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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 …

In 1996 Taschen Verlag GmbH, renowned for their beautifully designed and reasonably priced art books, joined forces with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany to produce a spectacular, 760-page illustrated catalogue of the highlights from the Museum’s photographic collection. Among the hundreds of historically significant photographs that appeared in 20th Century Photography, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, three especially enthralling photographs graced the book’s front, back, and spine: photo-journalist Fritz Henle’s 1943 portrait of Nieves, one of Diego Rivera’s Mexican models; surrealist photographer Man Ray’s 1930 photographic detail Lips on Lips; and Hamburg, Germany-based fashion photographer Charlotte March’s 1966 photograph of African American fashion model Donyale Luna. Taschen’s art director, Mark Thomson, placed Charlotte March’s Donyale Luna with Earrings for “twen” on the book’s spine, which gave her photograph a conspicuous place on likely bookshelves and, because of Luna’s captivating visage and gaze, empowered the photograph to compel bookstore browsers to return Luna’s look and pick up the book.

This essay considers Charlotte March’s legendary photograph, paying special attention to her subject, fashion model and actress Donyale Luna (1946-1979), and Luna’s extraordinary presence within the fashion industry and the photographic enterprise, circa 1966. By the time of the creation of Donyale Luna with Earrings for “twen,” Luna had already appeared on the covers of Queen, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and was photographed in haute couture clothing by such legendary fashion photographers as Richard Avedon and David Bailey. Describing Donyale Luna in 1966 as “. . . the completely new image of the Negro woman,” a commentator in Time magazine further remarked that “fashion finds itself in an instrumental position for changing history, however slightly, for [in the industry’s promotion of Donyale Luna] it is about to bring out into the open the veneration, the adoration, the idolization of the Negro . . . .”  March’s Donyale Luna with Earring for “twen” took this pronouncement a step further, interpolating into the alleged veneration a corporeal rejoinder: Luna’s forceful, subliminally militant counter-gaze, directed towards a world that, despite its adoration of her, struggled with the idea of black beauty and black agency.

Scholars of African American arts and letters cannot bestow enough distinction on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s 1903 literary classic The Souls of Black Folk. In spite of first appearing in print more than a century ago, this book remains an influential text to critical race theorists and contemporary creators of social, political, and economic policies. Du Bois’s popularization of such concepts as “the color line” and a “double consciousness” have intrigued intellectuals for generations, forming in peoples’ minds absorbing hypotheses and unequivocal pictures of the less than acceptable social conditions in which many Americans lived (and, sadly, continue to live), and an enduring model of the inner, psychological turmoil that too many people experience in racially segregated environments…

And, yet, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, like a jeweler’s elaborate setting for precious stones, famously framed and embraced these memorable watchwords: “for the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois’s pictorial model for “the color line – illuminated as miniature black surveyors in the pages of The Crisis, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s official magazine – suggested that Du Bois, too, conceived of America’s race problem in visual, architectonic conceits.  On this book’s subliminal visual overtures, one can also excavate and probe the book’s original subtitle, Essays and Sketches; that last word bringing to mind drawings and designs that, in concert with Du Bois’s poetic language and compelling narratives, attempted to reveal “the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the twentieth century.”

The idea in the architectural imaginary of a transitional, roofed and semi-enclosed space between a building’s interior and the world gave civilization the portico, the loggia, and the veranda, but this particular design feature seems to have evolved into something experientially distinct in the modern, southern United States. The historical and cultural factors which shaped “the South” – from its genesis and growth as a result of agricultural prowess and the transatlantic slave trade, to its identity being irrevocably tied to the American Civil War and that conflict’s bloody legacy of racial discrimination and more than a century of struggle over extending citizenship to its African American populations – loom large over everything the U.S. South is, especially its art and architecture. The porch, the South’s architecture of residential stagecraft, is both a setting for life’s little melodramas and itself an actor, anthropomorphically performing within the theaters of a regional, small-town, or rural existence.

Beginning with its stepped elevation off ground level, the porch announces from the front yard a phenomenological realignment, from scant turfgrass, flowerbeds lined in white-washed cobblestones, and brick-laid pathways to wooden steps and lumber decking and roofing.  The mind and body prepare to reorient themselves upon entering its domain, not only in terms of physically climbing up to a slightly elevated height, but psychologically recalibrating from the public realm to the quasi-public sphere, or the liminal zone that, as discussed below, is the porch.

