‘Manifesto of Women Students and Artists for Black Liberation’ (WSABAL) (1970)
This manifesto is reproduced in the ebook.
This manifesto was written by Michele Wallace in June 1970 but is collectively attributed to WSABAL. WSABAL was started by Faith Ringgold and her daughter, Michele Wallace.
WSABAL was not a public organisation or a union, it was a name designed to create a group identity and form an alliance under which people could unite. The manifesto outlines a “projected” united position in the art world. Like Martine Syms’ ‘Afro-Futurist Manifesto’ (40 years later), this manifesto is an appeal for people to join forces to take action now!
About Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace
Faith Ringgold is a well-established artist today and increasingly the subject of many retrospectives. There are many articles you can find online which document her life and work: https://frieze.com/article/50-years-celebrating-black-beauty-and-culture-faith-ringgold
This educator’s pack from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, gives her life history plus an analysis of 9 works.
https://nmwa.org/exhibitions/american-people-black-light/
Or you watch the Video Interview with Faith Ringgold, 1991 September 3 and 2006 May 10 used in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film !Women Art Revolution (2016) in the Stanford University archive: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution/catalog/dd043pf3293
Rutgers University has an archive of Faith Ringgold’s papers:
http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/ead/manuscripts/Ringgoldf.html
Michele Wallace’s papers are archived at New York Public Library, including her work from the 1970s as an art critic and activist. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/collection/data/752306365
Michele Wallace is now a Professor of English Literature and writes art as well as literary criticism. At the time, she wrote this, she was a student and collaborated closely with her mother.
WSABAL and New York protests in the Art World
In an interview with Mary Lodu, Michele Wallace describes the founding of WSABAL: http://thirdrailquarterly.org/mary-lodu-michele-wallace/
Rather than summarising this interview, I suggest that you click on the link and read it in full.
Faith Ringgold was extremely active in different organisations and protest groups in New York in this period e.g. Art Workers Coalition and BECC (Black Emergency Cultural Coalition), and there were multiple small radical groups criticising the art world, its narrow focus and its exclusions. Ringgold took part in the Ad Hoc Women’s committee’s Whitney Annual protests in 1971 where the chief demands of this manifesto 1) that 50% of artists in the upcoming biennial that year be women, alongside 2) the relatively new idea that all exhibitions should “reflect the ethnic distribution of the metropolitan area in which the show is being given” appear on the posters used in the protest. The Ad Hoc Women’s Collective grew out of the broader labour activist group the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), in which there was another the sub-group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) where Nancy Spero was a key member.
‘The Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee (founded by Brenda Miller, Poppy Johnson and Faith Ringgold) used it to force the Establishment to look at art by women, beginning with the 1970 Whitney Annual. Our tactics at the Whitney were multiple: we issued a fake press release saying the Annual would finally be 50 percent women and 50 percent “non-white.” We projected slides of women’s art on the outside of the building. We faked invitations so a lot of us could get inside to do a sit-in at the opening. The museum got wind of that and set up a machine to distinguish the fakes from the authentic invitations, so we traded our fakes to famous people the museum didn’t want to evict. We protested weekly on the Whitney’s defensive bridge over the moat; we faked a docent’s tour; we blew whistles in the stairwells, lipsticked the women’s room mirrors, left eggs and unused tampons marked “50 percent women” around the galleries…and we got a lot of attention, even from the FBI.’
Lucy Lippard recalls in ’From the Archive: No Regrets’
(Art in America, 16 March 2017)
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/from-the-archives-no-regrets-63252/
A second joint statement between the Ad Hoc Women’s Committee and WSABAL, was distributed as a self-published handout. It was titled “To the Viewing Public for the 1970 Whitney Annual Exhibition (1970). This was reproduced in Hilary Robinson (ed) Feminism-Art-Theory (Blackwells/Wiley, first edition, 2001). Pp. 56-57. This argues:
“THE WHITNEY ISN’T WITH IT!!!! They say they are giving us a survey of what’s going on in American sculpture right now, but all they’ve given us is their usual survey of their own prejudices”…”EVEN WE don’t know the potential of women artists in this country, because we’ve never had the chance to find out. ON TO FIFTY PER CENT!!!’
