Neal was influenced by the surrealist style of Hughie Lee-Smith, such as his depiction of inexplicable poles and balloons in his image of young girl, 1957, and in his Status Seekers, 1963. Status Seekers and Neal’s painting of a man with a balance (at the beginning of the exhibition), as well as Charles McGee’s Mask, c. 1962 and Jon Lockard’s If I Were Jehovah (later in the exhibition) refer to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s c. 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask,” which poignantly describes the lives of Black people in America.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh, great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and the long mile,
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

This sculpture portrays Pearl Primus, who first brought African dance to America in the 1940s.

An accomplished pool player, Neal felt that playing pool kept him in touch with regular people. “As an artist, your role in society is defined … by those who patronize and support you. … I like the game of pool. It keeps be from being held captive.”

During the 1967 uprising/rebellion, four year-old Tonya Blanding was shot by the National Guard, who mistakenly thought that a person lighting a cigarette was actually firing a gun from her home.

In this image, the man appears to have been arrested. Neal also explored Black incarceration in his unlocated Attica, c. 1972, which refers to the 1971 uprising in New York’s Attica prison. This surrealistic work depicts a semi-nude white woman, probably an allegorical figure of Injustice, squeezing a Black man’s head and torso in a bizarre contraption

This unidentified man sports a beret of the type often worn by urban militants. It is likely to be a home-grown Detroit militant, of which there were many, because the Black Panthers did not come to Detroit until 1968.

This work subverts sociological studies from the 1930s and 1940s that suggested, sadly, that African American children preferred white dolls. As noted, Black Nationalism called for Blacks to reject white culture and create their own. Accordingly, this child rips apart his white doll.

As noted earlier, this drawing refers to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask.”
However, here the man does not wear, but furiously rips apart the concealing mask.

In No More! Lockard spoofs the cheery servant, Aunt Jemima, a pancake maker’s brand that offended many African Americans. He turns her into a Black militant, wearing the black, red, and green of the Black Nationalist flag. The figure bursts the Aunt Jemima stereotype by smashing a Black Power fist through the box. Lockard produced many of his works as multiples, in this case using commercial lithography, because he wanted them to be readily available to people who could not afford high-priced artworks, like oil paintings.

In 1967 Dowdell painted the famous Black Madonna and Child in Rev. Cleage’s Central Congregational Church (later the Shrine of the Black Madonna). In this work, he depicts the lynching of three men. He, thus, calls for a reckoning for the endless atrocities inflicted on African Americans.

Pori Pitts was an early adherent of the Black Arts Movement and a member of the Black Panther party. From 1968 to 1976, he edited and contributed to Black Graphics International, a journal that featured the art and literary works of radical African American artists. Road to Revolution was published in the journal’s first issue. It apparently refers to the Detroit uprising/rebellion of 1967. It features the head of a man with bared teeth and a threatening gesture. Fire in the foreground seems to be his instrument of terror.

With the title Road to Revolution, Pori Pitts implies that the Detroit rebellion and other such urban uprisings of the 1960s were not just spontaneous expressions of rage at white oppression, but a prelude to the overthrow of racist, capitalist rule, a view shared by many Black militants nationally.

Allie McGhee, a friend of Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts, also contributed to Black Graphics International. This image depicts a skeleton, Death, wearing a military epaulette. Behind him, another figure tries to flee from Death, yet his hand rests on a large skull. The illustration protests both the Vietnam War and, in McGhee’s words, “the 1960s violence of white against black and black against white.”

This very complicated collage protests the centuries of oppression against Blacks. The central figure is President John F. Kennedy’s wife, Jackie. In the popular imagination, the Kennedy administration (1961-1963) was thought to resemble Camelot, the ideal mythical home of the  King Arthur, which was the setting for a contemporary Broadway musical of the same title. But, according to McGhee, reality for most African Americans was at “all times” anything but Camelot. Surrounding Jackie are prominent historical and contemporary Black heroes including Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones [later Amiri Baraka], Aretha Franklin, jazz/blues singer Ethel Waters, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Above the Black Power sign are the letters KKK on a blue sleeve with a white epaulette, implying the known collusion between military/law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan.  

At this painting’s lower right edge, one can see, in McGhee’s words, a “shrouded figure in black and mask [who] brings the cleansing of fire. A physical and spiritual rebirth.” Flames seem to engulf the rest of the picture. The work may refer to the 1967 Detroit rebellion/uprising with its cleansing fire leading to the birth of a Black City. Allie McGhee had a direct experience of the rebellion. A National Guardsman stuck a bayonet in his ribs when he was out after curfew.

 In this work, McGhee melds the artistic approaches of his mentors, Harold Neal, Al Loving and Charles McGee. Neal favored a figural Black Arts Movement aesthetic, whereas, by 1969, McGee and Loving were working in abstract/non-objective styles. This is called Last Oil because later McGhee painted with acrylics.

According to Neal’s daughter Chinyere, Rappin’ Johnson was a “legendary community member, … a kind of unofficial community griot.”  A griot, a term adopted in the U.S., was originally a West African elder who passed on communal history orally through stories, poetry, music, etc.

In this work Neal continued to use the style of layering flat, translucent shapes that he had learned at the Society of Arts and Crafts in the 1950s.

Paul Robeson was a hero to many as an actor, singer, peace and Civil Rights activist. A Communist sympathizer, he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. On Broadway in 1925, he played Emperor Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play of the same title. In it, a wily Brutus Jones, formerly a Pullman porter, becomes the vastly wealthy Emperor of an unidentified island. Foster portrays him wearing military garb seated on an extravagant throne, the very picture of O’Neill’s vain autocrat. Charles H. Wright, founder of the Wright Museum, greatly admired Robeson and commissioned Foster to create this and several other images of him.

The songs of Motown Records swept the country in the 1960s, including Dancing in the Streets by Martha and the Vandellas. In this painting, Martha is accompanied by her backup singers and two styling saxophone players. She is masked in white, like Nigerian Igbo dancers, transforming her into, in Woodson’s words, “personage” or “deity.” This masking gives Martha a ceremonial presence, thus elevating popular music to the level of ritual. This mood is further enhanced by the crowned golden head in the rear, which is painted in the style of ancient Egypt, that is, with head in profile and the eye in frontal view.

According to Allie McGhee, “In the 1970s [Black] people were trying to lift themselves up from the idea that they came from nothing to recognize that they were kings and queens, mathematicians, recognize they were something more than slaves.” Abu Symbols makes this point. It is based on the four colossal statues of Pharoah Ramesses II, who ruled from 1297 to 1213 B.C.E., which form the entrance of a temple formerly at Abu Simbel, Egypt. McGhee explicitly makes the connection between people of the African diaspora—including African Americans—and the Pharaohs by giving the statue on the right pronounced lips and a pure black face.