African-American art
[7] Like their peers, African-American artists also work in an array of media, including painting, print-making, collage, assemblage, drawing, sculpture and more.
[9][10] Once known as the "sculptor of horrors", Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller favored a mix of conceptual realism and symbolism, and took inspiration from ghost stories.
[11] Mentored by Henry Osawa Tanner, critiqued by Auguste Rodin, and exhibited in the 1903 Salon,[11][12] she recognized that a continued career relied on "meet[ing] requests for race-based work from the leading Black scholars, activists, and luminaries who controlled the commission pipeline".
Du Bois became one of her patrons, and she became the first African-American woman recipient of a federal commission ... for progress-themed dioramas for Jamestown's tercentennial ... and, later, for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation", but it all came at some cost.
[11][12][13] Another extreme is illustrated by an artist like Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, whose art was consciously radical, and has since become iconic.
[14] "[C]redited with popularising the term 'pigs' for corrupt police officers", his best-known imagery was often harshly critical of the existing power structure, openly violent and, like all political iconography, intended to persuade.
[14][15] Sculptor Edmonia Lewis, by contrast, financed her first trip to Europe in 1865 by selling sculptures of abolitionist John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw, the Union Colonel who led the enlisted black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.
[5] In response to a bust Lewis had made of her, her patron Anna Quincey Waterston wrote admiringly of her: "Tis fitting that a daughter of the race / Whose chains are breaking should receive a gift / So rare as genius.
Although some of her art includes confrontational symbols from the Black Power movement, she is best known for her portrayals of African-American heroes — Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman — and strong maternal women.
[21] Her The American People Series #20: Die which depicts a bloody clash between Cubist black and white figures, was hung opposite Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the newly renovated MOMA in 2019, the better to start a conversation between the "savage force" of their respective compositions.
[21][22][23] Conceptual artist Fred Wilson focuses on other kinds of composition, "juxtaposing wildly anomalous items, such as a slave statue and a set of fine china".
[8][26] As in the cases of Kehinde Wiley[citation needed] and Amy Sherald,[27] history painting can also involve portraiture; in this instance, the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, respectively.
Artists like Horace Pippen and Romare Bearden chose more ordinary subject matter, relying on contemporary life to inspire uncontroversial imagery.
With the consent of their masters, some slave artisans were also able to keep a small percentage of the wages earned in their spare time to save enough money to purchase their freedom, and that of their family members.
In New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies, slaves were apprenticed as goldsmiths, cabinetmakers, engravers, carvers, portrait painters, carpenters, masons and iron workers.
In the mid-18th century, John Bush was a powder horn carver and soldier with the Massachusetts militia fighting with the British in the French and Indian War.
Others include Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, a female artist who, like Edmonia Lewis, was a sculptor, as well as Grafton Tyler Brown and Nelson A.
[13][11][42] The goal of widespread recognition across racial boundaries was first eased within America's big cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York, and New Orleans.
[citation needed] By 1933, the U.S. Treasury Department's Public Works of Art Project was attempting to provide support for artists in 1933, but their efforts proved ineffective.
By the middle of the 1930s, more than 250,000 African Americans were involved with the WPA,[44] including Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, sculptor William Artis; painter and children's book illustrator Ernest Crichlow, cartoonist and illustrator Elton C. Fax, photographer Marvin Smith, Dox Thrash, who invented the printmaking method carborundum Mezzotint, painters Georgette Seabrooke and Elba Lightfoot, best known for their Harlem Hospital murals; Chicago printmaker Eldzier Cortor; and renowned Illinois-based artist Adrian Troy and many others.
[44] Many of these artists found themselves drawn to the interwar movement known as Social Realism, which reflected the politics and socioeconomic views of a generation that had been drafted into WWI, only to dance through the Roaring 1920s and crash in the Great Depression.
Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, they are recognized today as an important part of American folk history,[46][47] and the current market price for an original Highwaymen painting can easily bring in thousands of dollars.
After the Second World War, some artists took a global approach, working and exhibiting abroad, in Paris, and as the decade wore on, relocated gradually in other welcoming cities such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Stockholm: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Edward Clark, Harvey Cropper, Beauford Delaney, Herbert Gentry,[49] Bill Hutson, Clifford Jackson,[50] Sam Middleton,[51] Larry Potter, Haywood Bill Rivers, Merton Simpson, and Walter Williams.
Richard Hunt was the first African American visual artist to serve on the National Council on the Arts, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.
[citation needed] Kara Walker, a contemporary American artist, is known for her exploration of race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her artworks.
Influential contemporary artists include Larry D. Alexander, Laylah Ali, Amalia Amaki, Emma Amos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dawoud Bey, Camille Billops, Mark Bradford, Edward Clark, Willie Cole, Robert Colescott, Louis Delsarte, David Driskell, Leonardo Drew, Melvin Edwards, Ricardo Francis, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Herbert Gentry, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Jerry Harris, Joseph Holston, Richard Hunt, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Katie S. Mallory, M. Scott Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Joe Lewis, Glenn Ligon, James Little, Edward L. Loper Sr., Alvin D. Loving, Kerry James Marshall, Eugene J. Martin, Richard Mayhew, Sam Middleton, Howard McCalebb, Charles McGill, Thaddeus Mosley, Sana Musasama, Senga Nengudi, Joe Overstreet, Martin Puryear, Adrian Piper, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Gale Fulton Ross, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, John Solomon Sandridge, Raymond Saunders, John T. Scott, Joyce Scott, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Renee Stout, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Stanley Whitney, William T. Williams, Jack Whitten, Fred Wilson, Richard Wyatt Jr., Richard Yarde, and Purvis Young, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Barkley Hendricks, Jeff Sonhouse, William Walker, Ellsworth Ausby, Che Baraka, Emmett Wigglesworth, Otto Neals, Dindga McCannon, Terry Dixon (artist), Frederick J.
