Nelson Stevens just got up.
“Can I call you back in 10 minutes?” he asks.
It’s out of character for the 80-year-old artist who was at the core of the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
“You woke me,” he says when he rings me back. “I realized that in the 1960s and 1970s, I never slept at all. I’m making up for it now.”
All he did was nap back then. “It was too exciting a time,” Stevens explains. “People were assassinating our leaders every day; they were dangerous times. You never knew who was listening to you on the telephone. Now, I sleep through eight or nine hours like a retired gentleman.”
A selection of Stevens’ paintings are going on view at the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York opening 5 September. The solo exhibition, entitled Work from the 60s to the Present, features Stevens’ portrait of Malcolm X alongside women with afros and Swahili phrases.
Stevens first became a member of the Chicago-based art collective AfriCOBRA (which stands for African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), in 1969. The group is known for using bright, potent Kool-Aid colors to create empowering images of African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
“Initially, they wanted to be called ‘revolutionary’ artists, but at that time, revolution had to be used very seriously,” he said. “So, we chose the word ‘relevant.’”
The group was co-founded by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams. They’re known for their 1967 mural of black cultural leaders, The Wall of Respect, in the south side of Chicago. But they expanded to include more members, like Stevens, throughout the 1970s.
“When I joined AfriCOBRA, there were six members,” he said. “I felt like I was being adopted by them, my family was larger. I always felt that way being a part of this organization.”
The group had several exhibitions in Harlem and beyond, where they made their art affordable by selling silkscreen prints for $10 (today, they’re worth $10,000, says Stevens).
Stevens’ own art-making philosophy is at the intersection between art and activism. “I deal with the physiognomy of the soul of black folk,” said Stevens. “Our idea was to create the best art possible for our people.”
Before becoming a member of AfriCOBRA, Stevens painted murals on the walls of jazz clubs in the 1950s. He credits John Coltrane to becoming an artist. “When I was 25, I saw Coltrane live 20 times,” he said. “I was excited by the idea that you could do a tune so many ways and it was still the same tune. That’s true of jazz, or black classical music. My Favorite Things, he played that almost every night, but it was different.”
Stevens then moved to Cleveland in 1963 to work as a teacher at a middle school, and on the side, taught at the Karamu House, the oldest African American theatre in the US. Shortly thereafter, he enrolled at Kent State University to complete his masters in painting, which led him to meeting Donaldson and joining the group.
At a party one evening, he found himself talking to Fred Hampton, a chairman for the Black Panther party. “A few weeks later, he was assassinated by the Chicago police and he was 20-years-old like all of my students,” said Stevens, who spent over 30 years teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Things like that were happening.”
One of his artworks from 1971 reads Uhuru which means freedom in Swahili. It was a slogan for the African Nationalists movement of the 1950s and 1960s. When he met the African music icon Fela Kuti in 1977, Stevens told him about his paintings. “He loved the idea that ‘Uhuru’ became international enough that an African American was using a term in Swahili,” he recalls.
The exhibition features a painting of Malcolm X, which ties into his recollection of seeing him lecture in Cleveland in 1964. “I had a chance to meet him when I was 24-years-old, when he was on tour,” said Stevens. “He expressed the idea that all white people suppressed black people, I stood up and said: ‘Do you really mean all?’ He said: ‘We are lambs, they are like the lions. Be fearful even of an old lion who has lost his teeth because he might even gum you to death.’ I remember things like that.”
“Then he was assassinated,” he adds. “Then they got Martin Luther King then Medgar Evers and Then Bobby Kennedy, then they got the president. The 1960s were a devastating time.”
There’s also a painting called Spirit Sister, depicting one of his former students who became a teacher. “It reminds me of those times,” he said.
Nelson has been known to say: “At your best, you are the hope and dream of the enslaved to create visions of a liberated self.” It’s what he credits to his conversations with Larry Neal, a playwright with the Black Arts Movement, and good friend. “Larry is a great figure in my development,” he said. “AfriCOBRA was central to the Black Arts Movement.”
It’s a different time today, however. “Today we’re really in trouble,” he said. “When I start conversations with whoever I’m talking to, I ask if they’re going to vote. We used to have different tests to find out where peoples politics were, now I’m just concerned, ‘do you vote?’ We have a president who may lead the world down the toilet, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
After our early morning interview, it’s unlikely Stevens will go back to sleep. “I’m surprised I’m sleeping now,” he says. “I’m 80 and deserve the right to sleep now and again, but it’s almost like I’m sleeping with one eye open. It’s amazing what’s happening on the national scene. Some of us never speak his name, but he’s frightening.”
