Mystical Unity (triptych), 1972, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 138 inches. On loan from Howard University
benefit from viewer reactions to their work, which expand on
their intentions in creating the object. This transaction and ac-
secular music is an artificial and misguided endeavor. Jazz
tive interaction reflects the call-and-response dynamic of African
and blues, though called the devil’s music, are “just as import-
cultures like the Yoruba. The Yoruba concept of ìlutí, “good
ant as the gospel music, the church music. It’s the same thing.”
hearing,” applies to both sides.8 The viewer hears what the artist
That separation is something, Phillips argues, that we did
is saying most often when the artist has heard how the viewer
to ourselves.
feels or lives in the world. Perhaps that is why Phillips says that
what people feel from the work is more important to him than
rooted in the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance period idea
what they know technically.
of using cultural achievement and virtuosity as a palliative to
ease acceptance for blacks into middle-class American life.
Phillips believes that music is an essential aspect of African
diasporic culture: Music made us survive. Through all the horrors of the Middle Passage, through all the horrors of slavery. Through all the different things we had to go through in the ’60s in the civil rights movement, up to the present, and we’re still going through it. I don’t care whether it’s blues, whether it’s called field calls, whether it’s swing music, or whether it’s bebop, hip hop—that beat is still with us. And that beat is still probably the strongest energy in us. And that’s what keeps us connected to Africa.
He also contends that the separation into sacred and
The rupture that Phillips finds so superficial may have been
While conjure and folk religious practices have long been tropes and signs for those black cultural forms rooted in African antecedents, they have also been linked to slavery in the minds of aspirational blacks and observational whites.
Yvonne Chireau writes that despite efforts to eradicate
such slave traditions, “when African Americans moved out of slavery and into the social order that freedom offered, they carried their spiritual traditions with them.” These spiritual traditions “were ultimately present in almost every geographical location in which African Americans settled.”9
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