African American Art in Permanent Gallery Collections in Chicago
Explore a selection of works by African American artists included in the drove of the National Gallery of Art. Choose from the images below to view paintings, photographs, works on newspaper, and sculpture ranging from a still-life painting by
Higher up: Jacob Lawrence,
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Collection Highlights: African American Artists Joshua Johnson, The Westwood Children, c. 1807, oil on canvas, Souvenir of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1959.eleven.ane Joshua Johnson is America's earliest-known professional person African American creative person. Few details of his life are known. The son of an enslaved black woman and a white man, Johnson was born into slavery around 1763. A Baltimore County record from 1782 lists Johnson as an apprentice to a local blacksmith and states that he was to be freed within ii years. In 1798 and 1802, Johnson advertised his painting practice in local newspapers, describing himself every bit a "self-taught genius." Some scholars have suggested that Johnson was influenced by the Peale family of painters in Baltimore, particularly Charles Peale Polk. Kickoff in the late 1700s, Johnson began to receive portrait commissions from prominent Baltimore-area families, including the Westwood family unit depicted here. More than 80 portraits accept now been attributed to Johnson. In this painting, the three Westwood brothers take only come within with freshly gathered flowers and cherries. Accompanying them is the family dog, who firmly grasps a bird captured on their outdoor circuit. The brothers vesture matching trouser suits, fashionable for male children at the time. The younger children, Henry and George, clasp hands, while their older brother, John, extends a protective arm behind them. Johnson'south sympathetic pose of the iii boys makes their brotherly human relationship the subject area of this portrait.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Robert Seldon Duncanson, Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, 1848, oil on board, Gift of Ann and Mark Kington/The Kington Foundation and the Avalon Fund, 2011.98.one African American artist Robert Seldon Duncanson was widely recognized during his lifetime for pastoral landscapes of American, Canadian, and European scenery. Recent scholarship, withal, has begun to focus on a small group of however-life paintings (fewer than a dozen are known) that Duncanson produced during the late 1840s. Spare, elegant, and meticulously painted, these works reverberate the tradition of American still-life painting initiated past Charles Willson Peale and his gifted children—particularly Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale. Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, signed and dated 1848, is a classically composed piece of work with fruit bundled in a tabletop pyramid. The painting includes remarkable passages juxtaposing the smooth surfaces of beautifully rendered apples with the textured shells of scattered basics. The artist's plow from still-life subjects to the landscapes for which he is better known may have been inspired past Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life; Cole's series was exhibited in Cincinnati, where Duncanson lived in 1848. Duncanson shortly began painting landscapes that incorporated signature elements from Cole and oft conveyed moral messages. Following the outbreak of the Ceremonious War, Duncanson traveled to Canada, where he remained until departing for Europe in 1865. Often described as the first African American artist to achieve an international reputation, Duncanson enjoyed considerable success exhibiting his landscapes abroad.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Seine, c. 1902, oil on canvas, Souvenir of the Avalon Foundation, 1971.57.1 Painted 11 years after Henry Ossawa Tanner get-go settled in Paris in 1891, this speedily executed plein-air oil sketch is one of the creative person'southward rare depictions of the French capital. His vantage point is from the right bank of the Seine looking w toward the towers of the Palais du Trocadéro, the exhibition hall built for the 1878 World's Fair. A diffuse, hazy lite fills the scene, which is gratis of human activeness save for a solitary effigy dressed in black at the lower correct. With short, loose brushstrokes laden with paint, Tanner captured the scattered reflections of lite across both river and sky. This small, evocative painting possesses the mood and mystery that are characteristic of the artist'south better-known religious subjects. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts nether Thomas Eakins. Although Tanner achieved some success equally a painter in the United States, he left for Europe as a immature human being to escape racial prejudice. Tanner spent about of his professional person career in France, where he exhibited paintings at the Paris Salon and in expositions.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Aaron Douglas, Into Chains, 1936, oil on canvas, Corcoran Drove (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Collection), 2014.79.17 Into Bondage is a powerful delineation of enslaved Africans bound for the Americas. Shackled figures with their heads hung low walk solemnly toward slave ships on the horizon. In a gesture of despair, a alone woman at left raises her spring hands, guiding the viewer's eye to the ships. Yet even in this grave image of oppression, in that location is hope. Concentric circles—a motif frequently employed by Aaron Douglas to suggest sound, specially African and African American song—radiate from a point on the horizon. The male person figure in the heart pauses on the slave block, his face turned toward a beam of calorie-free emanating from a lone star in the softly colored sky, perchance suggesting the Due north Star. The man's silhouette breaches the horizon line in a sign of strength and promise. In 1936, Douglas was deputed to create a serial of murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Installed in the elegant entrance lobby of the Hall of Negro Life, his four completed paintings charted the journey of African Americans from slavery to the present. Considered a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural phenomenon that promoted African and African American culture every bit a source of pride and inspiration, Douglas was an inspiring selection for the project. The Hall of Negro Life, which opened on Juneteenth (June 19), a vacation celebrating the end of slavery, was visited by more 400,000 fairgoers over the form of the v months that the exposition was open to the public. This commemoration of abolition, and the landscape cycle in item, served every bit a disquisitional acknowledgment of African American contributions to state and federal progress. Unfortunately, of the four original paintings, only two—Into Bondage and Aspiration (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)—remain.