African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans, encompassing a diverse range of themes and media. Some artists draw inspiration from cultural traditions in Africa and the Black diaspora, while others address issues of American Blackness. Like their peers, African-American artists also work in an array of media, including painting, print-making, collage, assemblage, drawing, and sculpture.
The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Their themes are similarly varied, although many also address, or feel they must address, issues of American Blackness. A part of this media can include physical designs found within the home.
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.
The construction and decoration of the Janson House, built on the Hudson River in 1712, was the work of African-Americans. 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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During enslavement, black artists resisted its dehumanization and brutality. South Carolina potter, David Drake, wrote poems on his large vessels that not only identified him as a master of his craft, but also as literate during a time when it was illegal for black people to know how to read.
Another enslaved man who resisted was Frederick Douglass, who escaped bondage and freed himself. He was the most photographed man of the nineteenth century and coupled with his gripping autobiography, he made the case for the abolition of slavery.
Edmonia Lewis, a free woman from New York of African and Native descent, sculpted Forever Free (1867) to commemorate the event. The gleaming white, marble sculpture consists of two African American figures: a kneeling woman and a standing man holding shackles.
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.
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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. 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.
After slavery ended, the United States had a difficult time accepting black people’s freedom. There were debates about the proper role of black people in American society. Some white people could not imagine black people in any role other than as slaves. During this period there was a proliferation of images of black people as subhuman and in subservient roles. Blackface minstrelsy was also popular and trafficked in harmful stereotypes of black people.
Subverting these images was the goal of black image makers during this period. They wanted to produce images that showed the inherent dignity of black people. NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois championed an art that could be propaganda to ameliorate conditions for black people in the United States. He commissioned images from Thomas E. Askew that would be like positive advertising, casting black people as human, rather than the racist caricatures seen in popular media. James Van Der Zee’s images function similarly.
The effect of having dehumanizing images of black people in the public imaginary goes beyond superficial public relations. Systematically dehumanizing black people led to their deaths. As such, the extrajudicial murders of black people were common in the United States South.
As recorded in historical statistics of the United States, “Between 1901 and 1929, more than 1,200 African Americans were lynched in the South. Forty-one percent of these lynchings occurred in two exceptionally violent states: Georgia (250) and Mississippi (245).” [3] A bill introduced in April 1918 called for legal and financial ramifications for lynch mobs. The NAACP supported bill failed to gain support and was not passed. As recently as 2021, anti-lynching bills have been brought before the United States’ Senate with no success: senators failed to pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act until 2022.
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Lawrence’s painting addresses the ways in which some black people survived in the face of that trauma: through migration to urban areas in the northern and western United States, often facing similar racist circumstances. Lawrence’s sixty-panel series outlines the causes and effects of the Great Migration, which included economic and social factors. The searing painting depicts a seated, solitary figure with his back turned to the viewer. A noose hangs on a forlorn, barren bough above him.
Extrajudicial killings of black people still occur with shocking frequency. The high-profile 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman (and his subsequent acquittal) initiated the rallying cry and movement “Black Lives Matter.” Michael Brown’s 2014 murder by Ferguson police also propelled the movement forward. However, 2020 was a flashpoint with the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd causing protestors to take to the street in droves in cities across the United States. Corporations pledged money and promises of racial equity within their ranks. Quaker, in particular, pledged to stop using Aunt Jemima as a branding image and changed its name to Pearl Milling Company, while also donating millions to social justice efforts.
Like their mid-century counterparts, contemporary artists continue to respond to these tragedies. Amy Sherald painted a portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair in 2020 and donated the proceeds to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates. In Sherald’s portrait we see an ethereal Taylor in a luxurious blue gown that Sherald commissioned for the painting.
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance refers to an enormous flourishing in African-American art of all kinds, including visual art. 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.
ART in NY! The HARLEM RENAISSANCE with @CydBee🎨 👧🏿 | Odd One Out | Google Arts & Culture
The formation of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by the Great Migration-the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the continental United States, mainly from rural Southern regions to more populous urban centers in the North. Pursuit of jobs, better education, and housing-as well as escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism-drove black Americans to relocate.
The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Yet the Harlem Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades.
Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Project (1935-1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Further, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC) in 1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered hands-on art making led by professional artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC was critical in providing black artists continued support and training that helped sustain the next generation of artists to emerge after the war.
In subsequent decades, the Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid critical groundwork for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement.
The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement was a Black nationalism movement that focused on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts made up of Black artists and intellectuals. The Black Arts Movement started in 1965 when poet Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones] established the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, New York, as a place for artistic expression.
Artists associated with this movement include Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, James Baldwin, Gil Scott-Heron, and Thelonious Monk.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, artists were inspired 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. Some African-American women were also active in the feminist art movement in the 1970s.
