CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/8/2019

Art in the age of Black Power. 'Soul of a Nation' opens at de Young

“I feel it is my moral obligation as a black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially,” David Hammons said in 1969, one year before he made this haunting double self-portrait. Titled “Black First, America Second” (1970), this body print and silkscreen on paper presents one version of the self that “clings to the stars of the national flag,” according to Soul of a Nation originating curators Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, “while the other self appears almost painfully cleaved by its stripes… [It] is an image both timely and resolutely of its time.” This work and 235 others are featured in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the exhibition catalog of the decade, published to accompany the international traveling survey that opens today at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.