African American Photograph That Is Considered Controversial Political Art
Explore a selection of works by African American artists included in the drove of the National Gallery of Art. Cull from the images below to view paintings, photographs, works on paper, and sculpture ranging from a even so-life painting by
Above: 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, 1959.11.1 Joshua Johnson is America's primeval-known professional African American creative person. Few details of his life are known. The son of an enslaved blackness woman and a white man, Johnson was born into slavery around 1763. A Baltimore County record from 1782 lists Johnson every bit an apprentice to a local blacksmith and states that he was to be freed within two years. In 1798 and 1802, Johnson advertised his painting practice in local newspapers, describing himself as a "self-taught genius." Some scholars accept suggested that Johnson was influenced past the Peale family of painters in Baltimore, peculiarly Charles Peale Polk. Start in the late 1700s, Johnson began to receive portrait commissions from prominent Baltimore-area families, including the Westwood family depicted here. More than lxxx portraits have now been attributed to Johnson. In this painting, the three Westwood brothers accept simply come within with freshly gathered flowers and cherries. Accompanying them is the family unit dog, who firmly grasps a bird captured on their outdoor excursion. The brothers wear matching trouser suits, fashionable for male children at the fourth dimension. The younger children, Henry and George, clasp hands, while their older brother, John, extends a protective arm behind them. Johnson'due south sympathetic pose of the three boys makes their brotherly relationship the field of study of this portrait.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Robert Seldon Duncanson, Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, 1848, oil on board, Souvenir 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, yet, has begun to focus on a small group of still-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 by Charles Willson Peale and his gifted children—specially Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale. Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, signed and dated 1848, is a classically composed work with fruit arranged in a tabletop pyramid. The painting includes remarkable passages juxtaposing the smooth surfaces of beautifully rendered apples with the textured shells of scattered nuts. The artist's turn from withal-life subjects to the landscapes for which he is better known may have been inspired by Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life; Cole'due south series was exhibited in Cincinnati, where Duncanson lived in 1848. Duncanson before long began painting landscapes that incorporated signature elements from Cole and frequently conveyed moral letters. Post-obit the outbreak of the Ceremonious War, Duncanson traveled to Canada, where he remained until departing for Europe in 1865. Often described as the showtime African American artist to accomplish an international reputation, Duncanson enjoyed considerable success exhibiting his landscapes abroad.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Seine, c. 1902, oil on sail, Souvenir of the Avalon Foundation, 1971.57.ane Painted 11 years after Henry Ossawa Tanner first settled in Paris in 1891, this chop-chop executed plein-air oil sketch is 1 of the creative person'southward rare depictions of the French majuscule. His vantage point is from the right bank of the Seine looking west toward the towers of the Palais du Trocadéro, the exhibition hall built for the 1878 World's Fair. A diffuse, hazy low-cal fills the scene, which is gratis of human action save for a solitary effigy dressed in black at the lower right. With short, loose brushstrokes laden with paint, Tanner captured the scattered reflections of lite across both river and heaven. This small, evocative painting possesses the mood and mystery that are characteristic of the creative person's ameliorate-known religious subjects. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. Although Tanner achieved some success as a painter in the U.s.a., he left for Europe as a young man to escape racial prejudice. Tanner spent well-nigh of his professional career in French republic, where he exhibited paintings at the Paris Salon and in expositions.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936, oil on sheet, Corcoran Drove (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Collection), 2014.79.17 Into Chains is a powerful delineation of enslaved Africans leap for the Americas. Shackled figures with their heads hung low walk solemnly toward slave ships on the horizon. In a gesture of despair, a lone woman at left raises her spring hands, guiding the viewer's eye to the ships. Nevertheless fifty-fifty in this grave prototype of oppression, there is hope. Concentric circles—a motif frequently employed past Aaron Douglas to suggest audio, especially African and African American song—radiate from a point on the horizon. The male figure in the center pauses on the slave block, his face up turned toward a beam of light emanating from a solitary star in the softly colored heaven, possibly suggesting the North Star. The man'southward silhouette breaches