African American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Every February, the United States recognizes Black History Month with a specific theme.
African American art is intricately woven with influences from Africa, the Caribbean, and the lived experiences of Black Americans. Too often the history of Black people is centered on the actions of White people and the chronicling of African-American art history is no exception.
In celebration of the rich history of Black Americans in the arts, we’re reflecting on five artworks by historical and contemporary Black artists in the museum’s collection which visitors can currently see in our galleries.
Early Expressions: Craftsmanship and Portraiture
The earliest evidence of African-American art in the United States is the work of skilled craftsmen slaves from New England. Two categories of slave craft items survive from colonial America: articles that were created for personal use by slaves and articles created for public use. Many of Africa's most skilled slave artisans were hired out by slave owners.
The public works of art produced by slave craftsmen were an important contribution to the Colonial economy. In New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies, slaves were apprenticed as goldsmiths, cabinetmakers, engravers, carvers, portrait painters, carpenters, masons and iron workers. Some colonial art may have been by enslaved artists, but because the works are not signed, cannot be positively identified as such.
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Patrick H. Reason, Joshua Johnson, and Scipio Moorhead were among the earliest known portrait artists, from the period of 1773-1887. Patronage by some white families allowed for private tutoring in special cases. Many of these sponsoring whites were abolitionists.
Quilts as Storytelling: Harriet Powers and the Women of Gee's Bend
Harriet Powers (1837-1910) was an African-American folk artist and quilt maker from rural Georgia, born into enslavement. Now nationally recognized for her quilts, she used traditional appliqué techniques to combine local legends, African symbolism, Bible stories, and natural phenomena on her quilts. In her storytelling quilts she critically reflects her complex experience of the post-slavery United States.
Only two of her late quilts have survived: Bible Quilt 1886 and Bible Quilt 1898. Like Powers, the women of Gee's Bend developed a distinctive, bold and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African-American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity.
Quilt by Rosie Lee Moss of Gee's Bend
Although widely separated by geography, they have qualities reminiscent of Amish quilts and Modern art. The women of Gee's Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present.
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After the Civil War, it became increasingly acceptable for African-American-created works to be exhibited in museums, and painters and sculptors increasingly produced works for this purpose. These were works mostly in the European Romantic and Classical traditions of landscapes and portraits. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Edmonia Lewis are the most notable from this period.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Flourishing of Artistic Expression
Arts and Letters of the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History #26
The Harlem Renaissance refers to an enormous flourishing in African-American art of all kinds, including visual art and artistic communities during the 1920s. Notable artists in this period included Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, Lawrence Harris, Palmer Hayden, William H. Johnson, Sargent Johnson, John T. Biggers, and Augusta Savage.
Aaron Douglas's "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction"
William E. Harmon, an art patron and aficionado, established the Harmon Foundation in 1922, and it served as a large-scale patron of African-American art until 1967, generating interest in, and recognition for, artists who might have otherwise remained unknown.
The WPA Era: Art as a Means of Survival
President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, and that program succeeded at providing all American artists, and especially African-American artists, with a means to earn a living in a devastated economy. By the middle of the 1930s, more than 250,000 African Americans were involved with the WPA, including Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, sculptor William Artis; painter and children's book illustrator Ernest Crichlow, cartoonist and illustrator Elton C. Fax, and photographer Gordon Parks.
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Important cities with significant black populations and important African-American art circles included Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The WPA led to a new wave of important black art professors.
The Highwaymen: Painting the Florida Landscape
In the 1950s and 1960s, few African-American artists were widely known or accepted. Despite this, the Highwaymen, a loose association of 26 African-American artists from Fort Pierce, Florida, created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida landscape and peddled some 200,000 of them from the trunks of their cars.
In the 2004, the original group of 26 were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
The Civil Rights Movement and Beyond
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s led artists to capture and express the changing times. Galleries and community art centers developed for the purpose of displaying African-American art, and collegiate teaching positions were created by and for African-American artists.
By the 1980s and 1990s, hip-hop graffiti began to predominate in urban communities. Most major cities had developed museums devoted to African-American artists.
Kara Walker, a contemporary American artist, is known for her exploration of race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her artworks. Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South and are reminiscent of the earlier work of Harriet Powers. Her nightmarish yet fantastical images incorporate a cinematic feel.
Kara Walker at the opening of her show at the Walker Art Center
HBCUs: Nurturing Black Artistic Talent
Until the 1960s, colleges, art schools and galleries in the United States routinely rejected African-American applicants solely on the basis of their race. Legal segregation forced HBCUs to create opportunities for Black artists to be trained as well as to have their work exhibited and acquired.
The oldest HBCU in the United States is Cheyney University, founded in 1837 in Pennsylvania by Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys. In 1865, Congress enacted the Freedmen’s Bureau, which led to the federal chartering of institutions of higher education for newly emancipated Blacks.
