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I'm Black and I'm Proud: A Review of AAMARP's “Say It Loud” at the ICA
- 2 hours ago
- 10 min read
“Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak this Poem
Silently
Or LOUD”
– Amiri Baraka, Black Art
Editorial manager Alula Hunsen first entered 76 Atherton Street’s warehouse façade on a balmy summer day in August two years ago. He entered an elevator with a manual accordion door and rose slowly towards floors filled with work made by artists several generations ahead of me, entering into a hidden social and (meta)physical architecture of Black cultural production that had only been intimated to him prior to this studio visit; he’d visited the National Center for Afro-American Artists before, marked clearly by John Wilson’s Eternal Presence (1987), but felt unprepared entering the unpretentious building of 76 Atherton that houses a program with 49 years of work and relationships. Stepping out of the elevator, he meandered around the fourth floor, stumbling across old exhibition flyers and prints and peeking into offices and studios at figurative artworks-in-progress, before his host, Reggie Jackson, welcomed me in and sat me down for a two-hour oral-historical conversation that I had to condense into a 1500-word story. Jackson, a warm, bespectacled man of Hunsen's own stature (and AAMARP’s current executive director), was all too ready to regale Hunsen with the story of how he’d arrived at…
The African American Master Artists-in-Residency Program
or AAMARP. Founded in 1977 by Dana Chandler, AAMARP is a Boston-based artist collective, residency, and studio program in partnership with Northeastern University that provides free, renewable studio space and long-term support to Black artists.
Their latest exhibition, Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now, at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, which opened in February 2026, demonstrates the boldness of the program’s Black Arts articulation, the strength of its polyvocality, and the sheer breadth of work produced by artists affiliated with AAMARP across its nearly five-decade tenure. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, installation, and archival material, the exhibition foregrounds both the individual distinctiveness of its artists and the collective ethos that has sustained the program for nearly fifty years.
“It becomes imperative that Black artists join hands.” – Dana Chandler, Say Brother/GBH
From left to right: Pan-African Man, 1970; What America Means to the Black Man circa 1775-1970, 1970; Check Out Yo Mind, 1970; Black Man break free of the sucking, mutherfucking, white egg, 1974; Dana Smiles, 1976
Visitors of the show are met first by work from program founder and longtime executive director Dana Chandler, imploring us to dispel white interruption/fill black epistemology (Check Out Yo Mind, 1970), to extricate ourselves from the shell of white supremacy (Black Man break free of the sucking, mutherfucking, white egg, 1974), to free our own who remain in captivity long after emancipation (What America Means to the Black Man circa 1775-1970, 1970). While Chandler sadly passed shortly before the show’s opening, he smiles excitedly at us from the opposite wall in a photograph produced by Jackson (Dana Smiles, 1976).
Reggie Jackson’s next graphic/photo work in the show is on a wall cattycorner to his portrait of Chandler. African Meeting House (1977) superimposes a blue-red Benin Ivory Mask atop an image of the African Meeting House, a historic gathering place for Black freedpeople in Boston in the 19th century and a hotbed for abolitionist organizing. Jackson recreates African iconography over African-American geography to reassert aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities that Black people bring into inhabiting and producing physical space as a kind of re-architecturing or re-mapping of our cities, of this city – and repeats this practice across his Urban Ceremonial Mask series. Jackson, a U.S.-born descendant of enslaved people, grew up in New York before moving to New Haven to attend Yale; he co-founded the Black Workshop while there, building Black design and planning capacity outside of the Yale School of Architecture in a community space that remained operational for a decade.
“The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artists that alienates him from his community.”
“It is a profound ethical sense that makes a Black artist question a society in which art is one thing and the actions of men another.”
– Larry Neal, The Black Arts Movement
AAMARP as a program with its constituent artists challenges art’s autonomy. Often characterized and theorized as apart from labor and capital flows (yet curiously facilitated by and sometimes constitutive of capital flows; always a resultant product of labor on the part of an artist, reproductive labor on the part of their families and communities, etc.), the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, in which AAMARP participated, refused this “freedom.” Chicagoan artist-members of the Organization for Black American Culture (OBA-C), and later the African Coalition of Black Radical Artists (AfriCoBRA), wanted their art to be “art for people’s sake”. By this same token in Boston, “AAMARP Is For The People.” Archival televised clips from programming in GBH’s Say Brother (now known as Basic Black) and other Black television programming are projected onto a wall in the gallery, bringing to the fore artist-residents of AAMARP who speak critically toward a mode of cultural production that is imbricated not with galleries and white cube institutions, not with collectors, and not with academic institutions, but with Black working communities.