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1 In 1927 James Weldon Johnson, a primal figure in what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, published his masterwork, God's Trombones: 7 Negro Sermons in Verse. Inspired past African American preachers whose eloquent orations he viewed as an art form, Johnson sought to interpret into verse not but the biblical parables that served as the subjects of the sermons, but likewise the passion with which they were delivered—the cadence and rhythm of the inspirational language. Identifying black preachers as God'southward instruments on globe, or "God'south trombones," Johnson celebrated a cardinal chemical element of traditional black culture. Years before the publication of his poems, while traveling through the Midwest equally a field organizer for the NAACP, Johnson witnessed a gifted black preacher rouse a congregation drifting toward sleep. Summoning his oratorical powers, the preacher abandoned his prepared text, stepped downwardly from the pulpit, and delivered—indeed, performed—an impassioned sermon. Impressed by what he had seen, Johnson made notes on the spot, but he did not translate the feel into sermon-poems until several years later. Upon publication, God's Trombones attracted considerable attention—not only for Johnson'south poesy, but also for the astonishing illustrations that accompanied the poems. Created by Aaron Douglas, a immature African American creative person who had recently settled in Harlem, the images were an early manifestation of a compositional style that would later become synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance. Drawn by the cultural excitement stirring in Harlem during the mid-1920s, Douglas arrived in New York in 1925. He soon became a student of Winold Reiss, a German-born artist and illustrator and early proponent of European modernism in America. Information technology was Reiss who encouraged Douglas to study African art also as the compositional and tonal innovations of the European modernists. Before long, illustrations by Douglas began appearing in The Crisis, the NAACP publication edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity: The Periodical of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League. Impressed by these illustrations, James Weldon Johnson asked Douglas to illustrate his forthcoming book of poems, God's Trombones. On brusque deadline, Douglas created eight assuming and unmistakably modern images that clearly reflect the influence of Reiss too as the creative person's shut study of African art. Several years after the publication of God'south Trombones, Douglas began translating the eight illustrations he had created to accompany Johnson's poems into big oil paintings. The Judgment Day, the final painting in the series of eight, was the commencement work past Douglas to enter the Gallery'southward collection. At the center of the composition a powerful blackness Gabriel stands astride earth and bounding main. With a trumpet phone call, the archangel summons the nations of the world to judgment.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Horace Pippin,School Studies, 1944, oil on canvas, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin, in Honor of the 50th Ceremony of the National Gallery of Art, 1991.42.ane Horace Pippin turned to art subsequently serving in World State of war I in the African American regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Pippin was shot past a sniper and lost total use of his right arm, receiving an honorable belch from the armed services. He returned to his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and taught himself to paint using his left arm to support his injured arm. By the late 1930s his work had attracted the involvement of such notables as the artist N. C. Wyeth, critic Christian Brinton, and collector Albert Barnes. This painting belongs to a series of semi-autobiographical domestic interiors that Pippin painted from 1941 until his death in 1946, the best known among them beingness Domino Players (Phillips Collection, Washington, DC). Most of these scenes represent members of African American families pursuing a variety of activities in a single multipurpose room. The paintings all accept the same serenity, peaceful ambience and feature many of the same common household items, such as rag rugs, quilts, a stove, and an alarm clock. What distinguishes School Studies and gives added significance to the piece of work'southward title is the way the 3 figures, instead of interacting, have turned their backs to each other and seem lost in their own inner worlds.