Untitled (Land Where My Father Died)

1968

Untitled (Land Where My Father Died), 1968. Barbara Jones-Hogu (American, 1938–2017). Color screenprint; image: 45.7 x 50.8 cm (18 x 20 in.); sheet: 51.4 x 73.2 cm (20 1/4 x 28 13/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of David Lusenhop in honor of the artist 2021.37 © Barbara Jones-Hogu Barbara Jones-Hogu was a founding member of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a Chicago-based artists’ collective founded in 1968 to forge a distinctly Black form of contemporary art. This print is one of several created around this time in which the artist represented a crowd of Black men with fists raised—here, against an abstracted city setting. In creating the image, Jones-Hogu was inspired by political protests in Chicago that year, as well as the death of her own father and her reflection on the role that racism had played in his life. In an interview, Barbara Jones-Hogu described the inspiration for this print, saying that “I feel that racism and fascism played a great [role] in my father[‘s] life, so some of these prints’ ideas and content deal with the fact that we and he were not really free to do whatever we and he really wanted to do and could do due to radical oppression and suppression.”