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 response to both historical and contemporary injustices, Black art gives voice to those previously silenced. At the same time, several art movements have celebrated the beauty and flourishing of Black culture. Notable movements include the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties, which revived African American music, art, writing, and scholarship. In the sixties and seventies, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) combined activism and art to invoke pride in Black history and culture. Though not predominantly arts-focused, the Black Lives Matter movement has led to large-scale murals and public artworks that at once protest police brutality and convey hope, solidarity, and a colorful reinvention of spaces. All this has come from a diverse history: from Romantic landscapes to bold abstraction.
Mural from Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction (1934), Aaron Douglas.
The Role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
Until the 1960s, colleges, art schools, and galleries in the United States routinely rejected African-American applicants solely based on 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.
What is relevant to this discussion is that the HBCUs used their limited resources to train Black artists; acquire work created by artists of African descent; and provide Black artists with professional guidance and support.
Artist and art historian David C. Driskell noted:
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“The HBCUs have not been given the credit they are due. When nobody else was out there championing these [Black] artists, HBCUs were there, claiming them, showcasing them, putting them up on walls, teaching about them.”
“Black Art: In the Absence of Light” was inspired by David C. Driskell’s (1931-2020) groundbreaking 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art.” Driskell’s exhibition was pivotal to correcting the narrative of American art history. The exhibition exposed the nation to several generations of African-American artists who had been systematically excluded from the American art canon. Moreover, Driskell’s exhibition allowed a younger generation of African-Americans to envision themselves as artists, curators, art historians and museum directors.
To be accurate, there were White Freedmen’s Bureau officials, White philanthropists and White art patrons present in both the establishment of HBCUs and in the history of African-American art. These participants had an array of social, religious, and political agendas that are beyond the scope of this article.
Arts and Letters of the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History #26
Influential Black Artists and Their Contributions
Art tends to have two effects on us when we view it. The first is the purely aesthetic, the heart-wrenching power of seeing something novel, beautiful, frightening, or unexpected. From breaking down barriers to establishing new cultural canons, these artists have pioneered the portrayal of Black experience in the United States through works that do all of the above: inspiring wonder, hope, and shock in equal volumes.
Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872)
Robert S. Duncanson was a landscape painter whose work frequently depicted rivers and lakes against glowing, golden sunsets. Associated with both the Hudson River School and the Ohio River Valley tradition, he was the first African American artist to become known internationally. He had no formal training and taught himself by using other artists’ works as reference and sketching outside. His most famous work, Land of the Lotus Eaters, has a mythical and Romantic feel.
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Mary Edmonia Lewis (c. 1844 - 1907)
Also known by her Native American name, Wildfire, Mary Edmonia Lewis was the first professional African American and Native American sculptor. She grew up in New York then went to college in Ohio but was met with hostility and racism, being accused of several crimes before leaving. She found a teacher who helped her learn sculpture and launched a successful career, making sculptures and busts of abolitionists. However, the praise she received often felt insincere, and she worried about being taken advantage of. Relocating to Rome, she found more artistic and spiritual freedom, and her career solidified.
Forever Free (1867), Edmonia Lewis.
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pennsylvania to a bishop and abolitionist father and lived near artist Robert Douglass Jr. who inspired him to become a painter. He went to the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts and studied anatomy intensively. Later, he traveled to Paris, where art circles were more open, and he grew a strong reputation in France. He painted portraits, seascapes, and increasingly religious works and became internationally acclaimed.
James Van Der Zee (1886-1983)
Photographer James Van Der Zee was born in Massachusetts and early on displayed keen musical talent, although by his teenage years he had also built a darkroom in his parent’s house. He moved around New York and New Jersey before settling in Harlem. Van Der Zee founded an art and music conservatory with his sister, and later a photography studio with his wife. Throughout the twenties and thirties he became well-known, photographing celebrities and his Harlem neighbors alike.
Alma Thomas (1891-1978)
Alma Thomas was born in Georgia to a dress designer and a businessman. After moving to Washington following the Atlanta race riots, she was able to access art classes for the first time. She went on to study fine art at Howard University, where some sources claim she was the first woman in America to earn a Bachelor’s in art. She taught in a school until retirement but continued to study sculpture and painting, developing her signature style with abstract expressionist and color field influences. Going on to create a number of bright collections, she exhibited her work around the country, finding fame at the age of eighty.
