Pittsburgh’s Long Black Arts Movement: Celebrating Artistic Activism

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

The Black Arts movement emerged in the late 1960s as a cultural offshoot of the Black Power movement. No urban center in America has been a more fertile ground for functional and committed black art during this time than Pittsburgh. Some of the same Black Power advocates that would lead the confrontational struggle for Black Studies at the University of Pittsburgh would be at the center of the Black Arts Movement which yielded works by many Pittsburgh residents—the most well-known of these is the renown August Wilson. This panel presentation features a discussion among multiple activist-artists who were part of this movement and those who continue to sustain the legacy of community empowerment through proliferation of socially relevant African American art.

Sub Unit

• 109th ASALH Annual Conference

Chair

• Shawn Lamar Williams, Georgia State University

Presenters

• Sala Udin, Community Activist/Artist

• Valerie Adeniji Lawrence, Magnolia Publishing House

• Curtiss Porter, The African Library Unburnt

• Oronde Sharif, University of Pittsburgh

• Frank Floyd Hightower, Hightower Photography