Reflecting on Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment (1897), the trail-blazing African American art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray wrote in 1915: “It seems to me fitting and proper that in a paper concerning Emancipation and the Freed that we should pay liberal tribute to the Negro soldiers and sailors, whose work, whose sacrifices, and whose valor, so fully justified, and so strongly contributed to make secure, the Freedom which had been proclaimed by President Lincoln.”

This essay also explores devotion and allegiance on the parts of African Americans during the Civil War, but neither in the retrospective afterglow of Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece, nor in the “glory” days of battle and sacrifice that surrounded the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth’s ill-fated assault on Fort Wagner. Rather, I’ve chosen to focus on a well known, but little discussed black-and-white photograph of two men – one black and one white, in a nearly deserted Civil War camp – taken in 1863 and usually attributed to the Mathew Brady National Photographic Art Gallery. I preface my discussion with the idea that appended to Murray’s praise for black soldiers and other celebrations of African American valor during and after the Civil War were more subliminal meditations on black loyalty in the pre- and post-Civil Rights eras – loyalties specifically directed towards embattled white Americans – and on a supreme faith in the United States of America from blacks who, because of historical injustices and systemic discrimination, had little or no reason to believe in American democracy…

In the pocket-size percentage of Romance that contains “dem shoes,” Thomas Hart Benton was knowingly prefacing the idea of the “romantic South” with more than the painting’ designated title could ever convey. Whether or not one interprets the unshod man’s shoe-baggage as ill-fitting personal effects, prestige items, Mark Twainisms, lynch fragments, or odd trophies of respectability, their significations offset and treaded heavily over the outward storylines and conceits of an idealized South and its “special way of life.” The moon at dusk (or is it the setting sun?) conspired with Benton, winking and intimating that the romance we assumed was present in the painting could rightly be tapped as such, but one whose “crude facts” and asylum-seeking lovers betrayed an even greater devotion and human trajectory, all under the watchful eye of God.

Much has been written about artist David Hammons and his recurring basketball imagery, ostensibly symbolizing African American youth’s dreams of success in the National Basketball Association and, alas, the futility of those pie-in-the-sky fantasies for so many dreamers.  “It’s an anti-basketball sculpture,” Hammons famously proclaimed in a 1990 interview with Sports Illustrated about Higher Goals, one of his most famous basketball-themed works.  “Basketball has become a problem in the black community,” he continued, “because kids aren’t getting an education.  They’re pawns in someone else’s game.” Hammons’s published thoughts about the allure of sports for black youth, especially basketball, often leading young men to overlook other viable avenues for future successes, are frequently echoed in the career counseling literature for young people, stating over and over the odds against talented, young black athletes being selected for one of those coveted places on a major league sports team.  “His over-sized basketball hoops, exquisitely adorned in bottle caps in mock Islamic designs,” notes artist/critic Coco Fusco and art gallerist Christian Haye, “become blistering critiques of black youth’s obsession with financial success through sports stardom as the admonitory title, Higher Goals (1986), comes into focus.” Or what museum curator Franklin Sirmans describes as “the absurdity of the perpetuation of the myths around getting out of the ghetto via sports.” “That’s why it’s called Higher Goals,” Hammons explained to Sports Illustrated about his bottle-cap-decorated basketball backboards and hoops, installed in Harlem and Brooklyn, NY, and placed on soaring telephone poles. “It means you should have higher goals in life [other] than basketball.”

Perhaps not prominent enough in the discussions about these basketball references in David Hammons’s art – neither in the artist’s own commentaries, nor in critiques by other pundits – are meditations on the underlying ambiguities and dialectical thinking that Hammons invariably utilizes in these works.  Rather than casting African American “hoop dreams” as chimeras and hopelessly futile, Hammons frequently infuses these works with an uncanny optimism, allusions to bold ambitions, profound spirituality, and a cultural pride that, rather than shutting down or disparaging the dream, transforms it into a living and breathing concretization; an altar-like appendage to the black community that, in all of its reiterations and amplifications by Hammons, is more interminable and aspirational than limiting and delusional.

