Frank Bowling and 5+1

In early 1969, Bowling began writing on Black art for Arts Magazine. He contributed there and to other publications through 1971. His essays articulated an intense suspicion about Black art as a separate and readily definable category of art, believing the Black experience to be too subtle and complex to monolithically categorize and interpret.

In a three-part essay published between 1969 and 1970 in Arts Magazine, Bowling reflected on wider issues in Black art, lending a vocabulary to art criticism that he felt was missing: “What distinguishes or creates the uniqueness of the black artist is not only the color of his skin, but the experience he brings to his art that forge, inform, and feed it and link him essentially to the rest of the black people.”

“Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston,” held at the MFA in 1970 and curated by Edmund Barry Gaither, presented recent work by 70 Black artists. Gaither was director and curator of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA), and special consultant at the MFA from 1969 to 2020.

Bowling was deeply skeptical about group exhibitions based on racial identity, like “Afro-American Artists.” He thought these exhibitions were tokenistic and “guilty of that hidden but quite positive decline of standards,” as he put it.

Bowling contributed the painting Mel Edwards Decides (1969) to “Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston.” The work’s title references the decision by Melvin Edwards—who exhibited his art alongside Bowling’s in “5+1”—to decline participating in the MFA’s exhibition.

In 1971, Bowling participated in “Some American History,” an exhibition held in Houston, Texas, which explored the Black experience in American life from enslavement to the present.

When Larry Rivers, a white artist, curated “Some American History,” he invited Bowling to contribute a work that addressed his “South American–West Indian background.”

Bowling responded with a densely layered composition combining washes of bright paint, screen-printed photographs, stenciled maps and letters, and other visual elements. Among the figures and places in the photographs are the artist’s sons, his mother, and his mother’s store. Stenciled and painted over, these images slide into illegibility. “I named the painting Middle Passage because I am a product of the middle passage,” Bowling stated in the exhibition’s catalogue. “But…I do not bring my images together because of the history and brutality of that terrible crossing, but rather in spite of it.”

Alongside Bowling, two other “5+1” artists, William T. Williams and Daniel LaRue Johnson, had work included in “Some American History.” Williams’s work, George Washington Carver Crossing the Dupont River, May 17, 1954 (1970), pictured here at far left, uses for its base a linoleum panel the artist originally made for “5+1.” Rivers commissioned the new work specifically for “Some American History,” and it currently resides in the Menil Collection.

When Bowling arrived in New York in 1966, there was increasing debate around the concept of Black art. In 1969, he organized “5+1” at Stony Brook University. The exhibition presented work by five African American artists with whom he shared an interest in abstraction––Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams––alongside Bowling’s own work. Intending to give a platform to art being denied visibility, the artist also sought to create space for inquiry outside of a museum setting.

In October 1969, “5+1” opened in a classroom space at Stony Brook University. Organized by Bowling at university professor Lawrence Alloway’s invitation, the exhibition presented abstract works by Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, and Bowling himself.

Following “X to the Fourth Power,” a four-person exhibition coordinated by William T. Williams at the Studio Museum in Harlem earlier in 1969, “5+1” was a counterproposal to large group exhibitions that showcased artists’ work based on perceived racial identity.

“I felt that there was something that I could do about what appeared to be this overwhelming indifference to what Black artists were doing in this area,” Bowling later commented.

Bowling befriended several Downtown New York City–based African American artists, some of whom would become coexhibitors in “5+1.” Bowling regularly wrote art criticism, sometimes focusing on the work of these artists and the ways they rewrote and advanced modernist tradition.

Reflecting on “5+1” in an article for Arts Magazine that followed his earlier three-part essay on issues in the museum presentation and critical reception of Black art in the United States, and which as written apropos of the MFA’s presentation of “Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston,” Bowling wrote that “‘5+1’ had the avowed intention to once and for all put a stop to all those rotten ethnic shows.”

