivate an audience for African diaspora art, from the 1970s onwards; and (3) the founding of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco in 2002. Early on, Thompson and Hammons transformed the terrain, formalizing the content and practice of what they argued was a sociocultural and racial tradition, alternately termed African Atlantic, black Atlantic, and African diasporic. In many ways, their efforts drove an African diaspora visual turn that culminated in the call for institutions such as MoAD. To say this does not make them the principal architects, or the singular laborers, who, brick by brick, built cultural organizations dedicated to African culture.Footnote ³ But I do want to situate Thompson's and Hammons's projects as generative work that also brought significant pressure to bear on overlapping categories that signified black culture and ontological blackness, including African art and African American art.Footnote ⁴ For much of the twentieth century, African art and African American art designated objects to be studied, collected, and displayed, and these headings gained traction in many sectors of the cultural economy, from museums and auction houses to university syllabi and dedicated publications.Footnote ⁵ Yet African diaspora art, and especially the conceptualization of what it is and what it does, has involved a set of operations that are different from those put in motion by African art and African American art, both profitably rooted in chronology, geography, and history. In the present, the distinctiveness of “African diaspora art” lies not only in what it embraces and lays claim to, but also in its “being and becoming” a field, a practice, and a narrative.

More than three decades before Thompson made this claim in an interview, he had laid groundwork for it in “The African Influence on the Art of the United States.”Footnote ⁷ Though the phrase “African diaspora” is never invoked in this 1969 essay, the concept resonates throughout it, for Thompson situated his research alongside earlier scholarship that mentioned transatlantic aesthetic linkages.Footnote ⁸ Nonetheless, Thompson writes with greater conviction than his predecessors, insisting that material culture made by black American artists of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore African influences:

Writing specifically about the sculpture, Thompson identified seven traits that he believed suggested African influence in these plastic arts: monochromy or bichromy; smooth, luminous surfaces; symmetrical organization of forms; mask-like faces; beaded, shell, or metal eyes; synoptic vision; and the symbolic representation of reptilian, amphibian, and human figures. Thompson praised these vernacular works and considered them “parallel visual continuities” to acknowledged “African-influenced verbal arts (Aunt Nancy tales), healing (conjuring), cuisine (hog maws and collard greens), singing (field hollers and work songs), and dance forms.”Footnote ¹⁰

In these passionately written lines, Thompson insisted that there was a US tradition of African-influenced art worthy of historical study.

Thompson was well suited to undertake this revisionist task. Three years prior to the publication of this essay, Thompson earned a PhD in African art history; he was only the second person in the United States to do so.Footnote ¹² Before he traveled to Nigeria in the 1960s to study the aesthetics of Yoruba dance wands, Thompson had taken sojourns to New York City, Mexico City, Havana, and Port-au-Prince in the 1950s, soaking in Puerto Rican jazz and dance hall music, Caribbean mambo, and vodou rituals, all of which he reasoned were what he later called “Africanizing currents.”Footnote ¹³ In a word, Thompson first experienced “Africa” through its diaspora and set out to theorize it by picking up languages (from Spanish and Yoruba to Arabic and French) and by fashioning an interdisciplinary research method grounded in archaeology, comparative literature, connoisseurship, formalism, and history. Notably, he inserted himself – a white American whose childhood in El Paso, Texas generated his love of its “alternative culture with people who were brown” – into the evolution of an African diaspora cultural field, albeit one whose contours were not fully formed.Footnote ¹⁴