The Whitney Annual that year had 21 women out of 103 artists. 21% was better than the previous year of 3%, but it was not enough.
Ringgold also helped found the Black women artists’ collective: Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc. in 1971, which remained active as a group until 1997. Where We’re At planned their first exhibition in the summer of 1971. The artists were: Kay Brown, Jerrolyn Crooks, Pat Davis, Mai Mai Leabua, Dindga McCannon and Faith Ringgold. This was realised at the Acts of Art Gallery, in Greenwich Village in June/July 1971 and twelve women artists took part.
“A Black Women’s Exhibition
– because there never was one
– so that women should be recognized not only as Black artists, but also as women
– because most Black women artists live in Brooklyn.”
Feminist Art Journal (April 1972)
This is the first item on the list of 6 demands, including access to childcare, studio space and scholarships, from the show, published before the exhibition opened in Feminist Art Journal, edited by Cindy Nemser, (April 1972) and is reproduced in We wanted a Revolution, Black Radical Women Artists: A sourcebook, 1965-1985 (Brooklyn Museum, 2017). The exhibition of the same name, We Wanted a Revolution, toured the USA in 2017-2019.
Faith Ringgold also helped to found the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) with Flo Kennedy, Margaret Sloan, and Doris Wright, in May 1973. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/national-black-feminist-organization-1973-1976/ Within NBFO’s second year there were more than 2000 members and 10 chapters across the United States, which lasted until 1976 when the organization disbanded.
Ringgold’s actions as an artist and activist in the art world and beyond have proved an inspiration to many artists today as is demonstrated in this article: Indira Bailey ‘The (In)Visibility of Four Black Women Artists: Establishing a Support Network, Defining Obstacles, and Locating Self through Art’ (2017) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c9a4/2750b2424afd40871250096ef415996433c9.pdf
The manifesto is also connected to an exhibition of 200 works, People’s Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church in November 1970. The show was sponsored by the Art Worker’s Coalition and this manifesto is cited as the inspiration for the show as an “open show”. Two artists, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks burnt copies of the American flag as their contribution to the exhibition and it was this action which led to the arrest of the ‘Judson 3’ (Faith Ringgold (as an organiser of the show), Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks) who were later fined $100 (or jail for one month) in 1971.
See ‘Historical Background’ http://carbonfarm.us/amap/GAAG_Part2.pdf
The original typescript of this manifesto, as a defaced flyer, was exhibited again in 2008 in Carey Lovelace’s exhibition Making it Together: Women’s Collaborative Art + Community. New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2 March – 4 August, 2008. http://www.careylovelace.com/CLWomenCollaborative.htm
Image 9 on the link documenting the exhibition on the curator’s own website – shows 3 people looking at the manifesto as a large poster and this copy has been defaced by negative comments. This is a reproduction of a small flyer.
Carey Lovelace wrote that the manifesto was produced and circulated at the Art Strike Against Racism, Sexism, Repression and War on 22 May 1970 which was not only a protest against the War on Cambodia, but also the site of different protests about the role of art and museums and their complicity in not protesting the situation. Artists, co-led by Robert Morris and Poppy Johnson (of Ad Hoc Women’s Committee), picketed the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MOMA during the art strike. The copy she displayed was defaced here.
Recent interest in thinking about the history of this protest in relation to the contemporary art world’s activisms against President Donald Trump can be found in John Bowles 18 Jan 2017 article, in Hyperallergic, ‘The 1970 New York Artists Strike that Prefigured #J20’: https://hyperallergic.com/352184/the-1970-new-york-artists-strike-that-prefigured-j20/
While the actions and existence of WSABAL was extremely important symbolically as a protest which was “ahead of its time” in linking racism and sexism in art world politics, it is surprising how rarely the content of it is reproduced or fully discussed. Partly, this is to do with its existence as only a flyer: an ephemeral document.
