Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980

African American Los Angeles in the middle decades of the last century was alive with militancy, movement, and creativity. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960 – 1980, curated by Kellie Jones, captures this vitality while offering a nuanced survey of how visual artists in that community used the materials and ideas of the then-emergent post – abstract expressionist sensibility to shape a vital part of the Black Arts movement. In this review Geoffrey Jacques suggests how Now Dig This! can serve not only as a window into the particularities of the African American arts community of Los Angeles in the last century’s middle decades, but as a way of adding nuance to our ways of seeing art history, art making, and the art world generally during that period.