Word: mainstream
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is an art that thrives on uncertainty, like much work of our Postmodernist times, but it also displays confidence in the legitimacy of black experiences as artistic material. Black artists seem to have become more conscious of their cultural traditions even as they have met with unprecedented mainstream success. Discarding the anxieties of a bygone era, these artists presume the universality of the black experience...
...freedom created by the drive for civil rights during the past generation, black artists have escaped from the aesthetic ghetto to which they were once confined, where the patronizing assumption was that they would find inspiration only in their own milieu. As they move from the periphery to the mainstream, they are free at last to follow their various muses. Composer Singleton, for example, cites as models not only Miles Davis but also Igor Stravinsky. "It's limiting to be called just an African-American composer," he says. "There's no reason to limit yourself in any way." This attitude...
FILM The success of movies by black directors like Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing) and John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood) proved that black-oriented, mainstream movies can be profitable. Less commercial black filmmakers like Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) and Charles Burnett (To Sleep with Anger) continue to have difficulty raising money, but they produce substantial work nevertheless. One such movie is Haile Gerima's electrifying underground hit Sankofa, in which a young black woman is transported back in time to experience the horrors of slavery. Gerima, a professor of film at Washington's predominantly black Howard...
...line between the mainstream and the avant-garde in painting and sculpture remains dramatic for black artists no less than for whites. At one extreme are easily accessible depictions of black life, such as printmaker Varnette Honeywood's realistic portrayals of African women, which the Huxtables of TV's Cosby hung on their walls. At the other extreme are the puckish conceptual works of such younger figures as Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim and of David Hammons, their artistic godfather. Hammons, 51, paints or uses found objects to create pieces that raise unsettling questions about the significance of race...
...Despite attempts at a heroic compromise with a bipartisan, mainstream group of colleagues, Senate majority leader George Mitchell's efforts to pass some kind of health-care reform bill this year teetered on the edge of death. Republican leaders warned that a last-minute rescue effort could jeopardize G.O.P. support for global trade legislation. And some leading reform advocates, preferring to regroup for a fresh start in the next Congress, issued a "do not resuscitate" request...