CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

When Black Mask Closed MoMA

Ben Morea at the International Anti-Authoritarian Meetings of 2023 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. Photograph Source: Antochkat – CC BY-SA 4.0

In Memory of Ben Morea

On the afternoon of October 10, 1966, six members of Black Mask, a radical anti-arts arts group, marched in front of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) handing out leaflets while two members unraveled a large canvas sign announcing, “MUSEUM CLOSED.”

A handout published in Black Mask 1 (November 1966) read, in part, “A new spirit is rising.  Like the streets of Watts [i.e., August 1965 riot] we burn with revolution. We assault your Gods – We sing of your death. DESTROY THE MUSEUMS – our struggle cannot be hung on walls.” It continued, “Goddamn your culture, your science, your art. … What purpose do they serve? Your mass-murder cannot be concealed. The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretence [sic] and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity.”

In an accompanying press release, the group clarified its concerns:

“This symbolic action is taken at a time when America is on a path of total destruction, and signals the opening of another front in the world-wide struggle against suppression. We seek a total revolution, cultural, as well as social and political – LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.”

The demonstrators were offended by MoMA’s exhibition, “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” which they felt violated the Dadaist and Surrealists very creative visions.

Museum executives, having been notified by Black Mask about the planned action, informed the police who put up two sawhorses to block the entrance, closing the facility.  According to one account, “a nervous and shifty-eyed mob of plain-clothed and uniformed policemen and newsmen [and] one FBI man with a small Japanese camera” observed the demonstration. As the scholar Conor Hannan notes, “Black Mask’s mock-closure of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) represents the first true meeting of art and social protest within the setting of 1960s New York.”

During the ‘60s, numerous arts groups emerged that expressed strong political beliefs, including the Art Workers Coalition, the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Inc. (BECC) and, most importantly, the Black Arts Movement.

Black Mask was different from the other political arts groups in two important ways. First, it drew its radical sensibilities from the post-WW-I Dada and Surrealist movements, a sensibility shared by groups like the Chicago Surrealists, the Amsterdam Provos, the San Francisco Diggers and the UK’s King Mob.  Second, it drew its theoretical or analytic perspective – i.e., its critique of the capitalist culture industry — from the radical Marxists tradition that included the Frankfurt School (e.g., Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich), the anarchist/ecologist Murray Bookchin (i.e., the concept of “post-scarcity”) and the French Situationist International, particularly Guy Debord (i.e., the concept of “the spectacle”).

At the center of Black Mask was Ben Morea (1941-2026), an abstract painter and vibraphonistwho moved to the East Village in the early ‘60s.  As he later reflected:

“I had been involved in jazz during my drug addiction days. I was a musician and every time I got out of jail I went back around the jazz world and got re-addicted . . . When I finally kicked for the last time . . . they put me in the prison hospital . . . in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan . . . There was an occupational therapist who befriended me . . . She was an art therapist, so I started painting.”

During this period, he hooked up with the Living Theater and, as he recalled, he “was highly influenced by their ideas despite never being theatrically orientated myself.”  Morea further explained, “they were the first people to put a name to the way I was feeling and leaning philosophically.”  During this period, Morea was introduced to artist Aldo Tambellini........

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