Dr. Freida W. Tesfagiorgis Reflects on the Black Arts Movement: Painting Black History
Above: Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis with her painting Road to Monuments (1983)
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, professor emeritus of African American Studies, Gender Women Studies and Art, came of age artistically during the Black Arts Movement during the 1960 and early 1970s.
Her life follows the currents of Black history at the time, which deeply influenced the subject matter and the texture of her art. While she was born in Mississippi, her father moved the family to Chicago in 1952 and got employment at the Ford Motor plant and hauling and recycling metal from cars using his truck as a second job to support his wife and 12 children.
She chose to go to Graceland College (now University) because it is affiliated with the church in which she grew up, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ). With her large family, she financed her education with NDEA loans and work-study. The first semester, she and her best friend, JoLeah Ivy, lived with Dean Harold Condit and his family, arranging their class schedules to care for the young son, Randy, in exchange for room and board that semester.
“I was painting landscapes,” Tesfagiorgis said. “They were typical compositions that you do in drawing classes. Graceland was really a very solid, religious community. People knew each other. People spoke to each other on campus. This was 1964-1965. We had major social protests going on throughout the country. The Civil Rights Movement was already on its way to the Black Power Movement. Sitting in the student union and reading Time Magazine and newspapers, I said, ‘Wow, there is something happening. I need to move closer to home.’ It was very idyllic at Graceland and religious. That’s fine. But I just felt pretty much removed from what was going on. So I decided that I needed to get as close to home as possible.”
Tesfagiorgis transferred to Northern Illinois University, which socially wasn’t that far removed from Graceland.
“When I went to Northern Illinois University, the climate there was hostile,” Tesfagiorgis said. “It kind of reminded me of elementary and high school. Also there were about 16,000 students at that time. And I don’t remember the number of Blacks people, but it was really very small. They didn’t have fraternities and sororities there, but I was never a fraternity or sorority person. In fact, I didn’t even know what those were before I got to Northern Illinois because our campus had houses. You had houses with different names. And the male and female houses were coupled for different kinds of activities. When I arrived, I was recruited by both the Deltas and the AKAs, but I was much more interested in developing some kind of political organization, which I did. I co-founded an organization with a number of different people because we were interested in changing the climate, changing the campus and especially bringing Black culture and history to the campus. It was called the African and African American Culture Organization. We were able to get money from the administration to bring in Muhammad Ali. That was great. We also brought in Leroi Jones who was later called Amiri Baraka. He performed a play. We also had close relations with James Turner at Northwestern University. He was a prominent graduate student organizer of Black student activities and protests. He would come to us and help us think about how we could organize to get more funding, to talk about getting Black studies and lectures.”
Tesfagiorgis was drawn back to Chicago where the action was.
“We went to Chicago to the Afro Arts Theater,” Tesfagiorgis recalled. “Russel Meeks was another political figure in Chicago. He was driving us somewhere in Chicago and there were bullet holes in his front window. I asked him how they got there. He said, ‘Oh the police were shooting at me.’ I was wondering, ‘What the heck am I doing here in this car.’ We went to political activities at the Afro Arts Theater. And I know one of the young men, his last name was Satterfield, was gunned down standing at a bus stop. In 1965-1966, there was a lot of political activity. When we were at one event at the Afro Arts Theater, there was a directive, ‘Think about when you leave here, it should always be two women to one man’ because the police were less likely to bother you with two women and one man walking together as opposed to walking individually or in couples. These were eye-opening activities for me.”
Tesfagiorgis was an art education major at Northern Illinois, but almost all of the offerings to do her student teaching were at predominantly Euro-American schools. Tesfagiorgis reached out to her Chicago connections and landed at DuSable High School.
