Four Great African-American Artists of the 20th Century | Jacob Lawrence, Palmer Hayden, Romare Bear
Artist: Jacob Lawrence; Title: Vaudeville (1951)~ "Masterpiece."
The tensions between an art that refers to black people's social conditions and an art that transcends race and class politics are perhaps the primary hallmarks of African American art in the 20th century.
Once the hope of emancipation and political enfranchisement gave way during and after Reconstruction to the reality of despair, segregation, and disfranchisement, many black artists left the United States to pursue their art in Europe, especially France and Italy.
With the advent of the Harlem Renaissance and with the Great Migration of blacks to the north, themes of racial uplift and heroic depictions of African Americans became more and more prevalent and the political/apolitical debate began to center on the issue of racially representative art, particularly in response to Alain Locke's famous call for Negro artists to use African art as an aesthetic model.
In the years after World War II, however, the debate shifted away from racial representations and Africanist aesthetics to discussions of social responsibility among black artists. Some artists, however, chose to break away from the debate by turning to abstract art and expressionism—though even these artists generally remained "within the fold" by continuing to use and rely on specifically African and African American motifs and themes.
The Black Arts and Black Power movements of the 1960s brought politics and racial representation back to the fore. Since the 1980s, though, black art has been dominated by the postmodernist tenets of cultural relativity, art-as-performance, critical inquiries of art and society through one's work, and interrogations of identity, geography, and history. Using images and text, the art scholar Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw examine the art of fourteen African American men and women who made major contributions to art in the 20th century.
African American Art Curator Talk:
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator, explores the work of Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Lois Mailou Jones, Melvin Edwards, and other artists featured in the exhibition African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond. These artists participated in ongoing dialogues about art, black identity, and individual rights that engaged American society in the twentieth century. Using documentary realism, painterly expressionism, and the postmodern assemblage of found objects, they rewrote American history and its art.
Black Arts Movement
The big questions we ask are what is the role of the politically committed artist? What is the relationship between art and politics? Is there a “Black Aesthetic” and how did artists of that generation approach the topic? It’s interdisciplinary in nature look at people as diverse as Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Faith Ringgold, Sun Ra, and more.
Modern Art` Ethnic Roots Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence two great jazz artists who made prints instead of record albums? They were both storytellers, and as they improvised on their various themes, they had more in common with Ben Webster or Miles Davis than with the icons of late modernism in the visual-art world, especially with the scenes from Lawrence’s Genesis series, now on view at G.R. N’Namdi Gallery.
