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Preview
An Awakening of a Black Consciousness in American Culture
Art of the Harlem Renaissance period (1920–1935) reveals the awakening of a black consciousness through works that demonstrate African American artists’ focus on their race. For the first time, they presented portraits of their people and scenes from their daily lives. African American artists were motivated to do this by writings of intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke, who urged them to create images of their people that would counteract the spread of racist stereotype imagery.
During the 1940s and ‘50s, African American artists continued to define the African American image in work that dealt with their history, culture, and the multiplicity of their experiences.
Not until the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s did African American artists begin to deal directly with issues that African Americans were struggling with for some time, such as racism, poverty, and political exclusion.
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Aaron Douglas,
The Negro Speaks of Rivers (For Langston Hughes), 1941,
pen/ink on paper. Walter O. Evans Collection.
Douglas was
one of the first Harlem Renaissance artists. This drawing is his homage
both to the poet Langston Hughes and his poem “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers.”In the poem Hughes declares, “I bathed in the Euphrates…I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.” He concludes, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The reclining body is a visual illustration; it echoes the rolling river, and the figure’s knee matches the sharp pyramids. Douglas’ use of geometric forms and strong silhouettes is informed by African art, but conveys the modern African American. ^ top |
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Charles White,
Frederick Douglass, 1940, pencil on paper. Walter O. Evans
Collection.
This drawing
was made in preparation for a wall mural entitled Five Great American
Negroes, which has portraits of slavery abolitionists and Civil
Rights leaders, including Frederick Douglass (1818-95). The squared
grids and pinholes on the drawing are there to allow the artists to
properly place these images in the context of the large mural. Pinholes
allow charcoal dust to mark the precise areas on the walls.1951 © The Charles White Archives. ^ top |
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Image Caption: Aaron Douglas, The Creation, 1927, gouache on paper. Walter O. Evans Collection. (left)