the horizon line in a sign of strength and hope. In 1936, Douglas was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Installed in the elegant archway lobby of the Hall of Negro Life, his four completed paintings charted the journeying of African Americans from slavery to the present. Considered a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural miracle that promoted African and African American civilization every bit a source of pride and inspiration, Douglas was an inspiring choice for the projection. The Hall of Negro Life, which opened on Juneteenth (June xix), a holiday celebrating the cease of slavery, was visited by more than 400,000 fairgoers over the course of the five months that the exposition was open up to the public. This commemoration of abolition, and the mural bicycle in particular, served as a critical acknowledgment of African American contributions to state and federal progress. Unfortunately, of the iv original paintings, only 2—Into Bondage and Aspiration (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)—remain.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Twenty-four hour period, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.one In 1927 James Weldon Johnson, a central effigy in what would come to be known equally the Harlem Renaissance, published his masterwork, God'southward Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Inspired by African American preachers whose eloquent orations he viewed as an fine art form, Johnson sought to interpret into verse not only the biblical parables that served as the subjects of the sermons, but also the passion with which they were delivered—the cadence and rhythm of the inspirational language. Identifying black preachers as God'due south instruments on globe, or "God's trombones," Johnson celebrated a key element of traditional blackness civilization. Years before the publication of his poems, while traveling through the Midwest as 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 down from the pulpit, and delivered—indeed, performed—an impassioned sermon. Impressed past what he had seen, Johnson made notes on the spot, but he did not translate the experience into sermon-poems until several years later. Upon publication, God's Trombones attracted considerable attention—not only for Johnson's verse, but besides 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 on manifestation of a compositional style that would later get 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 educatee of Winold Reiss, a German-born artist and illustrator and early on proponent of European modernism in America. It was Reiss who encouraged Douglas to study African art besides as the compositional and tonal innovations of the European modernists. Presently, illustrations by Douglas began appearing in The Crunch, the NAACP publication edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League. Impressed by these illustrations, James Weldon Johnson asked Douglas to illustrate his forthcoming volume of poems, God's Trombones. On curt deadline, Douglas created eight assuming and unmistakably modern images that clearly reflect the influence of Reiss equally well as the artist's close study of African fine art. Several years afterwards the publication of God's Trombones, Douglas began translating the eight illustrations he had created to accompany Johnson's poems into large oil paintings. The Judgment Twenty-four hour period, the terminal painting in the series of eight, was the beginning work by Douglas to enter the Gallery'due south drove. At the center of the composition a powerful blackness Gabriel stands astride world and sea. With a trumpet telephone call, the archangel summons the nations of the earth 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 Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1991.42.1 Horace Pippin turned to art after serving in Globe War I in the African American regiment known every bit the Harlem Hellfighters. Pippin was shot by a sniper and lost full utilize of his right arm, receiving an honorable discharge from the armed services. He returned to his hometown of Due west Chester, Pennsylvania, and taught himself to paint using his left arm to back up his injured arm. By the late 1930s his piece of work had attracted the interest of such notables as the creative person 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 expiry in 1946, the best known among them existence Domino Players (Phillips Collection, Washington, DC). Most of these scenes represent members of African American families pursuing a variety of activities in a unmarried multipurpose room. The paintings all have the same tranquillity, peaceful ambient and feature many of the same common household items, such every bit rag rugs, quilts, a stove, and an alarm clock. What distinguishes School Studies and gives added significance to the work's title is the fashion the 3 figures, instead of interacting, have turned their backs to each other and seem lost in their own inner worlds.