“I met Dr. Margaret Burroughs at the DuSable Museum,” Tesfagiorgis recalled. “She was one of the co-founders of the museum with her husband Charlie and others. She was the chair of the art department at DuSable High School. Ramon Price was there as well. He was my direct supervisor. I did my student teaching there. That opened up a whole new world to me. We were part of the Black Campus Movement. It was nationwide, but very specific to Northern Illinois-DeKalb and connected to Chicago. That experience opened up a very new world, the Black Arts Movement, to me. It was very different from my Black culture, Mississippi and Chicago culture, which was very restrictive. My father was like, ‘Be in the house by sundown.’ He was very protective of us. He had to be. You don’t understand it until later. Anyway because Dr. Burroughs allowed me to go into the museum, to go downstairs where the collection was. I saw Charles White, Marion Perkins, artwork by artists whom I had never seen, Black artists. And then she connected me to the Southside Community Art Center, which she also co-founded back in the early 1940s. It was right across the street — this was around 38th Street — and it had a contemporary Black art exhibit. She gave me the names of individuals for my research study for a professor who said in a class, ‘There are no Black artists.’ I said, ‘There must be.’ He created an independent study with me. Burroughs introduced me to Danielle DeMain and George Fields who was directing the Southside Community Art Center and Doug Williams who sometimes directed the art center. So this whole world of contemporary Black artists was opened up to me through contact with those two Black art institutions. They were so critical.”
And Tesfagiorgis was able to meet some the avant-garde leaders of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago.
“Jeff Donaldson, Nelson Stevens, Napoleon Henderson, and Barbara Jones were AfriCOBRA people as Cobra artists,” Tesfagiorgis said. “Jeff Donaldson was at Northwestern working on his Ph.D. in African art history. That was an early example of someone who could be an artist and an art historian. That was before I got into the readings of James Porter who wrote Modern Negro Art in 1943. James Porter was an artist and an art historian. What I found were these models. Dr. Burroughs was an activist and founder of institutions. Jeff Donaldson was an artist and art historian and an activist. They did the 1967 mural Wall of Respect. There you found artists representing the time. In the 1960s, we were in the midst of a Black Art and Black Power movement at the same time of the Black Panther Movement nationwide. And there was the anti-war movement. All of these were going on at the same time.”
And these times impacted Tesfagiorgis’ art.
“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968,” Tesfagiorgis said. “The whole nation erupted during that period. I did a portrait of Dr. King. It was an expressive representation of a close-up of part of his face. The main point that I made here was to capture the dynamic emotional response to our loss. You see his piercing eyes, the fleshiness of his face, the lips and the nose. It was a partial representation. It was a representation of the loss as well as the heroic civil rights movement that he was to us. It was a work that I did in response to that tragedy of the moment. I want to say that many Black artists did not do any representational work at all. And of course this is all part of the freedom that artists had to create whatever they wished, whatever they desired, whatever they felt. Another work that comes to mind of how artists might represent a dramatic moment in history is Sam Gilliam’s work. He did a powerful, abstract expressionist work called April 4. April 4th is the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated. People look at that work and even though it is abstract — there are lines and drips and you get a real sense of action — there is a real flowing of emotion and power and chaos. There is a real sense of disruption. There is this luminousness that has a glowing effect. And all of it points back to the heroism of a man who puts himself down as a non-violent campaigner of justice, as a drum major for justice. You get a sense of the heroism of the drum major for justice. I think he gave that speech about a month before he was assassinated in Tennessee. Here is Sam Gilliam, a monumental figure. His work sells for millions. But he did that work. He didn’t do it right then. He painted it in 1969. He had to have time to reflect. Some artists need some time. And then they come out ready to do it. In my case, I just had to respond within that same year, 1968. All of the unrest and the chaos and burned out buildings and the National Guard standing around. The whole climate was volatile. I just had to turn into myself and reflect on all of this and refocus on Dr. King. That’s when I did that particular portrait.”
When Tesfagiorgis graduated from Northern Illinois, she wanted to stay in Chicago and teach art. Eventually she had to settle for language arts.
“I brought in James Brown’s ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud., “ Tesfagiorgis said. “‘What is James Brown saying when he sings that?’ It was a great experience. But it was really frustrating as well because the schools had their rules. I wanted to take the students to the Afro Arts Theater and Black places so that they could learn more about their heritage. But that was prohibited. I was told that those places were dangerous. I said, ‘We are teaching right here and we see gangs in lines walking across the playground.’ The Afro Arts Theater is a cultural site. But I could not take those kids to the theater or any place Black. I could take them to the Art Institute or the Museum of Science and Industry.”