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute Museum, now known as Hampton University Museum was the first HBCU to collect African-American art with its acquisition in 1894 of the oil paintings “The Banjo Lesson” and “Lion’s Head” by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937).
Howard University is a critical player in the history of African-American art because it is the first HBCU with an art department led and controlled by African-Americans. In addition to David C. Driskell, Howard University graduates include James A. Porter, Alma Thomas, Howard Freeman, and Elizabeth Catlett.
In 1931, celebrated artist and printmaker Hale A. Woodruff (1900-1980) established an art program at Atlanta University, now known as Clark-Atlanta University.
In 1996, the all-women’s Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia opened the first museum in the country dedicated to art by and about women of the African diaspora.
Five Exemplary Works by Black Artists
In celebration of the rich history of Black Americans in the arts, we’re reflecting on five artworks by historical and contemporary Black artists in the museum’s collection which visitors can currently see in our galleries.
Grafton Tyler Brown
Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) was one of only a few Black Americans who made a living as an artist before the 20th century, first as a topographic artist and a lithographer and later as a landscape painter.
Brown’s parents were freedmen living in Pennsylvania, but Brown decided to move West for greater freedom and opportunities in the 1850s, as many African Americans did. In the 1880s and 1890s, Brown traveled around the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, painting and selling images of his surroundings.
This serene scene of the Columbia River, titled Mitchell’s Point Looking Down the Columbia and on view in American Art: The Stories We Carry, depicts smooth, reflective water framed by rocky cliffs, rolling hills with patches of trees, and distant mountains.
Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage (1892-1962) studied sculpture in New York and Paris before opening her own art school in Harlem, New York in 1931. She was devoted to sharing her skills and resources with her students and mentored many young Black artists including Gwendolyn Knight, depicted here, and Knight’s husband Jacob Lawrence, both of whom would later live in Seattle.
This portrait depicts Knight in her early twenties with careful attention paid to her facial features and gracefully pulled up hair. Savage gifted this portrait bust to Knight, which she kept until her death in 2005 and bequeathed to the Seattle Art Museum, allowing this rare and fragile plaster work to survive while many of Savage’s other works did not.
James Washington Jr.
James Washington Jr. (1908-2000) saw his animal sculptures as deeply symbolic and resonant with his spiritual beliefs. Born the son of a Baptist minister in Mississippi, he brought these beliefs with him when he moved to the Seattle area in 1941 for a job at the Bremerton Navy Yard.
He felt that God was guiding him in his life and as an artist, calling him to create images that would communicate universality and truth about the world. His animal sculptures, such as Wounded Eagle No. 10 on view in Remember the Rain, showcase his close observations of the natural world, as well as his understanding of line, form, and medium.
Barbara Earl Thomas
In a striking and jarring confusion of black and white lines, Seattle-based artist Barbara Earl Thomas (born 1948) illustrates two related themes in this pair of linocut prints titled In Case of Fire and In Case of Flood on view in Remember the Rain.
These scenes of people dealing with apocalyptic disasters-fire and flood-draw from Biblical sources, but also from folklore, literature, and Thomas’s own family history and experiences. Rather than creating scenes of pure fantasy, Thomas describes her work as chronicling real narratives from the past and our present day, compelled by the economic and racial inequity she witnesses.
In a 2019 SAM Object of the Week blog post, Thomas was quoted as saying: “It is the chaos of living and the grief of our time that compels me, philosophically, emotionally, and artistically.
Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon’s (born 1960) Stranger in the Village (Excerpt), #7 renders a powerful text by civil rights activist and writer James Baldwin nearly invisible by stenciling the black type on a black background and coating it with coal dust.
On view in SAM’s modern and contemporary art galleries, the work’s unclear presentation of Baldwin’s words leaves viewers searching and straining to read the message. Baldwin’s essay published in 1955 recounts his visit to a remote Swiss village where he is the first and only Black person that many of the townspeople had ever met. In Ligon’s painting, the sense of hypervisibility that Baldwin describes becomes camouflaged and concealed.
Ongoing Celebrations: Black History Month Events
There are many ways to engage with and celebrate Black history and culture. Here are a few events:
- February 1-29Call to Conscience: Take a trip to the Columbia City Theater every Tuesday through Sunday this month to explore the Call to Conscience Black History Month Museum.
- Sundays in FebruaryBlack Ice: An American Sitcom Improvised: Unexpected Productions Improv wants you to be a part of their live studio audience every Sunday this month as they perform an improvised television sitcom inspired by Norman Lear’s iconic 1970s sitcoms.
- February 15Keynote Program with Dr. Doretha Williams: Our friends at the Northwest African American Museum are celebrating Black History Month with a keynote speech from Dr. Doretha Williams, Director of the Robert F. Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History.
- February 16-17BE Great Celebration: Celebrate Black Excellence at this free two-day event in Occidental Square hosted by the Downtown Seattle Association.
- February 24-March 9X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X: As Black History Month comes to a close, the Seattle Opera is tackling the story of Malcolm X’s life through a series of biographical vignettes.
