Black History Art: Jacob Lawrence

Migration Series: In the North the Negro had better educational facilities. Panel 58

Jacob Lawrence(September 7, 1917) is among the best-known 20th-century African-American painters.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey but raised in New York City's Harlem, Jacob Lawrence was most widely acclaimed for producing narrative collections that brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors.  Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.

This is Harlem

Lawrence was introduced to art when his mother enrolled him in classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, in an effort to keep him busy. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons. In the beginning, he copied patterns of his mother's carpets; one of his art teachers noted great potential in Lawrence.

Throughout his career, Jacob Lawrence emphasized the crucial role that the black community of Harlem played in his development as a young man and as an artist. In his images of Harlem, Lawrence painted his vision of poverty, crime, racial tensions, and police brutality based on his experience of urban life around him. He also portrayed a vibrant, thriving community and the aspirations of its people. Harlem was a constant backdrop to many of Lawrence’s paintings.  His themes included black working women, health concerns, leisure time, and the role of religion and spirituality in people's daily lives. In these works, Lawrence portrayed the community in bold colors, repeating patterns, and asymmetrical compositions. He also incorporated the rhythms, breaks, and changes of jazz music into his visual representations of the Harlem environment.

There are Many Churches in Harlem. The People are Very Religious.

The Seamstress

Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans. He often portrayed important periods in African-American history. He was 21 years old when his series of paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This impressive work was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as well as a series of pieces about the abolitionist John Brown.

Harriet Tubman Series

Harriet Tubman Series

Lawrence was 23 when he completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro, now called the Migration Series. The series was a portrayal of the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the North after World War 1, and showed their adjusting to Northern cities. In the 1940s Lawrence was given his first major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it brought him national recognition. He became the most celebrated African-American painter in the country, and a part of this series was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine. Last year the MoMA exhibited this series for the first time in 20 years.

Migration Series: From every Southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.

Migration Series: Panel 1

Migration Series: Panel 22

Lawrence married Gwendolyn Knight, a sculptor and painter, in 1941. She actively supported his work, providing both assistance and criticism, and helped him compose captions for many of his series.

Jacob Lawrence with wife Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence

During World War II, Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard. He was assigned to be the Coast Guard artist aboard a troopship, documenting the experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, all of which have been lost. When his tour of duty ended, Lawrence received a Guggenheim Fellowship and painted his War Series.  Of this series my favorite painting in this series is The Letter. Though the image is minimal in design the message is so strong and poignant.

War Series: The Letter

War Series: The Prayer

Lawrence grew depressed in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he stayed for 11 months. He painted as an inpatient, and the work created during this time offered insight into the circumstances of mental illness and therapy, from the patients’ absorption in the occupational therapies of weaving and gardening to the spiritless of the depressed.  His paintings differed significantly from his other work because it was the only work that depicts exclusively white subjects. It also has subdued colors and people who appear resigned or in agony.  After leaving Hillside, Lawrence returned to the strengths of his earlier work. 

As David Harrison said "Lawrence has taken us from the polite world of abstract painting to a much uglier place and returned us, effortlessly. That he crosses easily between these two concerns, seemingly miles apart, fits neatly within the boundary-crossing theme that Over the Line proposes. But when Jacob Lawrence was at his best, boundaries ceased to be the issue. He was able to absorb contradictions and inequities, history and myth, beauty and atrocity, humor and gravity. He took what he would from all of them and made something as complicated as his experience."

New York Transit

New York Transit

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lawrence spent much of his time painting commissions.  Lawrence taught at several universities, including Pratt Institute (my Alma Mata). In 1970, Jacob settled in Seattle as a professor of art at the University of Washington.  He continued to paint until his death in June 2000 at the age of eighty-two. His last commissioned public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit, was installed in October 2001 in the Times Square subway station in New York City.

Jacob Lawrence

Black History Art: Kerry James Marshall

Portrait of a Curator (In Memory of Beryl Wright)

Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist who uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, and photography to comment on the history of black identity both in the United States and in Western art. I was recently introduce to his work while doing research for a project.  He is well known for paintings that focus on black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, and has explored issues of race and history through imagery ranging from abstraction to comics. As he describes, his work is rooted in his life experience: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it.”