Contemporary Themes and Artists
Throughout the racial trauma and continued subjugation during the 20th century, black people have been able to cultivate moments of deep introspection and searing critique about their place in the United States using some of the very modes of visual derision white people have used against them. Some of those modes include stereotypes of black people, such as the mammy, the pickaninny, and the sambo, but their appropriation is satirical. In their original formats, as cartoons, memorabilia, and so forth, these caricatures of black people serve to mock and dehumanize, but black artists have found them to be powerful means of critiquing white supremacy.
As part of a racial reckoning in 2020, municipalities began to examine the place of Confederate monuments in the memorial landscape. For black people, these monuments are sobering reminders of those who wanted black people to remain in bondage. The Confederates honored in the monuments were essentially traitors, but somehow, they are enshrined within American history as heroes. Ironically, the army that the Confederates fought against named several military bases after these seditious Confederates. These bases are currently in the process of being renamed.
The majority of Confederate monuments were not raised in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but were erected decades later as rebellious symbols meant to quell civil rights activism and keep black people in their place.
Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War (2019) addresses this history with an equestrian portrait of a black man. Wiley is known for his large-scale portraits of black people that rewrite art histories by placing the black figure in compositions normally reserved for the white elite. In Rumors of War he is again placing the black figure in a space he would not ordinarily occupy.
Memorials are one way of reckoning with a violent and tumultuous past. Remembering figures, such as abolitionists, like Harriet Tubman in Alison Saar’s Swing Low (2008), we are not only remembering but also forging a path forward into the future in her likeness.
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. In 2007, Walker was listed among Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in The World, Artists and Entertainers".
Walker modeled the figure’s body after the ancient Egyptian Sphinx: she reclines on all fours, her rear end propped up exposing her labia. The pose is suggestive and explicit. One hand holds a fig pose, which is tantamount to a middle finger in some cultures. The gleaming white sculpture belies the blackness of the broad nose and thick lips. The unabashed nudity (save for kerchief on her head) suggests the sexual economies of slavery that placed black women in vulnerable positions for enslavers to abuse them.
Walker’s “Sugar Baby,” no doubt, enthralled its viewers. The pendulous breasts, ample derriere, and larger than life labia led some viewers to photograph themselves simulating sexualized poses. Those viewers mockingly reinscribed the same racist scripts of slavery’s sexual domination of black women. The afterlives of slavery is a term I borrow from theorist Saidiya Hartman that describes the ways in which the effects of slavery still function as a life-altering force for African Americans.
The Flag as a Symbol
For many citizens, primarily those who are white, of the United States, the flag is a potent symbol of liberty and freedom. However, for African Americans that same symbol is loaded with conflict and an unsettled relationship to citizenship in the United States. African American artists have used the flag, not as a symbol of liberty and freedom, but as a symbol of a cruel despot.
Faith Ringgold does this eloquently in several works over the course of her career, such as The Flag is Bleeding (1997). In each instance, Ringgold is addressing the promises of citizenship (granted only in 1868 by the 14th amendment) to African Americans that has been denied through de jure racial segregation and subsequent de facto racist policies.
Another artist who uses the flag of the United States as a symbol of a despot is David Hammons. In America the Beautiful (1968) and Boy with Flag (1968) (among others), Hammons combines his signature body prints with the stars and stripes of the United States’s flag. The latter composition tells the narrative of Black Panther co-founder, Bobby Seale, who was barbarically bound and gagged in a courtroom trial to keep him from speaking out in his own defense.
The restrained, body-printed figure is surrounded by a flag that not only provides a visual constraint to the body, but also an ideological one. Hammons’s many flag images culminate with African American Flag (1990), in which the artist replaces the red, white, and blue of the flag with the red, black, and green of the Pan-African flag. African American Flag encapsulates the syncretism of black people’s cultural and political investment in Pan-Africanism in the United States.
The reason black artists have come to symbolize the flag as an enemy is because of centuries of legal bondage and its long aftermath. While the founding fathers enshrined liberty and freedom into the United States’s founding documents, it was a spurious promise for African Americans.
Urban Art and Community Engagement
The community mural movement of the 1960s is defined by a spirit of creative collaboration and political resistance. The social and political landscape of the 1960s was shaped by powerful movements for social justice, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Chicano Movement. The social fervor that drew artists to the streets was the crucible that led to the formation of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in 1976.
One of the earliest examples of community muralism is The Wall of Respect in Chicago’s South Side, a public artwork that emerged out of a collaborative effort between black artists, including the prolific muralist William “Bill” Walker (1927-2011). The Wall of Respect painted portraits of black leaders and icons onto a building marked for demolition during Chicago’s Urban Renewal initiative in the 1960s.
The community in South Side Chicago rallied to protect both the mural and their neighborhood from demolition for several years, and it became a community space for gathering, for painting, for performances, and for honoring identity.