Barbara Ward is projected twenty feet away from her sculptural work, New Race II, featuring “Third World” black cloth dolls commissioned by the Cambridge YWCA in 1987. Ward explains in a 1995 interview for Say Brother’s Arts Magazine that her work isn’t, “the doll[s]; it’s the love, the healing…art is a transference.” Dana Chandler shares in a later clip that Black artists “find ourselves exhibiting in unconventional settings – bars, community centers, YW and YMCAs, rather than in Newbury Street galleries where our work is seemingly not welcome.” Perhaps this exclusion supported Black artists’ reflexive showing capacities, reinforcing that their work can and should be shared in venues closer to the communities which inspired the artists themselves. Photographer Rudy Robinson, in an episode of Say Brother from 1984 (Art, Artists, and the Collector, also projected at the ICA), offers further commentary on European art, which figures the artist as an interpreter or as a communicator/representative, and contra-distinguishes his own art-making: “I feel that the artist as in the African society works more as integral part of the community...and he serves a purpose beyond being an interpreter in the European fashion...my purpose, if I use that term, artist, is to somehow function as a chronicler of the community, and what I see.”
Another unnamed artist chimes in, “everything we do should have a purpose…to further humanity…to try to bring cohesion and unity.” Allan Rohan Crite’s The Artist and the Community (1984) drawing proposes a direct parallel between African “artists” in the pre-colonial village amongst family, political leaders in a top panel, and Black cultural workers (including Crite, Paul Goodnight, and others) in the post-colonial community and city in a panel immediate beneath, again supplicating artists as integral parts of their communities. Crite, an active artist in Boston long before AAMARP’s founding, points to a broader and older framework of Black artists comprising, inhabiting, and remaining accountable to their communities.
Parts of the show re-situate cultural production according to Africanized understandings of the relationship between art objects, artists, and their communities, moving away from fetish and towards ritual inclusion of the material world in a spiritual and social one. Vusumuzi Maduna contributes sculptures evocative of African art made in this tradition, with his Black mask (Juju Blue, 1979) and wooden twins (Ibeji, 1981) calling in, respectively Dogon ritual and Yoruba craft and figuration that retrieve, or fail to forget, a relationship between spirit, ecology, and matter. Juju Blue cries out to the viewer, eyes evoking cowries and mouth agape as if nommo were speaking through it. L’Merchie Frazier’s Ogun: God of War to Love (1995/2015) calls explicitly on the Yoruba deity Ogun, using an architectural form indebted to Brazilian candomblé and filling the bird-sized house of worship with pastiche and poetry from Boston (including words from Mel King). Sharon Dunn’s Resilience (2026) calls to mind an earthen speaker or homing beacon, surfacing and amplifying ancestral voices to resound out to a listener who may practice Voodoo.
From left to right: Juju Blue, 1979; Ibeji, 1981; Ogun: God of War to Love, 1995/2015; Resilience, 2026
“African-American” and “Black” are not exclusive terminologies, aesthetics, or bodies in AAMARP’s oeuvre; members and alumni of the program come from across not just the United States, the Western Hemisphere, or even the Black Atlantic, but from across the whole diaspora: Khalid Kodi from Sudan, Bryan McFarlane from Jamaica, Marlon Forrester from Guyana, as well as an assortment of artists from across the continental United States.
AAMARP artists reach through and and across conditions of enslavement and coloniality towards one another and towards us, towards solidaristic praxis (borrowing traditions across the diaspora, remembering those still on the continent and those dropped off along different stops). The Program’s artists work through and embody a multifarious blackness that refuses parochiality (around a “Black Bostonian,” or even a “Black,” self-identity and aesthetic) and resists reduction (toward violence, or resistance), instead gathering Blackness and identifying its “folk” constitutive elements which positively associate us with one another.
Models are sourced from Roxbury (as in Barbara Wards’ New Race II); spatial representations produced of Black neighborhoods (Crite and Susan Thompson’s Freedom, Justice, Equality mural-quilt (1989-2012) depicting a march through the South End, Rudolph Robinson’s TRY BLACK and Street Boy street photographs in Boston and Philadelphia (1983)); references made to maroon dreams of home in Jamaica (Bryan McFarlane’s I Dream of African Souls, 1986); artist pilgrimages made to Ghana (Reggie Jackson, Gloretta Baynes), Nigeria and Nicaragua (Sharon Dunn), Kenya and Uganda (Kofi Kayiga) to learn skills and modes. AAMARP operates across an ever-expanding geography: artists are provided with a home studio base in Boston (in the heart of what would/could have been Mandela), and grow their relational networks and lineages of practice outward, toward the Caribbean and Africa—never forgetting their new home(s) in the process.
