Herbert Pinney Tresslar, William J. Edwards and the Teachers at Snow Hill Institute, n.d. Gelatin silver print. Tuskegee University, AL.
“Powell, an expert on,
among other things, African American art since 1880, provides a fascinating
historical account and analysis of art collecting at historically black
colleges and universities. Both a survey and a critique, Professor Powell
anchors the catalogue by raising the essential questions about the meaning and
meanings of this show and of art historical inquiry. . . . This is an important
addition to the scholarship on American art and the vital writings and research
on African American art.” Michael
Prokopow, book review of To Conserve a
Legacy: American Art From Historically Black Colleges and Universities, The
Boston Book Review, July/August 1999.
To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. With Jock Reynolds, et al. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Oscar Micheaux, Body & Soul (still), 1925. Film (black and white, silent), 79 minutes
“Discursively, this location of Harlem to the forces of cultural encounters, assimilations, and oppositions is perhaps the most interesting part of ‘Rhapsodies in Black’ . . . . [The] exhibition calls on us to meditate on the idea of black modernity as part of the consequence of the transition of the world economy into industrialization. It offers a vision of Harlem as a real space, and its culture as important within a historical moment. The curators generously offered the view, rarely reciprocated by most surveys of modern art . . . that 20th century modernity has always been transcultural, transnational, often through the efforts of émigrés.” Okwui Enwezor, exhibition review of Rhapsodies in Art: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Spring/Summer 1998.
Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance. With David A. Bailey, et al. London & Berkeley: University of California, 1997.
Stanley Greaves, The Presentation No. 2 (from There’s a Meeting Here Tonight series), 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 47 ¼ x 41 1/8 in. (120 x 104.5 cm). Collection of the artist.
“This is indeed an
ambitious undertaking that attempts concisely to complicate and reposition the
study of the arts of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora. It shares with its
predecessors . . . the desire to underscore the ways in which visual culture
contributed to the construction of African American identities and subjectivities.
However, unlike those earlier works, Powell attempts to show these processes
through the cultural forces that have shaped twentieth-century diasporal
concerns. Absent is the biographical celebration of the artist who has
weathered despair and racism to achieve “greatness” . . . , yielding
a more detached narrative that reveals how ‘black’ imagery engages with larger
issues to achieve its symbolic force.”
Steven Nelson, book review of Black
Art & Culture in the 20th Century, Art Journal, Fall 1998.
Black Art: A Cultural History. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 2021 (Expanded edition of Black Art: A Cultural History, 2002 and Black Art & Culture in the 20th Century, 1997). Spanish translation: Arte y Cultura Negros en el Siglo XX. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, S.A., 1998.
Peter A. Juley & Son, Jacob Lawrence, n.d. Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in. Archives and Special Collections, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
For
Lawrence, the Haitian peasantry’s struggle for freedom in the eighteenth-century
had thematic resonances for the long-term struggles for freedom of black women
and men in the United States. In a
succession of serial paintings he made after the Toussaint L’Ouverture series, Lawrence brought this domestic
concern for individual and collective struggle into a unique, African-American
perspective. Starting with his Frederick Douglass series of 1938-39,
Lawrence embraced the range of experiences, trials, dilemmas, and triumphs of
selected personalities in African-American history, providing viewers with an
extra-literary sense and feeling for these important people and episodes. For example, in several of the panels from
his Harriet Tubman series of 1939-40,
a strict, illustrative rendering of this nineteenth-century tale about a woman
shepherding fellow bondsmen from slavery into freedom is supplanted by an
expressive, sometimes dreamlike conceptualization of her true story. At times more a symbolist than a social
realist, Lawrence bypassed superficial features of the events and figures in
Harriet Tubman’s story, searching instead for the inner, emotional truths of
her heroism.
Jacob Lawrence (for the Rizzoli Art Series), New York: Rizzoli International Publ., Inc., 1992.
Anonymous, Guitar, ca. 1920s-1930s. Painted wood and plywood, brass chrome, iron, lead, celluloid, metal wire, and photograph, 34 3/4 x 10 7/8 x 4 1/4 in. (88.3 x 27.6 x 10.8 cm.). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, 1986.65.300.
