William T. Williams began making “hard-edge” abstract paintings at Yale, where he studied with artist Al Held. This painting was named after jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and may conjure the cascades of sound in his performances.

Trane was made in New York in the same year that Williams—as a member of the Smokehouse Associates—created a number of abstract wall paintings in Harlem. That year he also set up the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Here, Faith Ringgold documented the 1971 uprising at Attica Prison, over demands for inmate rights, that left forty-three dead. The image presents the Attica Prison riot not as an isolated event but as an American tragedy to be understood within an ongoing, nationwide context. The caption reads: “This map of American violence is incomplete / Please write in whatever you find lacking.”

At the height of its popularity, this print was circulated as two thousand small-format posters. Ringgold first studied printmaking at the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School founded by Amiri Baraka.

Perhaps Betye Saar’s best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima juxtaposes radical Black Nationalist imagery of weapons, a raised fist, and African kente cloth with Aunt Jemima, the Southern “mammy” recognized as the face of the best-selling pancake mix and a stereotype of smiling, docile servitude. Saar was appalled by racist depictions she found on everyday objects at flea markets and in curio shops. Inspired in part by Joseph Cornell’s Surrealist assemblages, here she incorporated a kitchen notepad holder in the form of a Black female figure. Moved by the strength and determination of Black women, Saar sought to recast a painfully enduring image of Black female subservience as a symbol of empowerment.

Mars Dust was one of a series of paintings that Alma Thomas included in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. At age eighty, she became the first African American woman to have a solo show there. Fascinated by the technological advances of the space age, she looked at daily reports of NASA’s Mariner 9 mission to photograph Mars. Huge dust storms on the planet, which initially prevented the relay of images back to Earth, inspired her to make this work.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Frank Bowling’s work drew from Color Field painting of the 1940s and 1950s, yet maintained representational images. He poured waves of acrylic over stencils of continents, which were removed before more paint was applied, leaving ghostly outlines. Continents emerge from and disappear into color; oceans and rivers are combined with pools and trails of liquid paint. While many Black Americans were pointing to Africa as a mother continent, Bowling’s maps celebrate a more fluid and open idea of identity and belonging in the world, enacting what scholar Kobena Mercer calls a “decolonial space of decentering.” Texas Louise and Dan Johnson’s Surprise were included in Bowling’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in late 1971.

Born in Bartica, Guyana, Bowling moved to England in his teens. In 1966 he relocated to New York, where he joined a group of abstract artists and included many of them (such as William T. Willliams and Daniel LeRue Johnson) in his 1969 exhibition 5+1 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. This exhibition, and Bowling’s extensive writings, argued for an expansive notion of Black art encompassing both abstract and figurative.