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Charles White,Mother, 1945, lithograph in black on wove paper, Gift of Jacob Kainen, 2002.98.72 This piece of work is known by ii titles: Mother and Awaiting His Return. The woman who dominates the composition stares into space, her strongly modeled effigy a written report in patience. Given the work's date (1945), the framed star in the background (a symbol of the United states of america military), and the word mother inscribed in the lithograph'south lower left corner, the two titles make equal sense. The adult female's face up is easily interpreted as that of a mother waiting for a loved 1 to render from service in World State of war 2. Creative person Charles White has chiseled her facial features with determination while infusing her expression with sadness. The cubist faceting of her figure imparts a feeling of solidity and strength in her that is reinforced past her imposing size and foreground placement. Her hands and confront are near architectural, with their sharp edges and straight-line markings of light and shadow. Nonetheless her tired eyes, her chin ready into the palm of her hand, and the merest hint of incertitude in her expression signal concern. In 1942 White, primarily known equally a painter of historical murals, shifted his focus to portraits of everyday African Americans on the advice of Harry Sternberg, an teacher at the Fine art Students League, New York. White's portraits, including Mother, describe anonymous people dealing with situations mutual to the black experience. The meticulous draftsman used his skill to render man emotion and endurance in the face of such obstacles as discrimination. His works from the 1950s, the decade when the ceremonious rights struggle exploded in the United states, show the cost of such perseverance in images of black men and women fighting for social justice.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Bob Thompson, Tree, 1962, oil on canvas, Drove of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.3 Bob Thompson's Tree is based on the fantastical, morally charged work of Francisco de Goya, the Spanish main known for his scathing commentary on the Spanish royalty and religious persecution in the belatedly 18th century. Thompson'due south painting combines ii sequent plates from Goya's 1799 collection of etchings Los caprichos: Volaverunt (They Have Flown) on the left and Quien lo creyera! (Who Would Take Idea It!) on the right. Instead of but re-creating Goya's etchings, however, Thompson produced a unlike narrative past modifying the characters and calculation new elements. Goya's adulteress becomes a redheaded, winged angel belongings an uprooted tree. Her human form watches over several bestial figures, suggesting that human reason presides over key instincts. To unify Goya's 2 images, Thompson incorporated the colour cherry throughout the work and positioned the tree on a diagonal. Thompson attended the University of Louisville in Kentucky before moving to New York City in 1959. In New York he studied the old masters at the urban center'due south museums and became friends with luminaries such as jazz musician Ornette Coleman and multimedia artist Red Grooms. Thompson traveled to Europe on a fellowship, painting Tree in Paris. Like Tree, many of his paintings are renditions of old principal compositions. Sadly, Thompson died in Rome of complications subsequently gallbladder surgery at the age of 29, cutting brusque his promising career.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Jacob Lawrence, Street to Mbari,1964, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James T. Dyke, 1993.18.i In Street to Mbari, Jacob Lawrence captured the flurry of a busy outdoor marketplace in Nigeria. Shops line either side of the street while a maze of vendors awaiting discovery fills the altitude. The viewer becomes part of the scene amongst a crowd of people, immature and sometime, buying and selling. 1 can near hear babies crying, chickens squawking, and people chattering equally they talk over fabrics and produce. A cacophony of principal colors heightens the sense of commotion. Rolls of fabric show off different patterns and colour combinations. Strips of corrugated iron in varying sizes and colors course the shops' roofs and create a visual rhythm across the top of the painting. Lawrence showtime studied African art as a young man in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1962 he traveled to Nigeria on an invitation to showroom his work. In describing the trip, he said, "I became and so excited then by all the new visual forms I found in Nigeria—unusual color combinations, textures, shapes, and the dramatic result of calorie-free—that I felt an overwhelming want to come back as shortly as possible to steep myself in Nigerian civilisation and then that my paintings, if I'm fortunate, might prove the influence of the cracking African creative tradition." It was during a second trip there that Lawrence completed Street to Mbari.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Jacob Lawrence, Daybreak - A Time to Balance, 1967, tempera on hardboard, Bearding Souvenir, 1973.eight.1 Daybreak - A Time to Residue is ane in a serial of panel paintings that tell the story of Harriet Tubman, the famed African American woman who freed enslaved people using a fragile network of safe houses called the Hugger-mugger Railroad. This abstracted image emphasizes Tubman'due south bravery in the face of constant danger. Lying on the difficult ground beside a couple and their baby, she holds a rifle. Her face, pointing upward to the sky, occupies the virtually center of the canvass, her trunk surrounded past majestic. Tubman'due south enormous feet, grossly out of proportion, become the focal point of the piece of work. The lines delineating her toes and muscles wait similar carvings in a stone, as if to emphasize the arduous journeys she has made. Reeds in the foreground frame the prone runaways. Iii insects (a walking stick, a beetle, and an emmet) are signs of activity at daybreak. Jacob Lawrence is renowned for his narrative painting series that chronicles the experiences of African Americans, which he created during a career of more than six decades. Using geometric shapes and bold colors on flattened picture planes to express his emotions, he fleshed out the lives of Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Chocolate-brown, and African Americans migrating n from the rural southward during and after slavery. Lawrence was 12 in 1929 when his family settled in Harlem, New York, at a fourth dimension when African American intellectual and artistic life was flourishing there. Equally a teen, he took classes at the Harlem Art Workshop and Harlem Community Fine art Center, where he studied works of art by African American artists and learned about African art and history. Lawrence went on to create images that are major expressions of the history and experience of African Americans.