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. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world where the Black diaspora is found, for inspiration. Like their peers, African-American artists also work in an array of media, including painting, print-making, collage, assemblage, drawing, sculpture and more. Their themes are similarly varied, although many also address, or feel they must address, issues of American Blackness.
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. In the mid-18th century, John Bush was a powder horn carver and soldier with the Massachusetts militia fighting with the British in the French and Indian War. Patronage by some white families allowed for private tutoring in special cases. Many of these sponsoring whites were abolitionists.
Historian Aston Gonzalez’s Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century extends the prehistory of the Black Arts movement-as well as the Harlem Renaissance- to a critical period in the middle of the nineteenth century, when imagery was central to the fight against slavery. Black artists engaged in the nation’s first civil rights movement produced engravings, photographs, and moving panoramas. Few Black visual artists could reach a mass audience in the 1850s. By carefully examining their lives and work, with close attention to the media they chose, the author illuminates a vital period in the development of African American visual culture.
Some, such as William Wells Brown and Henry Box Brown, drew on their own experiences of enslavement to authenticate the narratives they depicted. Others, born in freedom, such as Robert Douglass, Jr., Augustus Washington, and Patrick Henry Reason, drew upon social connections and training in the visual arts to draw the public eye towards the struggles and the successes of African Americans. All of them were part of activist networks supporting abolition and civil rights.
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To confront the prevailing racist imagery of the day, Black artists had to work on more than one front. Early photographic portraits of prominent African American clergy, business leaders, and musicians, for instance, celebrated Black achievement. But they had to be circulated (at a time when photographs were not reproducible) in order to counter the racist “Bobolition” and “Amalgamation” prints popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Robert Douglass, Jr., a trained daguerreotypist, for example, produced a photographic portrait (since lost) of composer and musician Frank Johnson, posed with his horn. But he also produced a lithograph of the image. “From an activist’s standpoint, greater circulation meant the likelihood that more people would be receptive to the image’s ideas about black success and intellect,” Gonzalez writes (81).
Other artists, such as Henry Box Brown, William Wells Brown, and James Presley Ball, embraced panoramas as a means of visual depicting the horrors of slavery. The precursor to cinematic storytelling, moving panoramas were produced by teams of artists using a series of large canvases displayed in sequence, contiguously, producing the effect of moving through a landscape while a narrator described the scene. William Wells Brown was inspired to try the medium after seeing one of the most popular panoramas of the day, by John Banvard, with its bucolic scenes of plantation life along the Mississippi. Instead of peaceful rolling landscapes, “[William Wells] Brown inverted the focus from landscape to black bodies and enslavement” (122). While the panoramas themselves have not survived, reviews of them did, and in many cases so did booklets produced by the creators to supplement their production with documentary evidence and narratives. While showing audiences scenes of southern plantations, for instance, William Wells Brown detailed the grueling work of cotton-picking, cane-cutting, and sugar-boiling and depicted the harrowing experiences of those who tried to escape.
Although photographs could be made in mobile studios and reproduced cheaply during the war, Black photographers and printmakers did not play the prominent role that Matthew Brady and his white colleagues did in documenting the conflict in the South. Gonzalez identifies a particularly intriguing portrait, though, by James Presley Ball, of an unidentified woman and the two Union soldiers who helped her escape Kentucky after she had fled to Union lines. The young woman is seated in a hat and shawl while the men stand on either side of her holding their revolvers to their chests. According to Gonzalez, their pose “captured the liminal state of freedom of the African American woman”(179). This image hints at the public self-fashioning that photography and the proliferation of photograph studios allowed all Americans during and after the war, and even more so with the invention arrival of the inexpensive Kodak “Brownie” camera in 1900camera.
Still, Black artists and cultural producers continued their political work. W.E.B. Du Bois’s collection of photographs for the Paris Exhibition of 1900 is one of the most familiar examples of a Black visionary harnessing visual culture for political purposes at the turn of the twentieth century.
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. Others include Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, a female artist who, like Edmonia Lewis, was a sculptor, as well as Grafton Tyler Brown and Nelson A.
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The goal of widespread recognition across racial boundaries was first eased within America's big cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York, and New Orleans. Even in these places, however, there were discriminatory limitations. Abroad, however, African Americans were much better received. In Europe - especially Paris, France - these artists were freer to experiment with techniques outside traditional western art.
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.
History Brief: The Harlem Renaissance
The Harmon Foundation and the WPA
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 Harmon Award and the annual "Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists" further contributed to the support, as did the William E. Harmon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes, which although not limited to visual artists was awarded to several of them, including Hale Woodruff, Palmer Hayden and Archibald Motley.
Treasury Department's Public Works of Art Project was attempting to provide support for artists in 1933, but their efforts proved ineffective. 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.