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Charles White,Mother, 1945, lithograph in black on wove paper, Souvenir of Jacob Kainen, 2002.98.72 This work is known by two titles: Mother and Awaiting His Return. The adult female who dominates the composition stares into space, her strongly modeled figure a study in patience. Given the piece of work'southward appointment (1945), the framed star in the background (a symbol of the US military), and the give-and-take mother inscribed in the lithograph'south lower left corner, the two titles brand equal sense. The woman'south face is easily interpreted every bit that of a mother waiting for a loved i to render from service in World War II. Artist Charles White has chiseled her facial features with decision while infusing her expression with sadness. The cubist faceting of her figure imparts a feeling of solidity and force in her that is reinforced past her imposing size and foreground placement. Her hands and face are about architectural, with their sharp edges and straight-line markings of lite and shadow. Yet her tired eyes, her chin ready into the palm of her mitt, and the merest hint of dubiety 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 instructor at the Fine art Students League, New York. White's portraits, including Mother, depict anonymous people dealing with situations mutual to the blackness experience. The meticulous draftsman used his skill to return human emotion and endurance in the face of such obstacles equally discrimination. His works from the 1950s, the decade when the civil rights struggle exploded in the Usa, prove 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, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.three Bob Thompson's Tree is based on the fantastical, morally charged piece of work of Francisco de Goya, the Spanish main known for his scathing commentary on the Castilian royalty and religious persecution in the late 18th century. Thompson's painting combines ii consecutive plates from Goya's 1799 drove of etchings Los caprichos: Volaverunt (They Have Flown) on the left and Quien lo creyera! (Who Would Have Thought Information technology!) on the right. Instead of merely re-creating Goya's etchings, however, Thompson produced a unlike narrative by modifying the characters and adding new elements. Goya'south adulteress becomes a redheaded, winged affections holding an uprooted tree. Her human form watches over several unmerciful figures, suggesting that human reason presides over central instincts. To unify Goya's two images, Thompson incorporated the color ruby throughout the piece of 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 metropolis'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. Similar Tree, many of his paintings are renditions of quondam master compositions. Sadly, Thompson died in Rome of complications subsequently gallbladder surgery at the age of 29, cutting brusk his promising career.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Jacob Lawrence, Street to Mbari,1964, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James T. Dyke, 1993.18.1 In Street to Mbari, Jacob Lawrence captured the flurry of a decorated outdoor market in Nigeria. Shops line either side of the street while a maze of vendors awaiting discovery fills the distance. The viewer becomes role of the scene among a crowd of people, immature and sometime, buying and selling. One can almost hear babies crying, chickens squawking, and people chattering as they discuss fabrics and produce. A cacophony of primary colors heightens the sense of mayhem. Rolls of fabric testify off different patterns and colour combinations. Strips of corrugated iron in varying sizes and colors form the shops' roofs and create a visual rhythm across the elevation of the painting. Lawrence first studied African fine art as a fellow in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1962 he traveled to Nigeria on an invitation to exhibit his work. In describing the trip, he said, "I became so excited then by all the new visual forms I found in Nigeria—unusual colour combinations, textures, shapes, and the dramatic result of light—that I felt an overwhelming want to come up back every bit soon as possible to steep myself in Nigerian civilisation and then that my paintings, if I'm fortunate, might show the influence of the great African artistic tradition." It was during a 2d trip there that Lawrence completed Street to Mbari.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Jacob Lawrence, Daybreak - A Time to Rest, 1967, tempera on hardboard, Anonymous Gift, 1973.viii.ane Daybreak - A Time to Rest is one in a series of console 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 Underground Railroad. This abstracted epitome emphasizes Tubman's bravery in the face of constant danger. Lying on the hard ground beside a couple and their infant, she holds a burglarize. Her confront, pointing upwards to the sky, occupies the most eye of the canvas, her body surrounded by royal. Tubman's enormous feet, grossly out of proportion, become the focal signal of the piece of work. The lines delineating her toes and muscles look like carvings in a stone, as if to emphasize the arduous journeys she has fabricated. Reeds in the foreground frame the prone runaways. Three insects (a walking stick, a beetle, and an ant) 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 half-dozen 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 Brown, and African Americans migrating north from the rural south during and after slavery. Lawrence was 12 in 1929 when his family settled in Harlem, New York, at a time when African American intellectual and artistic