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Romare Bearden, Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 1967, collage of various papers with charcoal, graphite, and paint on newspaper mounted to canvas, Paul Mellon Fund, 2001.72.1 © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY The title of this collage could refer to several of its details. In the top right quadrant a nearly camouflaged passing train with billowing fume travels to an unknown location. The central effigy, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, appears lost in thought. A woman stares at the viewer with a disproportionately large middle, her manus on the windowsill. In the "background" (at right), blue birds fly. These elements and others recollect Romare Bearden'due south babyhood in rural N Carolina and personify journeying, a primal theme in African American history. The train suggests the Underground Railroad—the network of abolitionist-run safe houses that secretly transported people escaping enslavement—and the post-slavery migration of African Americans, primarily northward, to seek ameliorate lives. Built-in in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised primarily in the surrounding Mecklenburg County, Bearden eventually settled in New York City to stop college at New York Academy. He was a social worker there for several decades, during which time he spent nights and weekends on his art. Originally an abstract painter, Bearden began creating collages in the early on 1960s using images from photograph-magazines such every bit Life and Ebony. In improver to his unflinching, faceted images of black life, Bearden is remembered for his published books on art and aesthetics and for his political energy on behalf of black civilisation.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Sam Gilliam, Relative, 1968, acrylic on canvass, Anonymous Gift, 1994.39.1 Sam Gilliam's draped paintings such equally Relative pushed the notion of what painting was and could be. By moving his canvases off their stretcher confined, Gilliam allowed them to shift and flow as fabric is meant to do. The folds in the canvases, however, were non created at random simply instead reverberate Gilliam's specific idea about how he wanted his paintings to be installed. Relative, while still hung on a wall, becomes a part of its setting and interacts with and within that space. Lighting in the room affects the way shadows from the canvas fall on the wall. Physical motion around the painting can cause the fabric to stir, altering our perception of it. The ample folds demonstrate the painting's flexible backdrop, highlighting nuances of stained colors and hinting at what the creases conceal. Viewers tin indulge in the continuous play between action and stillness, brilliant color and dark shadow. Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Like Alma Thomas, he settled in Washington, DC, and taught art in the public schools. Also similar Thomas, he was a member of the Washington Color School and the larger color field move. Gilliam'south experimentations with colour and abstraction resulted from an involvement in moving away from figurative imagery to prefer color as the main bailiwick of his paintings.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Barkley Leonnard Hendricks, Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, 1972, oil on canvass, William C. Whitney Foundation, 1973.xix.i Sir Charles, Allonym Willie Harris offers a tripled image, its unmarried subject captured as if in a time lapse. Whether with eyes closed meditatively (on the left) or gazing into infinite (on the right), Sir Charles is alternately thoughtful and vigilant. Larger than life-size, this imposing figure clearly signals 1970s fashion, popular culture, and the assertion of black identity in the generation following the civil rights era. Barkley Hendricks cast his friends, lovers, family members, and men and women he met on the street as portrait subjects. Stark and monumental against a monochromatic ground, his portraits set up acutely on the individuality and cocky-expression of his subjects. Hendricks said that a painting he saw in 1966 while visiting the National Gallery in London—a portrait by Flemish master Anthony van Dyck featuring a ruddy velvet coat—was a bespeak of departure for this work. Intending to make a replica of the Van Dyck image, Hendricks received permission to paint as a copyist in the museum. But once in the process, he realized he could not copy another artist's piece of work, "no matter how much I similar it," he said. Years later, he painted Sir Charles with Van Dyck'south red coat in heed. Other writers take likened Sir Charles to the iconic iii graces—artistic muses (usually female) as portrayed past European old masters such as Botticelli and Rubens in three different attitudes, 1 usually with her back toward the viewer. It might be said that Hendricks'due south creative muses relate to classical Western art history as well every bit sources personal to the artist. Hendricks, who was born in Philadelphia, studied there at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University. He taught at Connecticut Higher. The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he exhibited his work at the Lyman Allyn Fine art Museum at Connecticut College; the Whitney Museum of American Fine art, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The Nasher Museum of Fine art at Duke University organized a career retrospective of Hendricks's work, Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Alma Thomas, Scarlet Rose Cantata, 1973, acrylic on canvas, Gift of Vincent Melzac, 1976.half-dozen.1 The unevenly spaced, staccato brushstrokes on the white canvas form a visual rhythm, as if the artist had painted a cantata, a type of musical composition. Tremendous effeminateness is shown in the play of space and color, with the white "background" as important to the overall effect as the reddish bursts