...Jeff R. Donaldson In the AfriCOBRA manifesto Donaldson describes the origins of the group and its aesthetic principles: “The expressive awesomeness that one experiences in African art and life in the U.S.A. like the Holiness church . . . and the demon that is the blues, Alcindor’s dunk and Sayer’s...

...Jeff R. Donaldson Since its beginning in 1969 in Chicago, AfriCOBRA has espoused an Afrocentric aesthetic vision. At the same time, it has deemed demeaning any art that posits African peoples as hapless victims, and therefore it has sought to produce a celebratory art—one that reflects cultural...

...Barbara Jones Hogu This essay explains the founding of AfriCOBRA as a cohesive, collaborative artists’ coalition that worked with an accepted philosophy and aesthetics to create positive images regarding their ethnic group’s social, economic, and political conditions, regardless of the media...

...Napoleon Jones-Henderson This essay, written by one of AfriCOBRA’s members, places the group as an aesthetic life force and a way of seeing the visual world coupled with the social, spiritual, relational, and political realities. The members of AfriCOBRA agitated for a new aesthetic, a new sense...

... Barbara Jones Hogu was a founding member of AfriCOBRA, a collective of painters, photographers, printmakers, textile designers, and sculptors that Jeff Donaldson founded in 1968 in Chicago. This interview covers Jones Hogu’s participation in AfriCOBRA and deals with questions about the group’s...

...Nicholas Miller This article examines AfriCOBRA cofounder Jeff Donaldson’s painting Ala Shango (1969) in relation to the 1968 Chicago riots and the militaristic and Pan-Africanist rhetoric of the Black Nationalist movement. Specifically, I discuss the artist’s appropriation and incorporation...

...,” Africobra, the African Commune of Bad Relevant “frenzy,” or perhaps “chaos.” 12 Here, Douglas is Artists. 5 speaking of music that emerged from the descen...

... movement inspired a tremendous solidarity among who formed or joined in forming collectives such as artists of African descent in the United States and AfriCOBRA, “Where We At” Black Women Artists, other parts of the African Diaspora. The rise of a Spiral, and Weusi, as well as others who operated...

... the textualization of gesture and process . This antitext struggle is brought into close relation with the often unrecognized conceptual art movement at the core of the Black Arts movement. The AfriCOBRA tenet of “mimesis at mid-point” leads the author to a reconsideration of the explicit theorizing, during...

...: Vintage, 1993), 17. lective AfriCOBRA. 12. Holland Cotter, “Black and White, but Never Simple,” New York Times, October 12, 2007. 13. See, e.g...

... affinities with the work of modernist Afri- can American artists such as Romare Bearden and, less evidently, the work of the AfriCOBRA artists of the 1960s, in continental Africa artists either drew directly from this model or developed parallel theories and practices also inspired by Pan...

... collectives and groups such as Spiral, Weusi, Where We At, and AfriCOBRA have similarly pursued a uniquely black expression in the context of what came to be known as the Black Arts movement. Ringgold’s journey was singular in that it led her to activism in the larger art world and in the women’s movement...

... filmmaker and a British con- of work by black practitioners, let alone charts their ceptual duo—begin to suggest the multiplicity of debts to previous groups, such as Chicago’s own phenomena that black aesthetic collaboration has AfriCOBRA, which are finally beginning to get addressed as well...

... what made a poem black, what was this black aesthetic in terms of photography? BC: I think that was what was so important, I remember I went to an AfriCOBRA meeting once, and I didn’t realize that there was so many poets working together or writers work- ing together or artists working...

... of the philo• ly, post-structuralist and feminist ap• livened this formulaic temporal blue• Africanisms in the New World; AfriCobra sophical and aesthetic debates preva- proaches to identity formation which print by selecting...

... not affect change. We do not mean change in the physical appearance of things, but change in the behavior of human beings.”1 And the third was the Jeff Donaldson–led, Chicago-based AfriCOBRA group, which firmly aligned itself with the Black Arts movement and outlined a formal style and community...

... Compared with FESMAN, the organizers of the US contingent to FESTAC 77 aimed to select a much larger number and array of artworks and to bring their creators to the festival so that they could have direct dialogues with other constituents of the global Black community. FESTAC, in the words of AfriCOBRA...

.... This invariably impacted his decision to principles of AfriCOBRA, using the urban colloqui- branch out into making “combines,” as he called alism “jam-pack and jelly tight” to describe multi- them, along with the urban grit of New York—a valent elements typically associated with an African trademark...

... Saunders; noted artists and scholars onstrating the longevity of community involvement Faith Ringgold, Ben Jones, and Benny Andrews, and and support; it paved the way for “Harlem Week,” a AfriCOBRA members Frank Smith, Barbara Jones major celebration held to this day. Hogu, Napoleon Henderson, Akili...

... Ringgold exudes soft- edged, casual confidence and poise. That Neel was the only white artist in the show was perhaps considered against the apropos painterly record of Ringgold by the bohemian John Singer Sargent of her time. Very loose figuration continued with AfriCobra (the African Commune of Bad...