life was flourishing at that place. As a teen, he took classes at the Harlem Art Workshop and Harlem Customs Art Center, where he studied works of fine 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 feel 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 paper mounted to canvas, Paul Mellon Fund, 2001.72.1 © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed past VAGA, New York, NY The championship of this collage could refer to several of its details. In the top right quadrant a nearly camouflaged passing train with billowing smoke travels to an unknown location. The primal effigy, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, appears lost in idea. A woman stares at the viewer with a unduly big eye, her hand on the windowsill. In the "background" (at right), blueish birds fly. These elements and others think Romare Bearden's babyhood in rural North Carolina and personify journeying, a central theme in African American history. The railroad train suggests the Hush-hush Railroad—the network of abolitionist-run prophylactic houses that secretly transported people escaping enslavement—and the post-slavery migration of African Americans, primarily northward, to seek amend lives. Built-in in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised primarily in the surrounding Mecklenburg County, Bearden eventually settled in New York City to finish college at New York University. He was a social worker in that location for several decades, during which fourth dimension 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 blackness civilisation.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Sam Gilliam, Relative, 1968, acrylic on canvas, Anonymous Gift, 1994.39.1 Sam Gilliam's draped paintings such as Relative pushed the notion of what painting was and could exist. By moving his canvases off their stretcher bars, Gilliam allowed them to shift and flow as cloth is meant to practise. The folds in the canvases, nonetheless, were not created at random but instead reflect Gilliam'due south specific idea about how he wanted his paintings to be installed. Relative, while still hung on a wall, becomes a function of its setting and interacts with and inside that space. Lighting in the room affects the style shadows from the sail autumn on the wall. Concrete movement around the painting can crusade the textile to stir, altering our perception of information technology. The ample folds demonstrate the painting's flexible properties, highlighting nuances of stained colors and hinting at what the creases conceal. Viewers can indulge in the continuous play betwixt activeness and stillness, bright color and dark shadow. Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Similar 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 Schoolhouse and the larger color field motility. Gilliam's experimentations with color and abstraction resulted from an interest in moving away from figurative imagery to prefer color equally the primary subject of his paintings.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Barkley Leonnard Hendricks, Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, 1972, oil on canvas, William C. Whitney Foundation, 1973.19.one Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris offers a tripled image, its single field of study 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, pop culture, and the exclamation of black identity in the generation following the ceremonious 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 fix acutely on the individuality and self-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 red velvet coat—was a point of divergence for this piece of work. Intending to brand a replica of the Van Dyck image, Hendricks received permission to paint equally a copyist in the museum. But once in the process, he realized he could non re-create some other artist'due south work, "no matter how much I similar information technology," he said. Years later, he painted Sir Charles with Van Dyck's red coat in mind. Other writers accept likened Sir Charles to the iconic three graces—artistic muses (commonly female) equally portrayed by European old masters such as Botticelli and Rubens in iii dissimilar attitudes, ane usually with her dorsum toward the viewer. Information technology might be said that Hendricks's artistic muses relate to classical Western art history as well equally sources personal to the creative person. Hendricks, who was born in Philadelphia, studied there at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned BFA and MFA degrees from Yale Academy. He taught at Connecticut College. The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he exhibited his work at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum at Connecticut Higher; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University organized a career retrospective of Hendricks'southward work, Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Alma Thomas, Red Rose Cantata, 1973, acrylic on sheet, Gift of Vincent Melzac, 1976.half dozen.one The unevenly spaced, staccato brushstrokes on the white canvass class a visual rhythm, as if the artist had painted a cantata, a type of musical composition. Tremendous delicacy is shown in the play of infinite and color, with the white "background" every bit of import to the overall consequence as the red