Thompson's project to elevate the profile of African diaspora art in the US and to situate it as the equal of canonical Western art – past, present, and future – should be considered alongside other transformative emanations of the 1960s. In this decade of black power, the free speech movement, and other countercultural protests and uprisings, Thompson's writing – formalist and connoisseurial in tone – was also scholarly activism. It was an insistent rejection of the traditional cultural hierarchy in the US and it offered itself as a new model that could replace the old. Towards this end, the work discussed in Thompson's 1969 essay, like the sculpture, fabric, and graphic art exhibited in a 1968 show he curated, African and Afro-American Art: The Trans-Atlantic Tradition, was presented in utopian terms: Thompson wrote and spoke of them as superior artistry and culturally authentic craft, produced by creative agents driven by high-minded morals and ethical purpose. Reviewing the latter, critic John Gruen saw the “proof-positive that the Negro has a vast and telling art historical tradition.” Yet while Gruen tells his readers that Thompson's exhibition will sweep away notions of “static” African art, he explains the work as an atavistic outcome: “There are immense ties between the visual arts of West Africa with the arts of the blacks in North America, the Caribbean, and South America – and, amazingly, these ties often appear unconsciously.”Footnote ¹⁵ Gruen effectively dashed to bits Thompson's intellectual labor – the formalist consideration, the connoisseurial attention – and took away only Thompson's retentionist narrative.

Around the time of Thompson's 1969 essay, artist David Hammons was searching for ways to figure the African diaspora in his visual practice, and, in doing so, to make modern black identities equally cultural, material, and political. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hammons made prints in which he stamped his body on treated supports to become, in the well-chosen words of art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell, “both the creator of the object and the object of meaning.”Footnote ¹⁷ Looking at Hammons's better-known body prints, such as Spade (Power for the Spade) (1969) and Injustice Case (1970) – it seems that there could be no better way of communicating distinction – individual, cultural, and artistic – and elemental difference (for no two bodies are exactly alike). However, as I have argued elsewhere, the breadth of subject in some of Hammons's more obscure body prints, among them the no-longer-extant Rabbi (mid-1960s), challenges readings that these works are exclusively a “discourse” on “aesthetic blackness.”Footnote ¹⁸ Hammons, in discovering the expressive potential of his body and its mobility as subject, sought other means to present his identification with a black experience grounded in transnational symbols and affiliations.

Hammons tethered Africa to the Americas, textually and bodily, in Zaire, a street performance, enacted in Los Angeles and New York City in the mid-1970s. In documentary photos, the Mid-western-born Hammons is “de-Anglo-cized”: he holds a beaded walking stick, wears a knit Rastafarian tam, and sports dreadlocks. In some frames, he poses before a wall on which the nation-state's name is spray-painted; in another, he prostrates himself beneath this tag “Zaire,” offering an open-ended gesture of respect or of mourning. Here, he points to the lower case “i” in Zaire, which seems to link his American body to this African country. With these public moves, none of which comprises “African art” or makes Hammons an “African,”Footnote ¹⁹ the artist, at the very least, drew the attention of passersby to Zaire as place of note.Footnote ²⁰

Hammons's preferred dialogist traverses the urban street. Throughout his career, he has frequently articulated his antipathy to elite art spaces and the populations that visit them. In a 1986 interview, the artist asserts,

For Hammons, who has never abandoned the commercial art market or eschewed gallery and museum exhibitions, such rhetoric is a central aspect of his refusé practice. In it, making art is a freer and more honest kind of “play”; reception, which should not be informed by emotion and feeling (and too much education), mirrors the artist's open-spirited creativity and the fun it might generate. Hammons's Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983) is a realization of Hammons's aspiration. Staged in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood, it was a performance that parodied high and low marketplaces – that of New York streets on which used books, records, and clothing were sold right from the sidewalk, and that of the city's galleries, auction houses, and museums where the commodity was “fine art.” Bliz-aard Ball Sale's handmade objects – white, round, and in a variety of circumferences – perfectly emblematized the subjective registers of taste, and were send-ups that ridiculed the constructed social status of whiteness as a racial category as well.

