Hello, my name is Russell Ihrig, and I am the Associate Director for Interpretive Programming. Today I will be reading the section panel called Turbulent Decade: From Tennessee to Africa for David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History, along with label text and audio descriptions for four highlighted works.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, David Driskell’s tenure at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, his first trips to Africa, and the civil rights movement stimulated his creativity in varied directions. Driskell’s subject matter responded to the “turbulent decade,” the era between the March on Washington in 1963 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. Galvanized by the civil rights movement, he continued to work thematically, developing distinctive iconographies that drew upon African and American history, Southern folklore, and his experiences as a Black man. Notable motifs include the Ghetto Wall series—pointed commentary on the stifling nature of segregation and disenfranchisement. Stylistically, his paintings were transformed through his ongoing experimentation with collage, pushing the relationships between content and painterly form to their extremes. During this time, he honed his signature style, which favored frontal, mesmerizing images animated by an internal dynamic of lines and flat areas of color and collage, as in Woman with Flowers and Memories of a Distant Past.