Chicago Black Renaissance
The movement included such famous African-American writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as musicians Thomas A. Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Mahalia Jackson[1][2][3][4][5] and artists William Edouard Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Katherine Dunham, Charles Wilbert White, Margaret Burroughs, Charles C. Dawson, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Walter Sanford, and Eldzier Cortor.
[7] It was also notably more inward-looking, evaluating politics and societal undercurrents within the Black community that Harlem Renaissance artists were less likely to explore due to broader collaboration with white benefactors.
[7] Ultimately, the Chicago Black Renaissance did not receive the same amount of publicity as the Harlem Renaissance on a national scale, the primary reasons being that the Chicago group participants presented no singularly prominent "face", wealthy patrons were less involved, and New York City—home of Harlem—was the higher profile national publishing center.
African Americans saw Chicago, and other cities of the north, as a chance for freedom from legally sanctioned racial discrimination.
Migrants mainly found work in meatpacking plants, steel mills, garment shops, and private homes.
With a revitalized community spirit and sense of racial pride, a new Black consciousness developed resulting in a shift toward social activism.
Jazz, which developed as a mix of European and African musical styles, began in the southeastern United States, but is said to have made its way from New Orleans to Chicago in 1915, when migrants came north to work in factories, mills, and stockyards.
[2] During that time, Chicago heard a number of jazz greats such as Earl "Fatha" Hines, Jelly Roll Morton, Erskine Tate, Fats Waller, and Cab Calloway.
Greats such as Chester Burnett, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Koko Taylor were prominent during this time.
[2] Prominent writers in the movement included Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Frank London Brown.
The South Side Writers Group was a writing circle of several authors and poets from the time of the Chicago Black Renaissance.
Photographers also displayed daily life of south side Chicago through a variety of iconic American images.
[3] Four Black artists, all of whom attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, are famous for sharing the vibrant spirit of Black Chicago through their art: William Edouard Scott, Charles Wilbert White, Archibald John Motley, Jr., and Eldzier Cortor.
He was an active member of the South Side Community Art Center, which was founded by Margaret Burroughs, and his work, "There Were No Crops This Year," won a first prize at the Negro Exposition in 1940.
[11] When reflecting on his time and studied spent with Buehr, the artist goes onto say about his mentor that “a great influence on me not only as a painter but as a gentlemen, as a man”.
In his portrait of this fisherman, the brushstrokes are extremely visible and the man is very naturalistic unlike his later paintings where it is very animates and appears to look saturated.
Motley graduated from the Art Institute in Chicago with the highest possible grades as well as recognition for “general excellence” in his work.
Along with his new knowledge of European modernism, he also started to incorporate elements of Impressionism, the colors of Fauvism and Expressionism, and the use of space in Cubism.
His use of a vibrant color palette, distorted perspective, and the condensing of space breathed new life into his style of painting.
In “The Liar,” the exaggeration critics comment on are perhaps the lips and how big they are, playing into the stereotypes of how certain people thought of African Americans.