The 2 dominant demands in this manifesto for 50% women artists and ethnic representation of a population may seem tame after 50 years of quota systems, attempts at equal opportunities and gender mainstreaming. At the time, they appeared radical and extremely controversial.
Let’s Discuss the Content of this Manifesto
Let’s focus on the headlines of the manifesto first.
These spell out the main functions of WSABAL:
to inform students of “esthetic oppression” of black women in the visual arts,
to encourage/protest/challenge all forms of art which are against “the people”,
and to support “real black art which is done by black women” and concerned with the “Afro-American situation” today.
These underpin:-
THE MAJOR DEMAND OF WSABAL
ALL GROUP SHOWS ARE TO BE OPENED TO THE PARTICIPATION OF ALL ART WORKERS THROUGHOUT AMERICA
All shows are to be fifty percent women.
All shows which are not a stated projection of a particular cultural group, such as Afro-American, American Indians, American Whites, etc., must reflect the ethnic distribution of the metropolitan area in which the show is being given.
These functions highlight the voice of black women artists and a feminist message about promoting art which foregrounds the work of women artists and focuses on women’s oppression – from the perspective of “black women”.
The definition of black art is divided into a “Black Art” in terms of its truth is followed by a list of items that “Black Art is not”.
This list includes the definition of the exclusion of women in “Brown Art Shows filled with Token Art Niggas which are being passed off for Black Art Show”.
Real Black Art is that of “a liberated voice”, “protests bigotry” and is produced by Black Women Artists. These are feminist ambitions for self-empowerment and protest from the situation in which one finds oneself.
Faith Ringgold’s art at the time was figurative, representational painting, combining pop art colours and lines with realistic portraiture of people around her. Her ‘Feminist’ series dates from this period, as does an important mural of women in prison, which was situated in a prison. She started later to produce work in textiles/ quilts. In the late 1970s she travelled to West Africa: but the ambition to reconsider an artistic heritage based on the “Principles of African Art” is important here.
The list of negatives: brown shit (all male) art shows, token nigga art (as partial accommodation of a few artists), mainstream copy whitey art (as the way to be accepted), talk not action, artwork which is propaganda or predictions of a future, “picture” art is quite precise as a series of criticisms.
The WSABAL manifesto makes clear that this manifesto was a protest against the token inclusion of black (male) artists in several exhibitions: Afro-American Artists organised in 1970, where 2 women, Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Rimboud were the only women included by curators: Edmund Gaither and Benny Andrews. It also refers to the Venice Biennale exhibition in July 1970. America cancelled its participation in the Venice Biennale that year and organised an exhibition in New York, but the criticism here is that it was not an open exhibition in its selection processes, and those selected were “Anti-Human Artists”.
This criticism and other remarks about “Superstar anti-human art” appear to be a caveat for abstract art – which at the time – was minimalist and often declared itself as “apolitical” or “not-political”. The bigotry against black women artists and the ignorance about their work comes from both a white art establishment and a group of black male artists who are looking out for their own careers and continuing the marginalisation of black women artists.
As Michele Wallace confirms in the interview on WSABAL: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, are the black male artists referred to in the WSABAL Manifesto’s “Black token art” or artists “copying Whitey” Mary Lodu interview with Michele Wallace, on the founding of WSABAL: http://thirdrailquarterly.org/mary-lodu-michele-wallace/
What the manifesto advocates is: black as a value/color/situation of oppression; rhythm as a major artistic contribution; and Principles of African Art. It concludes with 3 points, central to the ideas of WSABAL: to demonstrate the severity of oppression, a persistent will to survive, and a determination to make a liberated society.
