Black Art: In the Absence of Light

An illuminating bird’s-eye view of the past half-century of Black art in America. ... The film never dips into saccharine platitudes, and it is unafraid to examine the defects within artistic movements that, while fighting for racial justice, had their own blindspots.

We’re talking about a dense, complex history. No one film can hope to get all of it, and this one leaves a lot out. (Mention of the Black Power movement is all but absent here.) Still, there’s a lot, encapsulated in short, deft commentary by scholars and curators.

It’s still an eye-opener for any casual art buff, realizing that a lot has happened in that scene since Basquiat, and an awful lot happened before David C. Driskell had the gumption and the thick skin to dare to suggest there was a Black art aesthetic, and that there were more than 200 years of African American art that was too good and too important to ignore.

Yet the film seems unfocused. It is part welcome record of an art exhibition and its broad impact over two generations of artists, part survey of what an arbitrary selection of Black artists have achieved since, part analysis of diverse issues within a culture too often mischaracterized as monolithic and part chronicle of a crucial institutional infrastructure that has grown exponentially in the new millennium. By itself, any one of those topics would fill a documentary to overflowing.