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UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS |
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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.
About the Author
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.