bursts of color. The harmonic color field is no accident; the compositional and colour structure of Red Rose Cantata derives from Alma Thomas's interest in nature and music, in its linear organisation with organic variations. Thomas came into the professional person art globe late in life, after teaching art for 35 years in the Washington, DC, public schools. Her age, however, did not prevent her from gaining recognition as an creative person. In 1972, 1 year before she painted Red Rose Cantata, Thomas had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Fine art in New York—the museum'south first solo exhibition for an African American woman. Thomas and Sam Gilliam were the merely two African American members of the Washington Colour School. She and other artists, Gilliam among them, are associated with the larger color field movement, which probed the employ of solid color in abstract paintings. Thomas continued painting in her signature mode, cartoon on nature and music for inspiration, until her death in 1978 at historic period 86.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Howardena Pindell, Untitled, #twenty, 1974, collage with hole-punched paper dots, pen and black ink, monofilament, and talcum powder on oak tag paper, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Drove, 2007.6.303 Untitled, #twenty is a collage both intricate and seemingly precarious in its construction. Hundreds of small circular pieces, remnants from a pigsty-puncher, embrace the surface of the paper. Some lie flat while others cluster in piles or hang off the edges. A grid created past monofilament provides a substructure for the outwardly haphazard composition, and a calorie-free coating of powder imparts an iridescent quality. Although numbered, each slice 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 diverseness of techniques and materials in her fine art, including fabric and video. Similar Untitled, #20, her other work explores structure and texture in the process of making 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 only a large necklace, reclines on an overstuffed settee. Her alluring position is similar to the pose establish in archetype images of odalisques—enslaved women in the Ottoman Empire whose identities became sexualized and popularized during the 19th century. Withal dissimilar the seductive odalisque seen in Western art, whose gaze challenges by staring directly at the viewer, the nude in Wells's work, with optics 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, equally if unwelcome despite the outwardly inviting scene. James Lesesne Wells was built-in in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1902 and received BS and MS degrees from Columbia University. He had a long career in printmaking, showtime participating in the Federal Fine art Project, which encouraged the evolution of fine art in the U.s.a. during the Dandy Low, and then education at Howard University in Washington, DC, for almost 4 decades. Wells was active in the civil rights movement and often depicted the struggles of African Americans in his work. African Nude, which Wells created belatedly in life, reflects his printmaking skill, involvement in traditional African aesthetics, and commitment to representing African American history and experiences.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Martin Puryear, Lever No. three, 1989, carved and painted wood, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 1989.71.1 In the sweeping silhouette of Lever No. 3, a viewer might see either a long-necked animate being or a mechanical arm, as suggested past the piece of work's title. While Martin Puryear's sculptures often recall familiar forms, they encourage private interpretations. This work explores a delicate remainder betwixt the heavy, solid-looking "body" and the elegant, weightless attain of the giraffe-like "neck." The play between opposing values—heavy and light, fauna and mechanical, space and form, movement and stasis—imbues the sculpture with a sense of animation, vitality, and changeability. While the cardinal grade of Lever No. three appears to be sculpted from a heavy block of forest, information technology is actually a hollow vanquish, advisedly constructed of thin, bent planks of woods. The sculpture is stained light grey, which unifies its appearance merely also creates a somewhat uneven patina that emphasizes its hand-crafted quality. Like Lever No. 3, Puryear'south sculptural objects often blend qualities of fine art and finely crafted utilitarian objects. Puryear was built-in in Washington, DC, in 1941. After earning his BA there from Catholic University, he joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where he had the take a chance to report woodworking techniques such as basketry and carpentry. Puryear and so attended the Purple 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 Fine art, New York, organized a 30-year retrospective exhibition of his work.