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Augusta Savage (1892-1962)
This iconic sculptor loved to make things from childhood, and after taking a clay modeling class, her passion was cemented. She was awarded a scholarship in New York and completed her four-year course in only three. However, Savage was continuously discriminated against and rejected from further art studies or was unable to afford the high living expenses. Nonetheless, her sculptures became recognized and she received commissions from prominent social figures. Her community raised funds for her, and finally, she was able to attend a school in Paris. On returning to the US, she ran workshops and contributed to the early careers of many significant artists. As her work was often clay or plaster, much of it is missing or has been damaged.
Augusta Savage with her sculpture, Realization (1938).
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)
Another figurehead of the Harlem Renaissance, in his early years Aaron Douglas took art classes and later went to the University of Nebraska to study Fine Art. He came to Harlem during the height of the Renaissance, where he painted murals and became an art editor and illustrator, bringing attention to racial injustices of the time through his work. His murals became noteworthy and he was commissioned on several large projects. Keen to see young Black artists prosper, Douglas was involved in the Harlem Artists Guild and towards the end of his career, he founded a new art department for Fisk University in Tennessee, where he taught until retirement.
Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
Known for photojournalism, Gordon Parks also directed major films that told the stories of slaves and mistreated Black Americans. He was born to a farming family in Kansas and his early life was deeply affected by segregation and limited opportunities. Still, he taught himself photography skills and quickly caught the eye of photography clerks, who helped him find work. He ended up in Chicago, photographing socialites, fashion, and portraits. He joined the FSA (Farm Security Administration) to document the lives of poor communities. One of his best-known photographs, American Gothic, shows a cleaner named Ella Watson standing in front of the American flag with a mop.
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)
Referring to his style as “dynamic cubism”, fused with the aesthetics of Harlem, Jacob Lawrence was a painter known for his use of bright colors. After living in foster care and then reconnecting with his mother in Harlem, Jacob attended classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, where he worked with Augusta Savage. His work mixed stories of the African American struggle during the Great Depression, with bold color and striking shapes. He created long series of paintings to tell stories, such as the "Migration Series", where he showed Black Americans moving away from the rural South.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
Part of the Neo-expressionist movement, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career had a global impact on the art world. After struggling at school, he and his friend Al Diaz formed a graffiti duo around an invented character, SAMO. He joined a band, created art prolifically, and upcycled clothing. After his first successful exhibitions, Basquiat quickly gained recognition, befriended fellow artists such as Andy Warhol, and acquired a worldwide art dealer.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural Explosion
The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and interest in the rapidly changing modern world-many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the first time.
While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts-pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar-sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) is known as the “father of African American art.” He defined a modern visual language that represented black Americans in a new light. Douglas began his artistic career as a landscape painter but was influenced by modern art movements such as cubism, in which subjects appear fragmented and fractured, and by the graphic arts, which typically use bold colors and stylized forms. He and other artists also looked toward West Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as a link to their African heritage. They also turned to the art of antiquity, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of popular interest due to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902-1993) and Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) also explored a streamlined approach that drew from African and European artistic influences.
Sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) worked in a realistic style, representing his subjects in a nuanced and sympathetic light in which black Americans had seldom been depicted before.
Painter Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891-1981) began his career during the 1920s as one of the first African American graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the early part of his career, he created intimate and direct portraits, such as Portrait of My Grandmother of 1922.
James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), a photographer, became the unofficial chronicler of African American life in Harlem. Whether through formal, posed family photographs in his studio or through photo essays of Harlem’s cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, diverse, and thriving community.
The Great Migration and its Impact
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 Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance
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.
In conclusion, from realism to abstraction, these artists and many, many more have explored and brought awareness to the issues of their time, and expressed each of their unique experiences of the world they lived in.
Resources for Further Exploration
- The Obsidian Collection: A user-friendly, virtual portal for Black culture providing access to images of historical, artistic, and cultural significance gathered from Black newspapers, photographers, archives, and community groups from around the country.
- Art.com Black Art Collection: Includes thousands of works by Black artists, as well as photos and paintings depicting important figures from Black history.
- Afrekete Digital Humanities Project: A freely available search hub for digital materials (still and moving images, sound, text) in African American history and culture.
Below is a selection of books to further explore the world of African American art and photography:
- I Can Make You Feel Good by Tyler Mitchell
- The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion by Antwaun Sargent
- My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South
Which of these artworks is your favorite?