of color. The harmonic color field is no accident; the compositional and colour structure of Reddish Rose Cantata derives from Alma Thomas'south interest in nature and music, in its linear arrangement with organic variations. Thomas came into the professional art world late in life, afterwards teaching fine art for 35 years in the Washington, DC, public schools. Her age, however, did non prevent her from gaining recognition as an artist. In 1972, one twelvemonth earlier she painted Ruddy Rose Cantata, Thomas had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—the museum's first solo exhibition for an African American woman. Thomas and Sam Gilliam were the only 2 African American members of the Washington Color School. She and other artists, Gilliam among them, are associated with the larger color field movement, which probed the use of solid color in abstract paintings. Thomas continued painting in her signature style, cartoon on nature and music for inspiration, until her expiry in 1978 at historic period 86.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Howardena Pindell, Untitled, #20, 1974, collage with hole-punched paper dots, pen and black ink, monofilament, and talcum powder on oak tag newspaper, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, 2007.6.303 Untitled, #20 is a collage both intricate and seemingly precarious in its construction. Hundreds of small round pieces, remnants from a pigsty-puncher, embrace the surface of the newspaper. Some prevarication flat while others cluster in piles or hang off the edges. A grid created by monofilament provides a substructure for the outwardly haphazard limerick, and a lite blanket of powder imparts an iridescent quality. Although numbered, each piece is randomly placed. The utilize of numbers and a grid suggests a mathematical and perhaps methodical approach to balancing randomness and premeditation. Howardena Pindell was born in Philadelphia in 1943. She received her BFA from Boston University and her MFA from Yale University. Throughout her career, Pindell has used a variety of techniques and materials in her fine art, including fabric and video. Like Untitled, #20, her other work explores structure and texture in the process of making fine art.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists James Lesesne Wells, African Nude, 1980, color linocut on Japan paper, Gift of Jacob Kainen, 2002.98.246 The woman in African Nude, wearing merely a large necklace, reclines on an overstuffed settee. Her alluring position is like to the pose found in archetype images of odalisques—enslaved women in the Ottoman Empire whose identities became sexualized and popularized during the 19th century. However different the seductive odalisque seen in Western art, whose gaze challenges past staring directly at the viewer, the nude in Wells'southward work, with eyes downcast, appears unhappily submissive and ill at ease amid the oversize lush plants and gala colors of the background. The viewer is thus left unsettled, as if unwelcome despite the outwardly inviting scene. James Lesesne Wells was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1902 and received BS and MS degrees from Columbia Academy. He had a long career in printmaking, first participating in the Federal Art Projection, which encouraged the evolution of art in the Us during the Great Low, and so teaching at Howard University in Washington, DC, for about four decades. Wells was active in the civil rights motion and often depicted the struggles of African Americans in his work. African Nude, which Wells created tardily in life, reflects his printmaking skill, interest in traditional African aesthetics, and commitment to representing African American history and experiences.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Martin Puryear, Lever No. 3, 1989, carved and painted woods, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 1989.71.1 In the sweeping silhouette of Lever No. iii, a viewer might encounter either a long-necked creature or a mechanical arm, equally suggested by the work's title. While Martin Puryear's sculptures oftentimes recall familiar forms, they encourage individual interpretations. This work explores a delicate balance between the heavy, solid-looking "body" and the elegant, weightless achieve of the giraffe-similar "neck." The play betwixt opposing values—heavy and light, animal and mechanical, space and form, move and stasis—imbues the sculpture with a sense of blitheness, vitality, and changeability. While the primal form of Lever No. 3 appears to be sculpted from a heavy cake of forest, information technology is really a hollow vanquish, carefully constructed of thin, bent planks of wood. The sculpture is stained light gray, which unifies its appearance simply also creates a somewhat uneven patina that emphasizes its hand-crafted quality. Similar Lever No. 3, Puryear's sculptural objects often alloy qualities of fine art and finely crafted utilitarian objects. Puryear was born in Washington, DC, in 1941. After earning his BA at that place from Catholic University, he joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where he had the chance to report woodworking techniques such as basketry and carpentry. Puryear so attended the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and independently continued his studies in woodworking. He received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a xxx-year retrospective exhibition of his work.