African Americans

VII

Visual Arts

Since their arrival in North America, African American artists have straddled the line between European and African artistic traditions. Under slavery, black artists helped create many of the greatest achievements of American art and architecture, ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to the ironwork of the French Quarter in New Orleans. However, the professional black artists of the 19th century were few, often isolated from each other, and ostracized by whites. The first known black portrait painter was Joshua Johnston of Baltimore, Maryland. Although experts have attributed more than 80 portraits to him, next to nothing is known of his life. Other now-anonymous or little-known black artists worked in a range of decorative and fine arts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, black artists contributed to the major art movements of the time. In the mid-1800s Robert Duncanson painted romantic landscapes in the style of the Hudson River School. His Blue Hole, Little Miami River (1851) depicted a wilderness scene familiar to many fugitives from slavery. Another landscape painter, Edward Bannister, won one of the highest art prizes at the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. At the same exposition, sculptor Edmonia Lewis exhibited The Death of Cleopatra, which shocked viewers by representing the dead body of Cleopatra. Henry Ossawa Tanner painted scenes from everyday life and religious subjects. Tanner’s paintings gained international recognition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A

The 1920s

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a watershed in the development of a number of black artists. In the 19th century black artists often depicted classical or biblical scenes, typically avoiding overtly African American themes. In contrast, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance saw their heritage as an inspiration rather than a hindrance to their art. They increasingly depicted modern African Americans and incorporated influences from the varied artistic traditions of the African continent (see African Art and Architecture).

Many African American artists, such as sculptor Augusta Savage and painter William Johnson, moved from small towns in the South to large cities in the North in search of greater training and experience. The concentration of black artists and writers in urban areas encouraged interaction and collaboration. African American artists often illustrated books by Harlem Renaissance writers. The best-known African American artist of the 1920s, Aaron Douglas, provided illustrations for a number of books, including God’s Trombones (1927) by novelist James Weldon Johnson and The New Negro (1925) by scholar Alain Locke.

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B

The 1930s and 1940s

Like other American artists of the 1930s, black artists benefited from the support of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), a government agency that provided employment in many fields during the Great Depression. The WPA commissioned Douglas to paint a number of murals blending modernist and African influences. Inspired by the politically conscious work of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and José Orozco, other African American artists painted murals throughout the United States in the 1930s. Hale Woodruff’s murals at Talladega College in Alabama, painted in 1938 and 1939, depict the 1841 mutiny of African slaves aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad and their subsequent trial in the United States (see Amistad case).

In the 1940s black artists experimented with a variety of styles to capture the distinctive spirit of their African American subjects. Sculptor Richmond Barthé took the African American figure as his subject. Barthé sculpted busts of famous African Americans, such as Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, as well as more monumental works such as The Boxer (1942). William Henry Johnson adopted a style he termed primitivism to evoke the lifestyle of rural African Americans. Although Johnson was highly sophisticated, his colorful primitivist paintings of religious subjects and everyday life resemble folk art. Painter Jacob Lawrence depicted the 20th-century migration of blacks to the North in a series of paintings titled ... And the Migrants Kept Coming (1940-1941). Romare Bearden created collages that combine drawings, paintings and photographs.

C

Post-World War II Period

The popularity of abstract art in the 1950s discouraged many artists from representing recognizably African American images. Some black artists, such as painters Norman Lewis and Alma Thomas, sought to combine abstraction with African American themes. Lewis created abstract paintings that suggested the rhythms of jazz or the energy of the civil rights movement.

In the 1960s and 1970s many black artists found inspiration in the civil rights and black power movements. Some began to adopt increasingly confrontational political stances. In the 1970s Robert Colescott began painting politically charged parodies of famous European and American paintings. In George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), Colescott parodied the familiar painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) by replacing the figures of George Washington and Revolutionary War soldiers with characters from early 20th century minstrel shows. In 1997 Colescott became the first African American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious international art exhibitions in the world. Artist David Hammons created confrontational sculptural installations, such as Greasy Bags and Barbecue Bones (1975), which included grease-stained paper bags, sparerib bones, glitter, and hair.

In the early 1980s interest increased in so-called street artists, such as graffiti artists and urban muralists. Jean-Michel Basquiat, of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, began his career as a graffiti artist in New York City during the late 1970s. Before his untimely death in 1988, Basquiat had become a rising star in the New York art world. Basquiat’s paintings combine thick strokes of color, scrawled words, and cartoonish skeletons or other images.

In the 1990s many African American artists, such as painter Sam Gilliam and sculptor Martin Puryear, enjoy international acclaim. Black women artists, such as Adrian Piper and Faith Ringgold, address both feminist and African American issues in their work.

VIII

The Motion Picture Industry

The first full-length film directed by an African American filmmaker was Oscar Micheaux’s 1919 film The Homesteader, based on his novel of the same name. After Micheaux’s last film in 1939, very few black directors were able to finance full-length feature films. In the 1970s African American directors produced a number of urban crime dramas known as blaxploitation films, including Gordon Parks's Shaft (1971) and Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

In the 1980s, a new generation of black filmmakers, independent of major Hollywood studios, began making films with unprecedented critical and commercial success. Director Spike Lee has been the most commercially successful. Lee’s films, such as Do The Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992), explore the complex issues facing black America and rigorously examine race relations in the United States. Other young black filmmakers include John Singleton, Leslie Harris, and Julie Dash.

For most of the 20th century, mainstream American motion pictures usually offered black actors only stereotypical roles, often as servants to whites. The first Academy Award presented to a black actor went to Hattie McDaniel for her role as Mammy, a faithful slave to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind. Sidney Poitier was the first African American actor to become a major star in mainstream American motion pictures. Poitier’s films often dealt with politically charged subjects, such as racism and crime. He won an Academy Award for his performance as a drifter in Lilies of the Field (1963).

Other black actors gradually gained starring television series roles. Since the 1960s, Bill Cosby has broken down barriers and stereotypes in films and several television series. Actors such as Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, Cicely Tyson, and Morgan Freeman, have received great acclaim in a variety of roles. Despite such recent successes, black actors and actresses are still less frequently employed than their white counterparts.

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