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. Mixed media, abstract art, cubism, and social realism became not only acceptable, but desirable. Artists of the WPA united to form the 1935 Harlem Artists Guild, which developed community art facilities in major cities. Leading forms of art included drawing, sculpture, printmaking, painting, pottery, quilting, weaving and photography. In 1939, however, the costly WPA and its projects all were terminated.
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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 1950s and 1960s, it was impossible to find galleries interested in selling artworks by a group of unknown, self-taught African Americans, so they sold their art directly to the public rather than through galleries and art agents. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, they are recognized today as an important part of American folk history, and the current market price for an original Highwaymen painting can easily bring in thousands of dollars.
Some African-American artists did make it into important New York galleries by the 1950s and 1960s: Horace Pippin, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Hunt, William T. Williams, Norman Lewis, Thomas Sills, and Sam Gilliam were among the few who had successfully been received in a gallery setting. Richard Hunt was the first African American visual artist to serve on the National Council on the Arts, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Hunt was the fourth African American on the council, after Marian Anderson, Ralph Ellison, and Duke Ellington.
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. Some African-American women were also active in the feminist art movement in the 1970s. 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.
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.
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".
Influential contemporary artists include Larry D. Alexander, Laylah Ali, Amalia Amaki, Emma Amos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dawoud Bey, Camille Billops, Mark Bradford, Edward Clark, Willie Cole, Robert Colescott, Louis Delsarte, David Driskell, Leonardo Drew, Melvin Edwards, Ricardo Francis, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Herbert Gentry, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Jerry Harris, Joseph Holston, Richard Hunt, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Katie S. Mallory, M. Scott Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Joe Lewis, Glenn Ligon, James Little, Edward L. Loper Sr., Alvin D. Loving, Kerry James Marshall, Eugene J. Martin, Richard Mayhew, Sam Middleton, Howard McCalebb, Charles McGill, Thaddeus Mosley, Sana Musasama, Senga Nengudi, Joe Overstreet, Martin Puryear, Adrian Piper, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Gale Fulton Ross, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, John Solomon Sandridge, Raymond Saunders, John T. Scott, Joyce Scott, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Renee Stout, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Stanley Whitney, William T. Williams, Jack Whitten, Fred Wilson, Richard Wyatt Jr., Richard Yarde, and Purvis Young, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Barkley Hendricks, Jeff Sonhouse, William Walker, Ellsworth Ausby, Che Baraka, Emmett Wigglesworth, Otto Neals, Dindga McCannon, Terry Dixon (artist), Frederick J.
Many American museums hold works by African-American artists, including Smithsonian American Art Museum Colleges and universities with important collections include Fisk University, Spelman College and Howard University. Other important collections of African-American art include the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, the Paul R. Jones collections at the University of Delaware and University of Alabama, the David C.
Alison Saar, Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial, dedicated November 13, 2008. 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. Saar intended for the memorial to inspire future generations with Tubman’s heroic deeds. Tubman is shown striding forward, pulling at the roots attached to her skirt. The front of her skirt is fashioned after a cattle pusher on a locomotive. So, she is likened to a machine pulling at the roots of slavery. Her skirt also has images of faces, footprints, and objects that would have been carried by fugitives.
Being a artist requires talent, but, for the African-American artists, talent is not always enough. In nineteenth century America, race often determined who could be trained in the arts. There were no special schools or places where African-Americans could freely exhibit their talents. These talented artists were excluded from the academies, associations, and teaching institutions available to white artists. In rare cases, beneficent white families broke the rules and provided knowledge, direction, and resources to budding African-American talents in the arts.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural Explosion
In the early 1920's there was a movement was called the "Negro" or "Harlem Renaissance". This resurgence of literature, knowledge, and the arts coming out of New York was powerful. A fertile and acceptable door had been opened to African-American musicians, writers, poets, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and visual artists. The opportunity was now available to grow and show off their best talents. From 1919 to about 1929, Harlem, New York became the capitol of cultural activity for African-Americans. This period in American history was extremely uplifting to African-Americans as a people. Personalities and individuals connected their expressions in writings, music, and visual artworks as they related to the political, social, and economic conditions of being black in America.
One of the best speakeasies in Harlem was the Cotton Club, a place that intended to have the look and feel of a luxurious Southern plantation. To complete the theme, only African-American entertainers could perform there, while only white clientele (with few exceptions) were allowed to patronize the establishment. This attracted high-powered celebrity visitors such as Cole Porter, Bing Crosby and Doris Duke to see the most talented black entertainers of the day. Attending clubs in Harlem allowed whites from New York and its surrounding areas to indulge in two taboos simultaneously: to drink, as well as mingle with blacks.