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Lorna Simpson, Untitled (Two Necklines), 1989, 2 gelatin silver prints and xi plastic plaques, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2005.44.1.1-3 In Untitled (Two Necklines), identical photographs of an unidentified African American woman, shown from rima oris to breastbone, hang in circular frames, between them a list of words engraved on plaques. The double epitome suggests tranquility and composure: the woman's white shift is clean and simple, her oral fissure at ease, the curve of her breastbone elegantly arced. But the plaques feature words describing circularity and enclosure that are ominously electrified by text on the concluding plaque, which reads, "feel the footing sliding from nether you." Such meticulous alignments of words and epitome fuel the subtle yet startling power of Lorna Simpson's work, which for more than 2 decades has probed the spectral issues of race, sex, and class. Like this 1, her images are frequently truncated, replicated, and annotated with words that force the viewer to translate. Here, the framed photographs and words inscribed on plaques are literally and metaphorically blackness and white; the background of the concluding plaque is a haunting blood red. I is hard pressed to deny the implications of this personal yet dehumanized image and its bellboy language of racial pathology. Simpson's interest in the relationship between text and images began during her career as a documentary photographer. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She is recognized as one of America's ranking masters of potent, poetic piece of work in photography and flick. Her works signal what is nearly personal about identity while simultaneously touching upon clichés and assumptions that can disfigure or destroy it.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Joseph Norman, Slum Gardens No. three, 1990, charcoal on wove newspaper, Gift of the Sandra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation in memory of Dorothea Fifty. Leonhardt, 1992.twenty.1 The densely layered image of Slum Gardens No. 3 signals claustrophobia. A large tree with a thick, spiked vine winding its style up the trunk defines the right side of the piece of work. Weeds and flowers blanket the bottom half of the epitome, nigh obscuring the wooden shack (left) and the staircase. Plants invade a spotter fence and piece of railing in the lower foreground. Nosotros sense that the vegetation volition soon overtake the entire area, turning the "garden" into a neighborhood menace. The muscularity of the work, emboldened by thick, heavy lines of blackness charcoal, contributes to the intimidating quality of the plant life. Joseph Norman oftentimes uses landscape imagery to convey meaning. For this work he drew on his experiences growing upward in Chicago and on a 1990 trip to Republic of costa rica, where he witnessed the effects of poverty on various neighborhoods. Slum Gardens No. iii is not a view of a specific identify; rather, it visualizes the concept of "slums" from regions around the world. Here, the overgrowing mural serves every bit a metaphor for the lack of attending paid to impoverished neighborhoods. Not simply are the physical environments of such areas neglected, only, as Norman's drawing suggests, its social and economic problems are ignored as well. Norman was born in Chicago in 1957. He received a BS in art didactics from the University of Arkansas at Little Stone in 1980 and an MFA 6 years later from the Academy of Cincinnati. Afterwards instruction drawing for nine years at the Rhode Isle Schoolhouse of Pattern, he took a professorship at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2001.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Willie Cole, Domestic ID, V, 1992, steam-iron scorches with graphite on newspaper mounted in window frame, Gift of Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky, 1997.92.4 The imprints of six steam irons mark this work on paper. Beneath each silhouette, in large capital letters, is the name of an iron manufacturer—Casco, General Mills, Monarch, Silex, Presto, with one "unknown." What do nosotros make of this paradigm, framed in an old window? For the past 20 years Willie Cole has selected and transformed particular items discarded from our vast consumer civilization, such as irons, shoes, and backyard jockeys, into objects that resonate with metaphorical meaning—especially cross-referencing African cultural history and the African Diaspora. The iron silhouettes in Domestic ID, V recollect the slave era in America, when African women served as forced domestic laborers, and the menstruum afterward emancipation, when they took in laundry every bit one of the few lines of work open to them. The irons' singed imprints also evoke the rituals of scarification, practiced within certain African and other cultures, and branding, which expunged identity to marker humans every bit slave property—possibly reinforced by the iron marked "unknown." Other references inhabit this powerful image, such as the similarity of the iron's shape to boats that plied the slave trade across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the near-whiff of rut and steam that seems to evoke the hot, backbreaking work of plantation life. Mounting his image in a window, Cole literally reframes history in a way that summons the readymade art of surrealist and Dada artists such as Homo Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Such wry notwithstanding serious correspondences of history, fine art, and racial politics anchor Cole'south reputation in the fine art world. Educated at Boston University School of Fine Arts, the School of Visual Arts (where he received a BFA), and the Art Students League, Cole has exhibited his piece of work throughout the Us, Canada, and Europe.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Glenn Ligon, Untitled: 4 Etchings [A], 1992, softground etching, aquatint, spitbite, and sugarlift aquatint in black on Rives BFK paper, Souvenir of Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky and the Collectors Committee Fund, 2004.65.1.1 African American artists working in the 1980s and 1990s often focused on black identity as culturally and socially constructed. Artists including Glenn Ligon moved from using the black figure to employing text every bit a way to explore perceptions and understandings of race. In Untitled: Four Etchings [A–D], Ligon quoted from Zora Neale Hurston'southward essay "How Information technology Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928) and Ralph Ellison'due south novel Invisible Man (1952). Selections from both literary works are written in the first person, often repeating the word "I." In the process of deciphering the text, the viewer becomes the "I" and thus inhabits the