De Style

Strongly influenced by his experiences as a young man, he developed a signature style during his early years as an artist that involved the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African-Americans with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. This common theme appeared continuously in his large-scale painting throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

(l) Untitled, (r) Handsome Young Man

Some of Marshall’s notable works include the Garden Project, which critiques the glorified names of housing projects that conceal desperate poverty and the Lost Boys series about young men killed or abandoned by various social systems. This collection was semi inspired by an autobiographical situation where Marshall’s  youngest brother was incarcerated for seven years.  Marshal says it’s about “the concept of being lost: lost in America, lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in illiteracy. And all of those things sort of changed...all of those things kind of came together with the fact that my own brother now seemed to be one of those lost.

Untitled (Altgeld Gardens)

Lost Boys: AKA Black Johnny

Marshall explored the concept of black beauty in contrast to Western ideals with paintings where a nude female figure, literally blends into her dark surroundings, her sensuous shape barely discernible. Yet once the viewer looks closely, her curvaceous figure evokes a womanly power only enhanced by the deep black of her skin. As Marshall admits, he himself “‘had not considered that a black woman could be considered a goddess of love and beauty,’” but with his painting he proves its possibility. He challenges the classic perception of a goddess as only a Caucasian woman with long flowing hair, speaking again to the issue of African American identity in the Western world.

Small Pin Up Finger Wag

Beach Towel

Marshall studied in Los Angeles with acclaimed social realist painter Charles White and participated in the residency program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has received solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America and his work has been included in prestigious international exhibitions.  His paintings are in private collections and foundations as well as major public collections including the MCA’s.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall now lives in Chicago, where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design.

Black History Art: Romare Bearden

Pittsburgh Memory, 1964

Romare Bearden (born September 2) was an American artist and writer who depicted African-American life. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden moved to New York City at a young age.  Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, which are my favorite of his collections. Snippets from magazine photographs, painted papers, foil, posters, and art reproductions were among his materials. Bearden’s collages fractured space and form, leading one writer to describe them as “patchwork cubism.”

Spring Way, 1964

The Dove, 1964

Romare Bearden was somewhat of a Renaissance man. An innovative artist with diverse interests, he also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, created book illustration, comics, album art, and public murals. Bearden was the author/coauthor of several books, and was a songwriter who co-wrote the jazz classic "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie.  Jazz and the blues provided Bearden with many subjects. He grew up hearing rural blues and uptown jazz: Duke Ellington’s orchestra, Earl Hines’ piano, Ella Fitzgerald’s scat singing. For sixteen years, his studio was above the Apollo Theater, still a Harlem musical landmark.

Showtime, 1974

Billie Holiday Album

Bearden studied with a Chinese calligrapher, whom he credits with introducing him to new ideas about space and composition in painting. He also spent a lot of time studying famous European paintings he admired, particularly the work of artists such as Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Rembrandt. He also revered African art such as sculpture, mask and textiles.

(l to r) The Family, 1948; Three Men, 1967; Circe, 1977

Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsiblities of the African-American artist in the struggle for civil rights.  Critical of special or separate treatment he was nevertheless aware of their limited opportunities and made important commitments to leveling the playing field for black artists.  His lifelong support of young, emerging artists led him and his wife to create the Bearden Foundation to support young or emerging artists and scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Romare Bearden

Bearden died in New York City on March 12, 1988 at the age of 76. In the obituary for him, the New York Times called Bearden "one of America's pre-eminent artists" and "the nation's foremost collagist."

Black History Art: Leo & Diane Dillon

Island Under the Earth

Leo and Diane Dillon are/were among the most talented and versatile American illustrators of my childhood. They produced book covers, editorial illustrations, movie posters, album covers, and advertising featuring subject matter that ranged from the sweetest children’s literature, African folktales to Scandinavian epics, from fantasy to science fiction

Behind the Back of the Mountain

Leo Dillon, of Trinidadian immigrant parentage, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and Diane Sorber Dillon hails from the Greater Los Angeles Area.  Born eleven days apart in 1933, they met, competed, and fell in love while attending Parsons School of Design in New York. Over the years, their competitive friendship evolved into a lasting marriage and artistic partnership. Realizing their strength was in collaboration the Dillons created a broad spectrum of art using whatever medium or technique that “worked”—including pastels, colored pencil, watercolor, acrylic, stencils, typography, woodcut, collage, and sculpture—for a broad cross-section of clients.