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Lorna Simpson, Untitled (2 Necklines), 1989, 2 gelatin silver prints and 11 plastic plaques, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2005.44.ane.one-3 In Untitled (Two Necklines), identical photographs of an unidentified African American adult female, shown from mouth to breastbone, hang in circular frames, between them a list of words engraved on plaques. The double image 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 characteristic words describing circularity and enclosure that are ominously electrified by text on the final plaque, which reads, "experience the footing sliding from under you lot." Such meticulous alignments of words and paradigm fuel the subtle yet startling ability of Lorna Simpson'south piece of work, which for more than two decades has probed the spectral issues of race, sex activity, and class. Like this one, her images are oft truncated, replicated, and annotated with words that strength the viewer to interpret. Here, the framed photographs and words inscribed on plaques are literally and metaphorically black and white; the groundwork of the final plaque is a haunting claret red. One is difficult pressed to deny the implications of this personal yet dehumanized epitome and its attendant language of racial pathology. Simpson's interest in the relationship between text and images began during her career as a documentary lensman. 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 i of America'south ranking masters of potent, poetic work in photography and film. Her works signal what is most personal about identity while simultaneously touching upon clichés and assumptions that can disfigure or destroy it.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Joseph Norman, Slum Gardens No. 3, 1990, charcoal on wove paper, Souvenir of the Sandra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation in memory of Dorothea Fifty. Leonhardt, 1992.20.1 The densely layered prototype of Slum Gardens No. 3 signals claustrophobia. A large tree with a thick, spiked vine winding its way up the trunk defines the correct side of the work. Weeds and flowers blanket the lesser half of the image, almost obscuring the wooden shack (left) and the staircase. Plants invade a scout debate and piece of railing in the lower foreground. We sense that the vegetation will shortly overtake the unabridged area, turning the "garden" into a neighborhood menace. The muscularity of the piece of work, emboldened by thick, heavy lines of black 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 up in Chicago and on a 1990 trip to Republic of costa rica, where he witnessed the effects of poverty on diverse neighborhoods. Slum Gardens No. 3 is not a view of a specific place; rather, information technology visualizes the concept of "slums" from regions around the world. Here, the overgrowing landscape serves as a metaphor for the lack of attention paid to impoverished neighborhoods. Not only are the concrete environments of such areas neglected, simply, as Norman'due south drawing suggests, its social and economic problems are ignored likewise. Norman was born in Chicago in 1957. He received a BS in art pedagogy from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1980 and an MFA six years afterwards from the University of Cincinnati. Afterwards teaching drawing for ix years at the Rhode Isle School of Design, he took a professorship at the Lamar Dodd Schoolhouse of Art at the University of Georgia in 2001.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Willie Cole, Domestic ID, V, 1992, steam-atomic number 26 scorches with graphite on paper 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. Below each silhouette, in large capital letter letters, is the name of an fe manufacturer—Casco, General Mills, Monarch, Silex, Presto, with 1 "unknown." What practice we make of this image, framed in an old window? For the past 20 years Willie Cole has selected and transformed item items discarded from our vast consumer culture, such every bit irons, shoes, and backyard jockeys, into objects that resonate with metaphorical meaning—specially cross-referencing African cultural history and the African Diaspora. The fe silhouettes in Domestic ID, V call back the slave era in America, when African women served as forced domestic laborers, and the catamenia after emancipation, when they took in laundry as 1 of the few lines of work open to them. The irons' singed imprints as well evoke the rituals of scarification, proficient within certain African and other cultures, and branding, which expunged identity to marker humans every bit slave property—perhaps reinforced by the iron marked "unknown." Other references inhabit this powerful image, such every bit the similarity of the fe's shape to boats that plied the slave merchandise across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the near-whiff of heat and steam that seems to evoke the hot, backbreaking piece of work of plantation life. Mounting his image in a window, Cole literally reframes history in a fashion that summons the readymade fine art of surrealist and Dada artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Such wry notwithstanding serious correspondences of history, art, and racial politics anchor Cole's reputation in the 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 work throughout the U.s., Canada, and Europe.