Beyond site-specificity, Hammons also has courted a specific audience. About the response to bottle trees he made in Harlem, New York in the early 1980s, Hammons candidly recalled that

In this statement, Hammons posits a nonhierarchical relationship with a no-nonsense black public on which, he says, he depends. Everyday people observed the bottle trees and the much-written-about assemblage Higher Goals (1986); whether they “got it” or not, their feedback shaped his creative thinking and influenced his strategic trajectory. Furthermore, “they're already at the place that I'm trying to get to,” Hammons asserted. What is that “place”? Where is it? Not Greenwich Village, but rather Harlem, the twentieth-century mecca of black America. Additionally, Hammons's sights are trained upon an Anschauung, a view, and pointedly one that is characteristically independent, autonomous, self-reliant, and without borders that separate the peoples of the African diaspora. In this framework, institutional critique is not only lodged by the artist, but by a black diasporic constituency that, however alienated by the Eurocentrism of Western visual culture, talks back to it and challenges its authority.

A Macarthur (“Genius”) Fellowship-winner (1991), one whose work is in high-profile international collections – from the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern – and has commanded six-figure hammer prices for his drawings, Hammons has created a taste for African diaspora art, albeit in the elite, moneyed circuits he decries.Footnote ²³

When it opened in the fall of 2005, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco was among the first American cultural centers to bear “diaspora” in its name.Footnote ²⁵ Yet in the early planning stages, the museum's charge was differently conceived. Then mayor Willie Brown had imagined a museum devoted to black American history and culture. As the first African American mayor in San Francisco's history and as a former California state legislative leader with lasting political clout, Brown was well positioned to move this project forward. Furthermore, San Francisco's black American artists, citing the lack of exhibition opportunities in the city, supported Brown's initiative.Footnote ²⁶ Yet in an era when the city's African American constituency population was falling precipitously, Brown's twenty-person steering committee recommended that this black museum take “a global perspective.”Footnote ²⁷

Unquestionably, MoAD was a political initiative and a textbook example of institution building. The structure itself was meant to be read for its “difference” from neighbors. Its construction was part and parcel of a decades-long urban “redevelopment” project that transformed San Francisco's South of Market Street (SOMA) area, described in the 1950s and 1960s as a decrepit, seedy, Skid Row. Despite sustained opposition, industrial buildings in SOMA were razed and its streets were reconfigured to accommodate multistory glass corporate towers and a “culture gulch” of museums and art galleries.Footnote ²⁸ In 1993, the multidisciplinary Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opened, and two years later San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) took up residence across the street in a new $60 million postmodernist edifice designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta.Footnote ²⁹ MoAD, sited just around the corner from SFMOMA, was built on land owned by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. The agency kicked in $8 million for the commissioned design of MoAD and the building's construction.Footnote ³⁰ MoAD shares its footprint on the corner of Third and Market streets with the St. Regis Hotel and Condominiums, whose developer added $8.3 million to the project.Footnote ³¹ By the early 2000s, SOMA was considered “a knuckle of culture,” according to St. Regis Hotel developer Dick Friedman, one he was obliged to instill with a “public benefit.” In addition, Friedman explained,

For Friedman and others, MoAD delivered “ethnic and cultural diversity” to the newly gentrified arts district that, as local architectural critic John King put it, could “otherwise be dismissed as a bastion of wealth.”Footnote ³³

While local press generally praised MoAD at the time of the debut, the varied directions and tenor of commendation revealed the lack of understanding about the phrase “African diaspora.” Covering MoAD's opening in November 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle repeatedly referred to the institution as an “African museum” in several headlines and news stories.Footnote ³⁴ In these features, “origins” was the focus and MoAD's proclaimed interests in diasporic movement, adaptation, and transformation were rarely acknowledged. For certain, “Africa” played prominently in the titles of MoAD's inaugural shows, Linkages and Themes in the African Diaspora: Selections from the Eileen Harris Norton and Peter Norton Contemporary Collections and Dispersed: African Legacy/New World Reality. Nonetheless, the work of Dispersed participants – San Francisco Bay Area sculptor Mildred Howard, Brazilian installation artist Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto), and Cuban-born video artist Magdalena Campos-Pons – presented opportunities to consider the heterogeneity of their practices and of the category “African diaspora art.” Only one writer, Sharon Mizota of the conservative SF Weekly, did so and she approached this task warily. Her review of Dispersed opened sharply: “If you worried that the Museum of the African Diaspora might be the latest incarnation of political correctness, fear not.”Footnote ³⁵ Although she found Marepe's and Campos-Pons's creative strategies wanting, Mizota favorably wrapped up her review, “perhaps more important than their individual merits are the ways that these works defy stereotypical motif and attitudes to honor the complexity and richness of the African-American experience.”Footnote ³⁶ Clearly, Dispersed was a discovery for Mizota, who had expected none. The shift in her thinking sits next to her incorrect assignation of the Brazilian Marepe and the Cuban Campos-Pons to “the African-American experience.” This singular term, like “African museum,” simplified the construct of diaspora museum because, for Mizota and others, it needed to “be” in (or of) one place (or another).