Their work has been an outstanding contribution to children of all races and cultures.  Coming from a household of avid readers my parents made it a point to have a diverse collection of books in the home, including many that had characters that look like me and my siblings. My bedtime reading consisted of some of my favorite stories from books such as Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears, Who's In Rabbits House, and folk tales from The People Who Could Fly. My all time favorite book was the sassy poems by Eloise Greenfield in Honey, I Love.  I admired the fact that the little girls in the book had afro puffs and braids in their hair much like me, beautiful smiles and looked so happy.

Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ear

Honey, I Love

The Dillon's also became famous in the science fiction community for their inventive series of paperback covers for the Ace Science Fiction Specials as well as for their numerous magazine illustrations and book covers for the works of Harlan Ellison.  But outside the world of fantasy and science fiction, the Dillons unquestionably became best known for their numerous picture books for children. Celebrated for illustrating stories featuring all ethnicities and cultural heritages, they received unprecedented back-to-back accolades and awards.

(l to r) Left Hand of Darkness, Furthest, One Million Tomorrows

The major message the Dillons wanted to convey was that all people, whatever their culture or race, experience the same things. "We all have a lot in common. It is our beliefs that divide us. We have little control over what life brings us but we can change our thoughts." Also, since the beginning of history, people have expressed themselves in wonderful and unique ways. "Art in its many forms has survived to inform us of lives long gone. Art inspires, lifts our spirits, and brings beauty to our lives. We wish to pay homage to it and the people who created it."

Leo & Diane Dillon

In the course of their careers, the Dillons taught at the School of Visual Arts and lectured at colleges around the country. Leo died in 2012 at the age of 79 of lung cancer. The obituary of Leo in The New York Times praised the Dillons jointly as "one of the world's pre-eminent illustrators for young people, producing artwork — praised for its vibrancy, ecumenicalism and sheer sumptuous beauty — that was a seamless amalgam of both their hands", also noting the ethnic diversity of characters in the Dillons' work in the 1970s, "until then, the smiling faces portrayed in picture books had been overwhelmingly white."

Black History Art: Aaron Douglas

The Creation, by Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas (born May 26, 1899) was an African-American painter, illustrator and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.

Douglas had a unique artistic style that fused his interests in modernism and African art. His best-known paintings are semi-abstract, and feature flat forms, hard edges, and repetitive geometric shapes. Bands of color radiate from the important objects in each painting, and where these bands intersect with other bands or other objects, the color changes.  A student of German-born painter Winold Reiss, he incorporated parts of Art Deco along with elements of ancient Egyptian wall paintings in his work. Many of his figures appeared as bold silhouettes.

  (l) Into Bondage (1936), (r) Aspirations (1936), Aaron Douglas

Douglas contributed illustrations to Opportunity, the National Urban League's magazine, and to The Crisis, put out by the NAACP.  These were the two most important magazines associated with the Harlem Renaissance at the time.  He created powerful images of African-American life and struggles, and won awards for the work he created for these publications. His designs brought him to the attention of W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Alain Locke who were looking for young African American artists to express their African heritage and African American folk culture in their art.  He ultimately received a commission to illustrate an anthology of philosopher Locke's work, entitled The New Negro.

By 1939, Douglas started teaching at Fisk University, where he remained for the next 27 years.

Aaron Douglas was considered the "Father of African American arts." That title led him to say," Do not call me the Father of African American Arts, for I am just a son of Africa, and paint for what inspires me."

His striking illustrations, murals, and paintings of the life and history of people of color depict an emerging black American individuality in a powerfully personal way. Douglas linked black Americans with their African past and proudly showed black contributions to society decades before the dawn of the civil rights movement. His work made a lasting impression on future generations of black artists including myself (he is one of my favorites).

David C. Driskell, artist and a leading educator and scholar of African American art said, "At a time when it was unpopular to dignify the black image in white America, Douglas refused to compromise and see blacks as anything less than a proud and majestic people."

Douglas died in February 1979 in Nashville, at the age of 79

Black History Art

Today begins Black History Month and I have decided to share some of my favorite black visual artist throughout the month.  These artist will range from illustrators, painter and even photographers that I have admired throughout the years.  I am actually really excited for this post/challenge because it allows me to share artist I'm fond of and learn about other artist that may not be as well known.