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Glenn Ligon, Untitled: Iv Etchings [A], 1992, softground etching, aquatint, spitbite, and sugarlift aquatint in black on Rives BFK newspaper, Gift of Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky and the Collectors Committee Fund, 2004.65.1.i African American artists working in the 1980s and 1990s oft 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's essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928) and Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952). Selections from both literary works are written in the offset person, oftentimes repeating the word "I." In the process of deciphering the text, the viewer becomes the "I" and thus inhabits the person questioning their own self and identity. Untitled: Four Etchings [A] (above) and [B] repeat, over and over, sentences from Hurston's essay: "I do not always feel colored" [A] and "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white groundwork" [B]. Every bit the viewer reads, the texts become increasingly difficult to decipher. Smudged and cleaved blazon interferes with legibility, suggesting the viewer's literal and intellectual struggle to read the sentence and understand its implications. Etchings [C] and [D], both black type on blackness paper, also make the reader work to comprehend the pregnant. Their nigh identical texts taken from Ellison's monumental novel are about indiscernible—"invisible" like the story's protagonist. Text [C]: Text [D] is the same, except that it ends:
I am an invisible human being. No, I am non a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and os, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply considering people refuse to run across me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side-shows, information technology is equally though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see just 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 ability are unremarkably those who assign a subject'southward identity. And once such identity has been given, it accumulates historical authority as years, decades, and centuries ensue. Central to this miracle is the function of gaze—the thought that viewers accept the ability to define what they see. In the art of our times, nonetheless, the authority of gaze has been tested and upended. Hither, Lorna Simpson weighs in. The artist presents two binoculars and, between them, a series of phrases. Yous might pick up one of these looking devices—perhaps to spy?—and thus see what the text haltingly, disjointedly describes. But Simpson has placed the binoculars face up 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 data to understand a person or situation. Simpson has examined the relationship between text and image over many years, challenging concepts of truth, history, and identity. Here, gaze is thwarted by its instruments, and knowledge is bedridden by incompleteness. You may assign meaning to this image, simply Simpson reminds the viewer: information technology is not necessarily correct. Text:
can see the moisture of her jiff while she sings—an interior wall blocks the view of the other—can see 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 center—tried to hold in view—just shadows—virtually sighted—gruesome—remembered everything—correct in the line of vision—they moved iii steps dorsum and out of view
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Kara Walker,Roots and Links, Inc., 1997, black paper collage on prepared wove paper, Corcoran Drove (Souvenir of the Women'south Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2014.136.226.ii In Walker's cutting-paper silhouettes, troubling narratives of violence, animalism, and exoticism play out. Her work draws upon imagery mutual in the antebellum South and is controversial for its utilize of racial stereotypes of both blacks and whites. Walker focuses on the role of stereotypes in shaping history and their complex function in American race relations today. The abridgement "Inc." in the work'south title alludes to the institutionalization of racism and the implicit cultural approving of such degrading images. By suggesting narratives that complicate distinctions between fact and fantasy, victim and predator, black and white, Walker'due south work confronts the viewer with the uncomfortable claiming of self-reflection. Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, Walker moved to Atlanta, Georgia, at historic period thirteen. Her transition from an integrated boondocks to the racially divided atmosphere of the Due 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 Design, having begun her exploration of the silhouette while in school. At age 27, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation accolade. Her get-go retrospective exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Roy DeCarava,Mississippi freedom marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963, gelatin silver print, Robert B. Menschel Fund, 1999.67.3 On August 28, 1963, lensman Roy DeCarava was present for the celebrated March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty, which culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'due south "I Have a Dream" speech. In this striking photograph, DeCarava turned abroad 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 woman who was cute in her black. . . . I wanted to pay homage to that person, that spirit." Celebrated as one of the outset African American photographers to cover and explore the blackness experience in his art, DeCarava spent much of his career chronicling daily life in Harlem, the civil rights motility, and jazz musicians. His overarching goal, yet, was not documentary realism only rather "artistic expression," as he explained, "the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe but a Negro lensman can interpret." No matter the subject, DeCarava'due south photographs reveal a keen involvement in exploring the symbolic significance of blackness, every bit tin can be seen in his evocative, highly acclaimed book The Sugariness Flypaper of Life (1955), a fictional story of life in Harlem with text past Langston Hughes. DeCarava's influence extended far across his ain photographs. In 1955 he founded A Photographers' Gallery, ane of few commercial spaces in New York where photographers—including such emerging artists equally Harry Callahan and Small-scale White—could showroom their work.