"Chinyere Neale sits patiently at Detroit Public Theatre waiting for the evening's play to commence. It seems it is by fate that we both ended up here - two Black women with graying locs sitting next to each other in the theater, striking up a conversation about Black art in Detroit in between acts. "I really should see that exhibit. One of my Dad's pieces is in [it]," she tells me begrudgingly about the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History's 60th anniversary exhibition, Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering. When I ask who her dad is, and she replies "Harold Neal," I'm flabbergasted. Harold Neal, the Detroit painter who cofounded one of the city's earliest Black-led arts organizations in the 1960s? Yes, that Harold Neal."
"His painting featured in Luminosity is an emotional one. It shows four-year-old Tanya Blanding, the youngest casualty of the 1967 Rebellion, lying lifeless in her mother's arms after being shot by the National Guard. "Whenever someone wants to include my dad's work in an exhibit, they always use that one," she says with frustration. "But he did so many other pieces, and his work evolved so much throughout his career.""
Chinyere Neale attends a Detroit theater and notes her father Harold Neal's inclusion in the Charles H. Wright Museum's Luminosity exhibition. The featured painting depicts four-year-old Tanya Blanding, a 1967 Rebellion casualty, and Neal's daughter expresses frustration that curators repeatedly select that single emotionally charged work. Neal produced many other pieces and his style evolved significantly over his career. During the 1960s Black Art Movement, Neal and peers focused on portraying the harrowing realities of the African-American experience. In 1958 Neal, Charles McGee, Henri Umbaji King, LeRoy Foster, and Ernest Hardman founded Contemporary Studio, a Black-led collective that created exhibition opportunities when major institutions excluded Black artists.
Read at Hyperallergic
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