Jazz musicians often performed in these clubs, exposing white clientele to what was typically an African-American form of musical entertainment. As jazz hit the mainstream, many members of older generations began associating the raucous behavior of young people of the decade with jazz music.
By 1926, another stage in the developmental history of African-American visual artists came about. It was the establishment of the Harmon Foundation. The Harmon Foundation became an anchor for promoting the works of African-American artists. William E. Harmon, a real estate magnate, became the chief philanthropist and patron in the support of African-American artists and culture. Harmon's interest in African-American artists reflected "his interest in promoting justice and social commitment." The "deprivation of black Americans, he reasoned, was a national problem, not simply a burden on blacks alone." The Harmon Foundation existed from 1922 to the end of 1967.
The 1940's and 1950's were not easy times for the African-American artists. Only the acceptable, critically acclaimed few were able to work and produce lucrative pieces of art. Patrons of the arts were still mostly white and wealthy. Artists like the Florida "Highwaymen" found an unique way to sell and display their art, by producing in mass quantities and selling their artwork on the side of the road.
Thornton Dial's art functions like folk tales, combining African and American traditions to tell stories that are at once personal, political, and spiritual.
The Role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
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. 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. 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.
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). The African-American art holdings of Hampton University Museum increased in 1967 when the Harmon Foundation gave the museum numerous works by Harlem Renaissance artists. In 1984, the Hampton University Museum acquired the Countee and Ida Cullen collection. Countee Cullen was a leading Harlem Renaissance poet who financially supported his friends by purchasing their artworks. The Cullen collection includes work by Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden, and Hale Woodruff. The museum’s art collection also includes works by Elizabeth Catlett, John T.
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 1921, Harvard University graduate, James V. Herring (1887-1969), was hired as an instructor in Howard University’s department of architecture. A year later, in 1922, Herring fulfilled his true intention and established Howard University’s art department. His first hire in 1926/7 was Howard graduate, James A.
It is important to place the development of Howard University’s art department into historical context. In 1925, Howard University philosophy professor, Dr. Alain L. Locke, published the anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation to explain the burgeoning New Negro Movement (1919-1930). The New Negro Movement, promoted Negro artists looking to Africa, rather than to Europe for inspiration and artistic direction. Locke was lauded as the father of the Harlem Renaissance and subsequently, Howard University became “The Mecca” for artists and intellectuals of African descent. In 1930, Herring launched an art gallery on Howard University’s campus. The gallery was the first HBCU art gallery founded and curated by African-Americans.
James V. Artist and Howard University professor, James A. Porter (1905-1970), is often called the father of African-American art history. Inspired by a brief article he read about 19th century landscape artist, Robert Scott Duncanson, he began researching other forgotten or ignored Negro artists. In 1935, Porter received a fellowship to study medieval architecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. Modern Negro Art was the first comprehensive text on African-American art. Porter firmly placed Negro artists who had been erased from history within the American art canon. Modern Negro Art became the benchmark for subsequent scholarship on African-American art history and remains a relevant source.
In 1931, celebrated artist and printmaker Hale A. Woodruff (1900-1980) established an art program at Atlanta University, now known as Clark-Atlanta University. Woodruff hired celebrated artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960) to teach sculpture. By the mid-1930s, Atlanta University was regarded by many as the leading institution in the American South for Negroes to study art. In the late 1930s to early 1940s, the stature of Atlanta University’s art department rose as a result of Woodruff’s increased fame. By 1942, Woodruff was regarded as both an important Negro artist and a distinguished Negro art department chairman. Woodruff again drew on his experience as a participant in the Harmon Foundation’s exhibition and, in 1942, instituted The Atlanta University Annual Exhibitions of Paintings, Sculpture, and Prints by Negro Artists in America. The Atlanta Annual was the first exhibition of its kind sponsored by an HBCU.
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. In 2020, art collector and businessman George Wells donated 8 works by contemporary African-American artists valued at $1 million to Morehouse College, his alma mater. Morehouse didn’t have a permanent art collection. Wells, a 2000 graduate, stated that his gift will help Morehouse educate more people about contemporary art which will assist in diversifying the art world.
| Artist | Notable Achievement |
|---|---|
| Henry Ossawa Tanner | First African-American artist to earn international acclaim |
| Aaron Douglas | Known as the "father of African American art" |
| James A. Porter | Often called the father of African-American art history for his comprehensive text "Modern Negro Art" |
| Kara Walker | Contemporary artist known for her exploration of race, gender, and identity |
This historical journey through African American art reveals a narrative of resilience, creativity, and cultural significance. From the early works of enslaved craftsmen to the groundbreaking contributions of contemporary artists, African Americans have consistently used art as a powerful medium for expression, resistance, and celebration of their unique experiences.
Detail of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by Augusta Savage