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists Carrie Mae Weems,May Flowers, 2002, chromogenic print, printed 2013, Alfred H. Moses and Fern Chiliad. Schad Fund, 2014.3.i May Flowers, a compelling photograph of three immature African American girls, succinctly addresses the bug of race, class, and gender that the American creative person Carrie Mae Weems has explored for decades. Related to a video Weems fabricated in 2002 titled May Days Long Forgotten, the photograph evokes both leap'south renewal and May Day, the international workers' holiday. Befitting these themes, May Flowers depicts girls from working-course 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 child, while its subject—adolescent girls with flowers in their hair, lounging on the grass—recalls both 19th-century paintings and photographs, such every bit 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. Yet the color of the girls' skin belies such a history, fifty-fifty as their beauty and knowing expressions—specially the authoritative look of the cardinal figure—challenge viewers to question why they accept been excluded for and then long. Further complicating and enriching the work, Weems glazed information technology with a piece of convex drinking glass of the blazon commonly used in 18th- and 19th-century mirrors, as if to propose that the prototype represents a reflection of the earth at big. Weems received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and has been honored with numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013.
Drove Highlights: African American Artists Gordon Parks,Washington, D.C., Mrs. Ella Watson, a Government Charwoman, July 1942, gelatin silvery print, printed 1960s, Gift of Julia J. Norrell, 2015.119.1 A rich and complex religious practice is displayed in the Washington, DC, home of Ella Watson, a cleaning woman who worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during World War Two. 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, likewise as two elephants, two crucifixes, candles, and a rosary—intermingles with her everyday life reflected in the mirror. Appearing in the reflection is a child'south doll propped against 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 summer foliage are visible at the intersection of 11th and P Streets, in northwest Washington. Over the grade of a month, the photographer Gordon Parks created a series of nigh 90 pictures of Watson, including his most iconic photo, Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman (American Gothic), in which he posed her with a broom and a mop before an American flag. Fabricated nether the auspices of the Historical Section of the FSA, which was headed by Parks'south mentor Roy Stryker, the series was not published by the government at the time. Parks purchased his start camera in late 1937 while working equally 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 as a lensman for Life magazine and a filmmaker in Hollywood, Parks was both an instigator and witness of social and aesthetic alter during his storied career.
Collection Highlights: African American Artists James Van Der Zee,Couple, 1924, gelatin silver print, Robert B. Menschel Fund, 2000.83.1 Standing side by side amidst elements of middle-class comfort and in forepart of an elaborately painted backdrop, the subjects of James Van Der Zee's Couple exude poise and sophistication. Their elegant apparel, straight gazes, and tender nevertheless assured body language demonstrate confidence and security in their place in society. Created at the elevation of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1929), this photograph exemplifies the spirit of an artistic, literary, and social movement that sought to affirm black inventiveness and self-determination in the aftermath of World War I and the first moving ridge of the Groovy 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 married woman Gaynella, who assisted with the subtle poses, polished styling, and selective placement of studio props that imbued Van Der Zee'south 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 piece of work as a lensman in Harlem built on these familial beginnings past emphasizing motherhood, marriage, and customs through careful collaboration with his sitters to combine their personal identities with their social continuing and aspirations. His photographic career continued into the late 1960s with mail-gild retouching and calendar work.
Source: https://www.nga.gov/features/african-american-artists.html
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