A beautifully illustrated survey of African American art of the twentieth century includes many never-before-seen works by the most important artists of the period. This selection presents works from the renowned collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation's greatest repository of African American art. From traditional media of painting and artists such as Horace Pippin and Faith Ringgold, to photography of Gordon Parks, and new media of Sam Gilliam and Martin Puryear (installation art), the African American experience is reflected across generations and works.
Here are 28 need-to-know Black artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. This list is meant to shine a light on artists who have prominence within institutions, but are often excluded from mainstream conversations meant to amplify overlooked Black artists or canonize them as leading figures of art history. While contemporary artists like Kerry James Marshall, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold are the founding leaders of contemporary figurative painting and printmaking, the contributions of artists like Malcolm Bailey, Charles Alston, and Camille Billops may not be as widely discussed. We hope this will serve as an introduction to, rather than a comprehensive list of, Black artists whose legacies deserve to be cemented in art history and public consciousness.
Painting the 20th Century: Black Artists | The New York Times
Accompanying the much-publicized exhibition of the same name that will be traveling throughout the nation over the next two years, this selection presents works from the renowned collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation's greatest repository of African American art.
African American Art in the 20th Century is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The C.F. Foundation in Atlanta supports the museum’s traveling exhibition program, Treasures to Go. The William R. Kenan Jr.
A landmark work of art history: lavishly illustrated and extraordinary for its thoroughness, A History of African-American Artists -- conceived, researched, and written by the great American artist Romare Bearden with journalist Harry Henderson, who completed the work after Bearden's death in 1988 -- gives a conspectus of African-American art from the late eighteenth century to the present.
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A new consideration of extraordinary art created by Black artists during the mid-20th century, My Soul Has Grown Deep considers the art-historical significance of contemporary Black artists working throughout the southeastern United States.
Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is Deborah Willis's long-awaited, groundbreaking assemblage of photographs of African American life from 1840 to the present.
In honor of Black History Month, Artsy is featuring the work of 28 Black artists who are not as widely known or celebrated as some of their historical or contemporary peers.
Of course, Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Sam Gilliam, and Frank Bowling are well-deserved citations of the early Black abstractionists, but lesser known to that history, broadly speaking, are Lilian Thomas Burwell, Evangeline “EJ” Montgomery, and Deborah Dancey.
Key Artists and Their Contributions
Charles Alston
Charles Alston (B. 1907, Charlotte, North Carolina. D. 1977, New York) was known for his abstract approach to figurative portraits and narrative paintings and was instrumental in shaping the Harlem Renaissance. Believing that white audiences were incapable of looking deeply at Black subjects, Alston developed his signature style by erasing and painting over the representational likeness of his figures. While this approach might make Alston’s work appear “universal” to a larger audience, the artist’s faceless subjects instead feel like hyper-specific reflections of the conditions Black Americans faced during the early to mid-20th century.
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Oftentimes, Alston’s images rebuke the iconography of the nuclear family that dominated art and media culture in the 1950s. This is evident in his painting The Family (1959), which depicts a household consisting of a Black mother and three children, omitting the traditional patriarchal figure of the father.
Malcolm Bailey
Malcolm Bailey (B. 1947, New York. D. 2011, New York) Malcolm Bailey’s graphic paintings use form and color to unpack the history and suffering of the transatlantic slave trade. In his “Separate but Equal” series from the late 1960s, for example, he contrasted abolitionist diagrams of slave ships against other illustrations, such as that of a cotton plant. These paintings, like Untitled (1969), create a disturbing parallel between the realities of chattel slavery in treating humans like cargo, and that of commodities, like cotton, that enslaved people were refining in the Americas.
Across his paintings, Bailey deployed an almost minimalistic approach to allow color and space to dominate his canvases. This created, at first glance, an aesthetically pleasing image that sours at the harsh reality of the image content.
Camille Billops
Camille Billops (B. 1933, Los Angeles. D. 2019, New York) was known for her extensive work archiving Black arts and culture from the 20th century, Camille Billops was also a formidable sculptor, printmaker, and filmmaker. She regularly incorporated her family history and life into her practice, specifically in her films. Her “docu-fantasies,” as she called them, used performance and archive to challenge records of history, and were at the forefront of Black women’s experimental film practices.
Meanwhile, Billops’s prints and sculptures feature bold lines and shapes that evoke early modern aesthetics, such as the Art Deco movement. In these works, she blends African, Western, and Eastern art styles and motifs to depict the impact global exchange has had on national identity. Her figures often parody and challenge Western depictions of Black people, making for an uneasy engagement due to their frankness, while revealing the discomforting history of art, representation, and Blackness.
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Betty Blayton
Betty Blayton (B. 1937, Williamsburg, Virginia. D. 2016, New York) was most commonly known as a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Blayton was also an accomplished abstract painter. Her works-“spiritual abstractions,” as she called them-were made through a process that combined monotype printing with traditional painting. In these abstract prints, Blayton plays with the graduation of hues, often a single color or color family. Viewers are left hypnotized as they sink into the swirl of color, ink, and water that conjure the otherworldly, as evident in Resisting Life Forces #3 (2000).
An accomplished educator and curator, Blayton was a foundational abstractionist for many New York-based artists in the late 20th century, including the legendary Jean-Michel Basquiat, her former student.
Other notable artists include:
- Hilda Wilkinson Brown (B. 1894, Washington, D.C. D. 1981, Washington, D.C.)
- Lilian Thomas Burwell (B. 1927, Washington, D.C.)
- Zoe Charlton (B. 1973, Eglin AFB, Florida)
- Deborah Dancy (B. 1949, Bessemer, Alabama)
- Heitor dos Prazeres (B. 1898, Rio de Janeiro. D. 1966, Rio de Janeiro)
- Minnie Evans (B. 1892, Long Creek, North Carolina. D. 1987, Wilmington, North Carolina)
- Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (B. 1877, Philadelphia. D. 1968, Framingham, Massachusetts)
- Marguerite Harris (B. 1963)
- Palmer Hayden (B. 1890, Widewater, Virginia. D. 1973, New York)
- Janet Henry (B. 1946, New York)
- Sargent Claude Johnson (B. 1888, Boston. D. 1967, San Francisco)
This list of African-American visual artists is a list that includes dates of birth and death of historically recognized African-American fine artists known for the creation of artworks that are primarily visual in nature, including traditional media such as painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking, as well as more recent genres, including installation art, performance art, body art, conceptual art, video art, and digital art.
These artists came to prominence during the period bracketed by the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement. The means of these artists varied-from modern abstraction to stained color to the postmodern assemblage of found objects-and their subjects are diverse. Benny Andrews, Ellis Wilson and William H. Johnson speak to the dignity and resilience of people who work the land. Jacob Lawrence and Thornton Dial, Sr. acknowledge the struggle for economic and civil rights. Sam Gilliam, Felrath Hines and Alma Thomas conducted innovative experiments with color and form.
The featured artworks were created at significant social and political moments in America. Words of Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke, novelist James Baldwin, Civil Rights leader Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and their contemporaries provided insight and inspiration.
