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BAG: Point
from which creation begins
The Black
Artists' Group of St. Louis
By Benjamin
Looker
Reviews
From
1968 to 1972, St. Louis was home to the Black Artists’ Group
(BAG), a seminal arts collective that nurtured African American
experimentalists working in theater, visual arts, dance, poetry,
and jazz.
Inspired
by a newly assertive cultural nationalism, over the course of the
1960s scores of black artistic cooperatives had sprung up around
the country, and these ideological and aesthetic impulses
resonated with BAG’s founders. In an abandoned warehouse in the
city’s central core, a generation of innovative artists created
a moment of intense and vibrant cultural life, surrounded by the
physical and economic evisceration that typified that decade’s
“urban crisis.”
Working
to raise black consciousness and explore the far reaches of
interdisciplinary performance, members established a local arts
academy for area youths, navigated a relentless calendar of
original multimedia productions, and articulated an uncompromising
social agenda. As debates over civil rights, nationalism, and the
role of the arts in contemporary struggles all found form in BAG,
the organization quickly became one of the Midwest’s most
significant exemplars of the emergent Black Arts Movement of the
1960s.
This
book narrates the group’s development against the backdrop of
St. Louis spaces and institutions, examines work by its major
artists, and follows the collective’s musicians in their
eventual move to Paris and on to New York, where they played
a leading role in Lower Manhattan’s “loft jazz” scene of the
1970s.
--Publisher,
Missouri Historical Society Press
In
this brilliant evocation of a great cultural flowering in the late
1960s, Benjamin Looker boldly plants the flag of St. Louis in the
middle of the history of jazz and restores that often neglected
city to its rightful place in the narrative of African American
arts. The rich detail, careful research, and clarity of writing
make this book a pleasure to read and set new standards for
studies of American culture and urban history.
--John
Szwed, Author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis
Looker's
meticulously researched monograph on the important Black Artists'
Group is an invaluable contribution to the historical literature
on American experimentalism, providing unique and trenchant
insights on how African American artists negotiate complex
relationships among aesthetics, social and political forces, and
community activism. In particular, the book illuminates the
process by which musical ideas developed outside of the canonical
cultural centers of the United States eventually gained
international recognition as among the most audacious, risk-taking
new sounds of the late twentieth century.
--George E. Lewis,
Improviser and Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Columbia
University
As a young man
coming of age in St. Louis during the Black Power and Black Arts
Movements, I am sure that my creative spirit was ignited through
my exposure to BAG. I was always around these artists at
rehearsals, readings, rap sessions, and performances, just a kid
trying to be someplace out of harm's way, on a mission of
self-discovery. I found myself by being exposed to the roots of my
cultural heritage. The Black Artists' Group inspired me to do the
work that I do today.
--Ron Himes,
Founder and Producing Director, St. Louis Black Repertory Company,
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Benjamin Looker
is a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He graduated from Washington
University in 2000 with majors in urban studies and music, before
earning an M.A. from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Looker was recently a Fulbright Scholar to Canada, and is currently
a graduate student in the American Studies Program at Yale
University.
* * *
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update 24 April 2009 |