person questioning their ain cocky and identity. Untitled: Four Etchings [A] (above) and [B] repeat, over and over, sentences from Hurston'southward essay: "I do not e'er experience colored" [A] and "I experience near colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" [B]. As the viewer reads, the texts become increasingly hard to decipher. Smudged and broken type interferes with legibility, suggesting the viewer'due south literal and intellectual struggle to read the judgement and understand its implications. Etchings [C] and [D], both blackness blazon on black paper, also brand the reader work to comprehend the significant. Their nearly identical texts taken from Ellison'due south monumental novel are about indiscernible—"invisible" like the story's protagonist. Text [C]: Text [D] is the same, except that information technology ends:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-flick ectoplasms. I am a homo of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a listen. I am invisible, understand, simply because people decline to see me. Like the bodiless heads you run across sometimes in circus side-shows, it is every bit though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they run into simply themselves, or figments of their imagina-
...figments of their imagination—indeed everything
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Lorna Simpson, Two Pairs, 1997, photogravure on handmade Richard de Bas newspaper, Gift of Graphicstudio/University of South Florida and the Artist, 1998.87.17 Artistically speaking, those with power are unremarkably those who assign a subject's identity. And once such identity has been given, it accumulates historical authority every bit years, decades, and centuries ensue. Primal to this phenomenon is the part of gaze—the idea that viewers have the power to define what they come across. In the fine art of our times, however, the authorization of gaze has been tested and upended. Here, Lorna Simpson weighs in. The creative person presents two binoculars and, between them, a series of phrases. You might pick upwardly one of these looking devices—perchance to spy?—and thus meet what the text haltingly, disjointedly describes. But Simpson has placed the binoculars face down, simultaneously promising and frustrating vision. Text and binoculars each furnish only partial knowledge, underscoring the inherent problem of relying on only written or visual information to understand a person or state of affairs. Simpson has examined the relationship between text and image over many years, challenging concepts of truth, history, and identity. Here, gaze is thwarted past its instruments, and knowledge is bedridden by incompleteness. You may assign pregnant to this image, just Simpson reminds the viewer: information technology is non necessarily correct. Text:
tin run into the moisture of her jiff while she sings—an interior wall blocks the view of the other—tin can run into the bluecoat #'s—full moon perfect light—undressed completely and got into the tub to his left—motionless—kept a log of observations—curvaceous—went unnoticed by the naked eye—tried to concord in view—just shadows—near sighted—gruesome—remembered everything—right in the line of vision—they moved three steps back and out of view
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Kara Walker,Roots and Links, Inc., 1997, black newspaper collage on prepared wove paper, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women'due south Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2014.136.226.two In Walker's cut-paper silhouettes, troubling narratives of violence, lust, and exoticism play out. Her work draws upon imagery mutual in the antebellum South and is controversial for its utilise of racial stereotypes of both blacks and whites. Walker focuses on the office of stereotypes in shaping history and their complex function in American race relations today. The abbreviation "Inc." in the piece of work's title alludes to the institutionalization of racism and the implicit cultural approval of such degrading images. By suggesting narratives that complicate distinctions betwixt fact and fantasy, victim and predator, black and white, Walker's work confronts the viewer with the uncomfortable challenge of cocky-reflection. Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, Walker moved to Atlanta, Georgia, at age 13. Her transition from an integrated town to the racially divided atmosphere of the South had a profound impact on her. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Fine art and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Blueprint, having begun her exploration of the silhouette while in school. At age 27, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation honor. Her first retrospective exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Roy DeCarava,Mississippi liberty marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963, gelatin silvery print, Robert B. Menschel Fund, 1999.67.3 On August 28, 1963, photographer Roy DeCarava was nowadays for the celebrated March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty, which culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Take a Dream" spoken language. In this striking photograph, DeCarava turned away from common displays of political demonstration—placards and crowds—to capture the confidence, interiority, and stoicism of an isolated marcher. DeCarava described this powerful portrait, with its subtle gradations of gray and black, as representing "a cute black adult female who was beautiful in her blackness. . . . I wanted to pay homage to that person, that spirit." Historic as one of the commencement African American photographers to embrace and explore the blackness experience in his art, DeCarava spent much of his career chronicling daily life in Harlem, the ceremonious rights movement, and jazz musicians. His overarching goal, yet, was non documentary realism but rather "artistic expression," as he explained, "the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer tin can interpret." No matter the subject, DeCarava'due south photographs reveal a great interest in exploring the symbolic significance of blackness, equally tin can be seen in his evocative, highly acclaimed volume The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a fictional story of life in Harlem with text by Langston Hughes. DeCarava's influence extended far beyond his own photographs. In 1955 he founded A Photographers' Gallery, i of few commercial spaces in New York where photographers—including such emerging artists every bit Harry Callahan and Modest White—could exhibit their work.