In the context of an essay about art, visual culture, and racial blackness, the qualities of embodiment and abstraction might seem at odds with one another. The transitive verb embody connotes the act of giving bodily form to something, to incarnate or make something corporeal, and to give something a definitive, tangible, visible, or concrete configuration. A noun rather than expressing an action, the word abstraction and its descriptive form abstract broadly insinuate the antithesis of concreteness: the formation of an idea (as of the qualities or properties of something) by mental separation from particular instances or material objects. As one considers artistic conceptions of racial identities, embodiment stresses the artistic act of visibly capturing a racial quintessence, whereas abstraction enables an artist to avoid racial specificities and corporeal materializations altogether, ostensibly through artistic designs and forms that differ from the embodying kind. Is it possible then for these two qualities to coexist (or, at least, to serve an artist’s creative potential without compromising her integrity), especially as pertaining to art and visual culture that privileges an African American or black diasporic point-of-view (in terms of subject matter, aesthetics, or production)?

… The fabled, upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem has long held a special place in the history of this urbanizing process, and in the greater cultural mythos surrounding a twentieth-century black identity. “Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and talented of the whole Negro world,” hawked James Weldon Johnson in 1925. Perhaps more than any other African American community, Harlem has connoted a particular type and degree of city credential: that of possessing the biggest and the most ethnically diverse community of peoples of African descent in the world; of its residents (whether deserving the label or not) being the penultimate, world-wise cosmopolites; and of symbolizing (through its community organizations, local businesses, cultural and leisure activities, and national headquarters) black modernity writ large. Although Harlem’s reputation was, in part, the residual effect of being located in New York City, the community’s African American face and its magnetic pull on an inordinate number of black movers and shakers in public life contributed to its legendary status, which was firmly established by the beginning of the first World War.

One of the earliest artworks to convey something about Harlem’s tumultuous origins is George Bellows’ Tin Can Battle, San Juan Hill, New York. Although not an image of Harlem, Bellows’ drawing of this old Negro quarter in Manhattan’s West Sixties – demolished after World War II to make way for the Amsterdam Housing Projects and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts – made vivid the terrible living conditions and random violence which compelled its residents to pack up and move uptown. Like his fellow Ashcan artist Robert Henri, Bellows delighted in depicting the poor and the common masses, and his spirited treatment of black tenement dwellers in various states of repose and arrested action had the buried message of giving a forum to the related notions of Negro insurgency and flight (to Harlem): a sentiment San Juan Hill’s notorious history of race riots could have easily planted in the mind of the socially aware Bellows.

Screens, Entryways, and Cabinets in Twentieth-Century Black Visual Discourse

Historically, African Americans have been attuned to the cultures of secrecy and impasse. Before emancipation, enslaved men, women, and children, although physically and socially confined, were the sentient repositories of a wide range of suppressed information (genealogical, proprietary, and criminal) that their legal status prohibited them from publicly disclosing or responding to, either in testimonies or actions. In the years immediately following the abolition of slavery and up to the civil rights era, African Americans had to navigate carefully through mainstream society’s private clubhouses, so-called legal systems, and other clandestine operations for fear of violating long-held confidences and facing the fatal consequences of disclosure. The psychological muzzles and real-life restrictions prompted, in 1895, the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to write, famously, “We wear the mask.” Although conceived and composed with that period’s narrowly typecast black entertainers in mind, Dunbar understood how the theater’s limitations on the spectrum of black emotional expressivity – encapsulated in the metaphor of a grinning, deceptive mask – extended into everyday, cross-racial interactions. Similarly, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (whose phrase “herein lie buried many things” forms part of this essay’s title) in 1903 notably reminded readers that from the perspective of “the Veil” or, rather, the mantle of racial difference and discrimination, one could begin to fathom black spirituality, sorrow, and struggle, past and present. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century – and even encroaching into our own twenty-first-century Facebook moment – Du Bois’s metaphor of living “behind the Veil” and Dunbar’s poetic refrain “We wear the mask” are themes in African American arts and polemics that, rather than operate obliquely as mere literary conventions, touch a deep, resounding core within a modern, African American ethos.