The
concept of a “blues aesthetic” is an attempt to describe selected examples of
art in this century, and to delineate several important aspects of this
art. Let’s be clear: what we are talking
about is basic, twentieth-century Afro-American culture. The term “blues” is an appropriate designation
for this idea because of its associations with one of the most identifiable
black American traditions that we know.
Perhaps more than any other designation, the idea of a blues aesthetic
situates the discourse squarely on: 1) art produced in our time; 2) creative
expressions that emulate from artists who are empathetic with Afro-American
issues and ideals; 3) work that identifies with grassroots, popular, and/or
mass black American culture; 4) art that has an affinity with Afro-U.S.-derived
music and/or rhythms; and 5) artists and/or artistic statements whose raison
d’etre is humanistic.
Although
one could argue that other twentieth-century Afro-U.S. musical terms, such as
ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, gospel, swing, bebop, cool, rhythm and blues,
doo-wop, soul, funk, go-go, hip-hop, or rap are just as descriptive as “the
blues,” what “the blues” has over and above them is a breadth and mutability
that allows it to persist and even thrive through this century. From the anonymous songsters of the late
nineteenth-century who sang about hard labor and unattainable love, to contemporary
rappers blasting the airwaves with percussive and danceable testimonies, the
blues is an affecting, evocative presence, which endures in every artistic
overture made towards black American peoples.
The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism.Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC, 1989.
Yombe peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nkisi nkondi (Oath-taking and healing fugure), late 19th century. Wood, clay, fiber, metal, pigment, cowrie shell. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL.
Following
a 1953 tour of Ghana, Afro-American novelist and essayist Richard Wright
described his first impressions of his “ancestral homeland” in the book Black
Power. Wright was taken aback by the differences and similarities between
Africans and black Americans. The shared characteristics were particularly
puzzling for Wright, since he had long assumed that the centuries which had
transpired and the traumatic experience of slavery obliterated any
possibilities for African “survivals” in America. However, his face-to-face
encounter with West African dance, gestures, and cultural patterns recalled
similar traditions in the United States.
Wright’s acknowledgement of “some kind of link,”
along with the same realization by anthropologists and historians form the
ideological core for the Field Museum of Natural History’s exhibition African
Insights: Sources for Afro-American Art and Culture. The connections between various
African peoples and their Afro-American descendants are often not immediately
apparent. Layers of time, as well as cross-cultural influences, refashion
African expressions into American statements. But the indelible mark of several
West African civilizations continues through time and over the dominant
culture, expressing itself in an outlook and style that is essentially “Black
Atlantic.” The arts and cultures that exist along Africa’s west coast – from
Senegal’s Cape Verde to just below the mouth of the Congo River – are
reinvented among black populations in South America, the Caribbean, and the
United States with striking results.
African and Afro-American Art: Call and Response. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, 1984.
William H. Johnson, Self-Portrait with Pipe, ca. 1937. Oil on canvas, 35 x 28 in. (88.9 x 71.1 cm.). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.913.
“His story still
astonishes. Nowhere in the annals of African American art is there a life’s
work, a life’s journey, like that of William H. Johnson — that
folk painter of Harlem, that European modernist, that polished academic — who
began his artist’s life as a poor boy in the Jim Crow South drawing in the
dust, and ended it in madness, a street person, a ruin. . . . To fully understand the man, his passions,
his tragedies, all that he absorbed, and all that he discarded, you have to
read the deeply moving book on Johnson’s life and art by Richard J. Powell that
accompanies this show. . . .” Paul
Richard, exhibition review of Homecoming:
The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, The Washington Post, 14 September
1991.
Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Raymond Saunders, Light Up, 1970. Crayon, pencil, and cut-and-pasted paper on paper, 8 3/4 x 6 1/4″ (22.4 x 15.9 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired with matching funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bernard J. Reis and the National Endowment for the Arts, 105.1971.
