African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) is an African American artist collective formed in Chicago in 1968. The five founding members of the group were Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams. Other early members who joined in the late 1960s and 1970s included Nelson Stevens, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Carolyn Lawrence, Frank Smith and James Phillips.

Some of AfriCOBRA's founding members had been associated with a multi-disciplinary Chicago association called OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) that formed in the early 1960s and produced culturally-specific, pro-Black literature and visual arts. OBAC was most famous for creating the 1967 urban mural entitled the "Wall of Respect" on Chicago's South Side. AfriCOBRA members Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Carolyn Lawrence were among a larger group of visual artists who contributed to the "Wall of Respect" project prior to the founding of AfriCOBRA.

AfriCOBRA artists were associated with the Black Arts Movement in America, a movement that began in the mid-1960s and that celebrated culturally-specific expressions of the contemporary Black community in the realms of literature, theater, dance and the visual arts.

Beginning in 1968, AfriCOBRA members met regularly on the South Side of Chicago at the home and studio of Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell where they discussed ways that their art could embody a "Black aesthetic," and how their art could be placed in service of Black liberation movements.

In an interview celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Teresa A. Carbone (the Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum) stated, "It's difficult to draw a one-to-one correspondence between a work and an immediate social effect, but graphics from the Chicago artist collective AfriCOBRA, [African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists] really did help reshape the mindset of black communities."

When the group originally formed in 1968, they called themselves the Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists (COBRA). By early 1970, as the group prepared for its first major exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, they were calling themselves the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA). The final name pulled sought to create a larger sense of community positing that art-making has a collective nature. The creators wanted the works to be accessible, so they made poster art that was designed for mass production.

...
Wikipedia