Revered Roxbury artist Napoleon Jones-Henderson died Saturday, Dec. 6, a City of Boston staffer tells me. He’d long been ill with cancer. He was an eminence. He was so cool.
Born in Chicago in 1943, Napoleon came up as part of the revolutionary Chicago art collective African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCobra), founded in the late 1960s. It was one of the most influential art groups of the past century, producing art radiating psychedelic Black Power. Starting out, they priced their art to make it affordable to their community—to spread the word as well as to bring Black beauty and pride into local homes. In their manifesto, they outlined their guiding principles: “Expressive awesomeness,” positive images of Black culture, African-inspired symmetry and rhythm, commitment to the struggles of African peoples, affordable art, “shine” (“the rich luster of a just-washed ‘fro, or spit-shined shoes, of de-ashened elbows and knees and noses), and bold “cool-ade colors.”
“I do not make ‘art’ rather I am participating in ritual, a ritual as important to the Afrikan man as it was to his CREATOR. The ritual of harmonious interlocking, creating a whole,” Napoleon wrote in the catalog for the “Afri-Cobra III” exhibition at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Art Gallery in 1973. “…We must be about the business of expressing what is ‘BEAUTIFUL’ ourselves.”
While other members made paintings and prints, Napoleon created dazzling weavings. “To be free … We must protect our community. Come together to learn to defend us,” Napoleon wove in the group’s signature bright colors around a Black face in his 1970 tapestry “TCB.” “Stop genocide,” he said in a 1975 tapestry. “All men are equal,” he wrote across his 1976 screenprint “A Few Words from the Prophet Stevie,” “If you want to hear our view: you ain’t done nothing!!”
When AfroCobra members spread around the country as they took up teaching jobs, Napoleon landed in Boston in 1974 to teach textiles at Massachusetts College of Art. Over the years, Napoleon also expanded into public art—like his “Roxbury Rhapsody” tile mural inside the Bruce Bolling Building in Boston’s Nubian Square and his “Procession of the Ancients” in Providence’s Conventional Center. Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art gave him a retrospective during the Black Lives Matter days of 2022, which felt both wonderful and belated.
Napoleon and I were friendly. I grew up in Chicago too, so I felt kinship with the Chicago-to-Boston adventure. I last saw him in October during Roxbury Open Studios. His home on Morley Street was an astonishing neoclassical edifice with massive columns rising to the sky (long under renovation), and inside racks of jazz recordings, his loom, and art by so many friends and comrades—AfroCobra, Boston’s Paul Goodnight, legendary Chicago artist, community builder and museum founder Margaret Burroughs, etc. Inspirations all.
When I saw Napoleon in October, I offered to help him with the autobiography he was planning. I followed up with an email, and some weeks later he asked for photos, but I’ve been too sick with cancer myself to get back to him. Sigh.
Napoleon’s death leaves me sad—and angry. He was another dazzling local artist, too often overlooked and neglected due to the persistent racism and provincialism of the white-dominated fine art world. I’m angry about him being gone—and angry about missing out on what more amazingness he could have created in a more hospitable world.
<I’ll add info about memorial services as soon as I learn of them.>
Related:
• Wadsworth Jarrell, AfriCOBRA And Creating ‘Art That African People Can Relate To’
• The Original Black Power Mural And A New History Of African American Art From Chicago
• Hairy Who: Chicago’s Sordid, Goofball, Raucous, Grotesque ‘60s Pop Art
• How Dana Chandler Brought Black Power To Boston Art, Murals And Museums
• The Earth Expedition Of Sun Ra, Jazz Visionary And Afrofuturist Pioneer
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