The two 1960s artists whose careers and products may be considered to have formed a bridge between the visual past (the omnipresent black figure, overtures to visual modernism, and the need to acknowledge the politics of race) and a visual future for African American art (artistic singularity
over racial unity, narrational / perceptual simultaneity, and the interjecting of class, gender, and sexuality into art) are Bob Thompson and ROMARE BEARDEN.
Usually this is the moment in my story when I am told that my discomfort is solely my problem and my responsibility to wrestle with and get
over, that everyone feels a little out of place when they are new, and that my identity should be first and always that of a Christian seeking
unity rather than division, especially along
racial and ethnic lines.