This photograph documents a joyful handshake between artists Frank Bowling and Jack Whitten at the opening celebration for “5+1.” Mary Whitten stands to the left of Bowling, and Al Loving stands to Whitten’s right alongside one unidentified attendee. Two large panels of patterned linoleum by William T. Williams hang on the classroom-turned-gallery wall behind them. “These artists were set against what was expected of them,” Bowling later remarked of Williams’s contribution. Strewn across the floor, a work by Melvin Edwards—a slack length of industrial link chain—encircles the group, drawing them closer together.

Adger Cowans, a fellow artist, photographer, and close friend of the artists who participated in “5+1,” took this photograph, capturing the grinning group next to a delicate filter of barbed wire strands—the deceptively delicate threads of Edwards’s Curtain (for William and Peter) (1969).

Originally published in Specula, the 1970 Stony Brook yearbook, this black-and-white photograph shows an aerial view of the university’s rapidly expanding campus on Long Island just eight years after its groundbreaking. In its first decade, the campus (colloquially referred to as Mudville) was under constant construction, with new buildings and roads replacing the trees of a once rural Suffolk County. The humanities building, which housed the Department of Art, the newly launched Black Studies program, and the classrooms where “5+1” was on view can be spotted in the top right corner of the image—an appropriately H-shaped structure.

This calendar clipping includes an announcement of “5+1” taking place in the “University Gallery” in Stony Brook’s humanities building “through November 8.” The gallery that held the exhibition was in fact two classrooms connected by a retractable wall. As a single space, they hosted an exhibition program launched by Department of Art professor Lawrence Alloway in an effort to bring artists to campus. Reflecting on the exhibition decades later, Bowling noted the deliberate decision to base “5+1” in a university context, expressing a specific interest in exhibiting work for a student audience.

In the fall semester of 1969, the first courses were taking place in the newly formed Black Studies program at Stony Brook. This course advertisement from the student newspaper, the Stony Brook Statesman, lists three of the first courses offered to undergraduate students. The Black Studies program was the result of a number of actions led by the Black Students Union in 1968 and 1969, calling for the creation of a “Black Institute” that would center the experiences of Black students on campus. These actions were part of a larger Black students movement sweeping the nation in the late 1960s and early ’70s. At Douglass College in New Jersey, Frank Bowling, who was on the arts faculty, was part of similar efforts to create an African American studies program.

This 1970s trifold mail brochure was sent to prospective Stony Brook students, advertising the university’s new Black Studies program. An “Academic Philosophy” shared inside describes the program as “designed to provide an introductory and systematic understanding of Africa and peoples of African ancestry with the hope of expanding the students’ academic and intellectual horizons.” On the cover, the department slogan “power through knowledge” nods to both the Latin aphorism scientia potentia est (knowledge is power) and the birth of Black Studies programs as created by a dedicated, student-led faction of the Black Power movement.

The title of this work refers to American abstract artist Barnett Newman (1905–1970) and his series of paintings Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966–70). Bowling’s painting borrows from Newman’s canvases, which are divided into bands of primary color, implicitly challenging Newman’s (and other American artists’) authority over abstract painting. Into fields of lush color, Bowling introduces coded references to his own biography: outlines of South America and of his mother’s house in New Amsterdam, Guyana, hover over the painting’s central column. The substitution of Newman’s primaries for red, yellow, and green—used for tricolor flags in many African and Caribbean nations that gained newfound independence at the time, including Guyana in 1966—adds to the painting’s air of rebuttal.

In this map painting with a distinctive, brooding palette, South America and Africa appear in geographic relation to one another while continents of the northern hemisphere are out of sight. A bolt of yellow fills the gap between the two visible land masses. Nearly splitting the canvas, its forceful downward thrust can be understood as marking the Middle Passage, the forced sea voyage endured by enslaved peoples taken from West Africa to the Americas, and the journey of the painting’s title.

Adger Cowans, who photographed the opening reception of “5+1,” is a close friend of Bowling’s and the other “5+1” artists. He took this portrait of Bowling in the 1980s.