Raymond Saunders’s drawings, especially those from the 1970s, are highly accomplished, tour de force graphic expressions in the tradition of Cy Twombly, Jim Dine, and other linearly oriented artists of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Often combining delicate pencil traceries, handcrafted patterns, calculated scribbles, insets of prismatic colors adjacent to intermittent blank areas, cut-and-pasted papers, and stenciled and stamped symbols and numerals, these drawings revel in a free-form impulsiveness unencumbered by modern art conventions or expectations. What distinguishes this Bay area artist’s methodology and production from those of other expressionist painters is a purposeful yet almost cursory approach to design and color in tandem with an instinctive, improvisatory tendency and a playful attitude toward the drafted, sketched, and portrayed. The result is an almost guileless art whose subjects—anecdotal, popular, and autobiographical—fuel Saunders’s distinctive, wholly original approach to post-Pop art-making. Works such as Light Up reconcile masterful yet psychologically unfurled drawing with astute color applications veering toward the neon and radiant, an aesthetic squaring-off in which Saunders’s promulgation of mark-making in crayon and pencil vociferously challenges the minor status of drawing in art world hierarchies.
“Raymond Saunders” and “Hervé Télémaque,” in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, eds., Darby English and Charlotte Barat (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 304-305, 418-419.
Nina Chanel Abney, Untitled (Yo 123), 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 56 x 56 inches. (Photo courtesy of Nina Chanel Abney)
In contrast to poet and playwright
Amiri Baraka’s tongue-in-cheek, ceremonial appeal in his 1966 poem
“SOS” (“Calling all black people Calling all black people, man
woman child Wherever you are…”), Nina Chanel Abney puts not just some,
but allof us on notice.
Cutout, hard-edged pictorial elements transmit short, concise messages,
tightly packed within the canvas’s rectangular domain and placed cheek-to-jowl
alongside a succession of parallel communications, phrasings, and glyph-like
codes. An expansive but unmodulated
palette, on the order of Goethe’s color wheel equitably distributed across
recognizable shapes and uniform fields, disallows the luxury of a
driver’s-test-styled-grasp of regulatory signs and warnings. Yes, there’s a profile of a head there and,
in other places, articulated and akimbo patterns suggesting human anatomy, but
neither do these physical features nor their ocular stares really tell us
anything that carries an assumed storyline’s descriptive arch and its moral
resolution. Abney’s notice is a brash
and amplified shout-out about the limitations of language, the constraints of pigment
and painting, and the borderlines of comprehension, especially in this moment
of limitless visibility by way of the Internet.
When juxtaposed with Abney’s painted universe, the ancient Tower of
Babel doesn’t even approach the linguistic boundaries, heteroglossia, and aural
interferences of human discourse we experience in the twenty-first-century.
“Preface,” in Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, ed. Marshall N. Price (Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2017).
Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain IV, 1946. Oil on canvas, 26 x 36 in. (66 x 91.4 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Jane Kendall Gingrich, 1982.55.2.
In ten paintings Horace Pippin explored
biblical subject matter and spiritual themes. Although this work comprises a
relatively small number (in comparison to Pippin’s overall artistic production
of over one hundred works of art), several of these paintings – like the Holy Mountain series – are considered some of Horace Pippin’s very best works and represent an important,
but rarely discussed, aspect of African-American visual expression: namely,
modern religious art.
When one normally thinks of African-American religious art,
the turn-of-the-century paintings of the expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner
immediately come to mind. If one were to think of modernist approaches to biblical
subjects, then the works of African-American artists William H. Johnson, Allan
Rohan Crite, or Romare Bearden might be more appropriate. Still, if one were to stretch the imagination and
consider more community-based religious works, then an artist like James
VanDerZee might surface, as seen in his staged and photo-negative manipulated
church altar and funeral parlor photographs of the 1920s and 1930s.
It is unlikely that Pippin was familiar
with paintings by any of these black artistic ancestors and relatives. Nor
would he have been cognizant of their European and Euro-American counterparts,
artists like Georges Rouault, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and other painters of
religious subjects. Instead, his notions of religious art principally came from
the common, mass-produced chromoliths that have illustrated Bibles, church
vestibules, and African-American homes since the advent of inexpensive color
lithography. As noted in the following description of decorations found in African-American
homes, Pippin’s early concept of art would have certainly come from these
select, Judeo-Christian themes and visual narratives:
Most
of the pictures found [in African-American homes] were of a religious
character, the subjects being such as St. John on the Isle of Patmos, Angels
descending to the tomb of Christ, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Joseph with Christ
in his arms, The Resurrection, The Fall of Jericho, and the Believer’s Vision
…
“Biblical and Spiritual Motifs” (reprint), in Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art, ed. James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 136-143.