L’Merchie Frazier’s portrait of Ericka Huggins (Ericka Huggins: Liberation Groceries, 2019) places Black artistic self-determination alongside political self-determination (in part through weaving), as does Calvin Burnett’s tender portrayal of Angela Davis (eponymous, c. 1970s). Frazier historicizes AAMARP within a lineage of black cultural organizing that runs with, counter to, outside of formal institutions that eventually catch up to/co-opt/genuflect Black art and politics through wall text she contributes to her own work. The Harlem Renaissance, Weusi Collective, Organization for Black American Culture (OBA-C, pronounced “oba-see,” as in igbo), Spiral, and AfriCoBRA are called in as AAMARP’s forebears.
“All of us…suffer the same problem. We are all disorganized.”
“Black people must do the organizing…until we come to that realization, we are the man’s fools” – Dana Chandler, Say Brother/GBH
Holding a rich history and an active, ongoing legacy, AAMARP has never hidden their hand, or lowered their voices – but they have perhaps been quieted, as an unclear and increasingly frustrated relationship with their institutional partner, Northeastern University, fails to unwind its tenuousness. What started in the late ‘70s as a partnership became a tumultuous relationship marked by tension and impasse: first by Northeastern’s decision to uproot the original studio space several times across Lower Roxbury, and then (according to Chandler) instrumentalizing AAMARP to allow Northeastern to buy property in Jamaica Plain. Now seemingly on the outs with the educational institution, which in 2018 tried to lock the artists out of their own building, the difficulties AAMARP has faced are part and parcel of an arts economy that often fails to support Black or worker-led institution-building. Elma Lewis, founder of the National Center for Afro-American Artists, spoke to this lack of capacity in 1977—the same year AAMARP was founded. The Center has had its own struggles in attempting to hold its doors open for good, after closing them for a number of years due to financial troubles. The legacies of both AAMARP and the Center, affectionately known as the Big Head Museum, are immense and acknowledged even by institutions that have not adequately recognized or supported their work until the present (even now, Northeastern University’s website makes little mention of AAMARP’s history). Whether their futures will reflect their monumentality is an open question.
My favorite work in the show is Milton Derr’s Confined (1987). Designed to be hung in a courthouse, Derr depicts (and undermines) Black male incarceration, reminding viewers that those who are disappeared by the state are still our magnitude and bond. Confined represents its central figure’s fortitude through bondage, fists splitting, face stern, fractured lines abounding. Made to challenge carceral/police geography and space, the piece was rejected at the courthouse, instead finding a home at the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Roxbury: An institution that could support his abolitionist figuring. The Studio Museum in Harlem was an early supporter of Chandler’s work, helping him find acclaim and resources to support his own career and Black Power aestheticization; a replica print of Check Out Yo Mind exists on their walls today, mirroring the one which opens the ICA’s show. This is but one small reflection of the power that Black cultural organizing holds.
The ultimate legacy of AAMARP is that it is a still-standing program, which has left an indelible on Black identity, aesthetics, and cultural production. The lineage that L’Merchie Frazier places AAMARP within is ongoing, and reaches into the present and future. Newer AAMARP resident Deme5 is also a member of the African Latino Alliance, a graffiti and mural crew that picked up where AAMARP muralists like Chandler and Sharon Dunn left off in producing works like Roxbury Love (2014; note the red, black, green, and yellow, alongside Madiba’s face) and From the Pyramids to the Projects (2002; featuring pharaonic, continental, and wild-styled imagery). Artists in the Program still make and show brilliant work, as evidenced by “Say It Loud.” Sharon Dunn’s work was produced this year, and artist-resident Shea Justice’s work on-show is an excerpt of an ongoing piece: a collaged scroll featuring portraits, textual elements from archival news and governance documents, that he started in 2004 and has not stopped adding to since.
Roxbury Love, 2014 From the Pyramids to the Projects, 2002
Black self-determination — our ability to refuse, re-orient, and stand up syncretic systems of hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics — are unkillable. Whether the world must end for us to fully realize it; whether we must continue stealing ourselves away; whether afterlives of subjugation haunt us, and them, until the bitter end, or freedom dreams urge us towards the marvelous. We will continue to organize.
Alula Hunsen (he/him) is the Editorial Manager at the Boston Ujima Project, working on narrative-building towards liberatory urban futures.
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