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Carrie Mae Weems,May Flowers, 2002, chromogenic impress, printed 2013, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2014.3.1 May Flowers, a compelling photograph of three young African American girls, succinctly addresses the problems of race, class, and gender that the American artist Carrie Mae Weems has explored for decades. Related to a video Weems made in 2002 titled May Days Long Forgotten, the photograph evokes both spring's renewal and May Day, the international workers' holiday. Befitting these themes, May Flowers depicts girls from working-form families in Syracuse, New York, wearing floral-print dresses. Its tondo format, truncated foreground space, and tight focus on the figures harks back to Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and kid, while its subject—adolescent girls with flowers in their hair, lounging on the grass—recalls both 19th-century paintings and photographs, such as those by Édouard Manet and Julia Margaret Cameron. Weems intensified this historical character by printing the photograph in sepia tones and placing it in a circular frame like those gracing the walls of 19th-century parlors. Notwithstanding the color of the girls' peel belies such a history, even equally their beauty and knowing expressions—particularly the authoritative look of the primal figure—claiming viewers to question why they take been excluded for then long. Further complicating and enriching the piece of work, Weems glazed it with a piece of convex drinking glass of the type commonly used in 18th- and 19th-century mirrors, equally if to propose that the image represents a reflection of the world at large. Weems received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and has been honored with numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Gordon Parks,Washington, D.C., Mrs. Ella Watson, a Regime Charwoman, July 1942, gelatin silverish print, printed 1960s, Gift of Julia J. Norrell, 2015.119.one A rich and circuitous religious do is displayed in the Washington, DC, home of Ella Watson, a cleaning woman who worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during World War Ii. Her altar—composed of statues of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Our Lady of Lourdes, St. Joseph, St. Martin de Porres, St. Anthony, and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, every bit well every bit two elephants, two crucifixes, candles, and a rosary—intermingles with her everyday life reflected in the mirror. Appearing in the reflection is a child's doll propped confronting stacked boxes, while Watson herself wears a floral apron over her polka-dot dress. Through her open window, a Coca-Cola delivery truck and lush summertime foliage are visible at the intersection of 11th and P Streets, in northwest Washington. Over the form of a month, the lensman Gordon Parks created a series of well-nigh ninety pictures of Watson, including his most iconic photo, Washington, D.C. Regime Charwoman (American Gothic), in which he posed her with a broom and a mop before an American flag. Made nether the auspices of the Historical Section of the FSA, which was headed past Parks'south mentor Roy Stryker, the serial was not published past the government at the time. Parks purchased his outset camera in tardily 1937 while working every bit a waiter for the Northern Pacific Railway. By the early 1940s he was immersed in some of the most important artistic circles and dynamic photographic projects of his generation. From his rural roots in Kansas, where poverty and racism were widespread, to his meteoric success equally a lensman for Life magazine and a filmmaker in Hollywood, Parks was both an instigator and witness of social and artful change during his storied career.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists James Van Der Zee,Couple, 1924, gelatin silver print, Robert B. Menschel Fund, 2000.83.1 Continuing side by side amid elements of middle-class comfort and in front of an elaborately painted backdrop, the subjects of James Van Der Zee's Couple exude poise and sophistication. Their elegant dress, direct gazes, and tender yet assured body language demonstrate confidence and security in their place in guild. Created at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1929), this photograph exemplifies the spirit of an creative, literary, and social motility that sought to affirm black creativity and self-decision in the aftermath of World War I and the showtime wave of the Great Migration north. Van Der Zee opened his first independent photography studio in 1916. He later established his GGG Photo Studio, which was named for his wife Gaynella, who assisted with the subtle poses, polished styling, and selective placement of studio props that imbued Van Der Zee's portraits of luminaries and everyday people alike with a cosmopolitan refinement. His famous subjects included pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey, poet Countee Cullen, boxers Joe Louis and Jack Johnson, and singers Mamie Smith and Hazel Scott. Self-taught, Van Der Zee began photographing his family and friends in his hometown of Lenox, Massachusetts. His later work as a photographer in Harlem built on these familial beginnings by emphasizing motherhood, marriage, and community through careful collaboration with his sitters to combine their personal identities with their social standing and aspirations. His photographic career continued into the late 1960s with post-club retouching and calendar work.
Source: https://www.nga.gov/features/african-american-artists.html
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