Location does matter, no less than the specifics of the stories neatly mapped atop one another. In 2006, MoAD accepted a traveling exhibition: Carrie Mae Weems's The Louisiana Project, organized by the Newcomb Art Gallery of Tulane University in New Orleans. A commentary on the US purchase of Louisiana in 1803, The Louisiana Project did not address the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans and other Gulf of Mexico cities and towns in 2005. Instead, this installation featuring the artist's interpretive photography, video, and narrative was a portrait of this southern metropole, starring its architecture, customs, and social relations. Kenneth Baker, the San Francisco Chronicle's chief art critic, most admired Weems's photographs, writing that their “swirl of images and references takes on an unexpected power, partly because of the photographs’ casual surrealism and formal poise.”

Yet Baker, throughout his ambivalent review, suggests that Weems's subject was too distant for Bay Area viewers whom he thought knew little about New Orleans's Mardi Gras rituals.Footnote ³⁷ Weems's black-and-white photographs, Baker concluded, “have a mystery that sustains the curiosity it takes to learn something of the work's background, which only the exhibition catalogue adequately provides.”Footnote ³⁸ The thing is, Baker didn't seem aware of local black constituencies with New Orleans and Gulf of Mexico roots: thousands, including former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, had left this southern region and migrated to the Bay Area in the 1940s and 1950s in search of better jobs and lifestyles. Among these transplants and their descendants, there was no need for The Louisiana Project's exhibition catalogue or programmed introduction to Gulf culture; they regularly visited the region to see family or attend funerals, and to party during Mardi Gras, Jazzfest, and school reunions, and they knew the terrain well. MoAD was banking on their deep interest in the Gulf history and heritage, a layered narrative that overlapped with the larger public's fascination with the 2005 deluge and the black exodus it provoked.

“Louisiana” signaled, for Baker, an opportunity to realistically document the drama of a city ruined by wind, water, and human failure to plan for an excess of both. As a conceptual project that engages another history, The Louisiana Project is a let-down for Baker and a triumph for Clifton Lemon, another Bay Area observer. “Weems gets my attention because she has a story to tell. That's all we really want, isn't it, a story?” asks Lemon.Footnote ³⁹ Like links in a chain, the narratives constructed by Thompson, the connections to audience made by Hammons, and the curated exhibitions at MoAD, are stories – differently grounded, researched, and set into motion – of the African diaspora.

In the ensuing years, MoAD has continued to mount exhibitions that display contemporary and historical art, photojournalism, ritual art, and material culture from both Africa and its diaspora. There are equal numbers of exhibitions that somehow characterize both “places” (nearly always positioning the former as the anchor that defines the latter) in representational, abstract, and conceptual visual languages, put into service by black and non-black artists alike.Footnote ⁴⁰ Still, increasingly, the meaning of diaspora at MoAD is communicated through its public programming: there are book talks by authors whose publications include “diaspora” in their titles or examine its histories (or both) and performances by storytellers, singers, and dancers that situate themselves and their artistic expression as diasporic. At MoAD and in and within similarly dedicated structures and infrastructures, African diaspora art is the illuminated enmeshment of marked bodies and the cultural work they produce – indexically, self-reflexively, and, seemingly, naturally.