Collection Highlights: Black Artists

Betye Saar is a Los Angeles–based artist who mingles personal history, mythology, and folk art to reflect upon her life and the African American experience.

Twilight Awakening centers on a powerful central figure who hovers between the space of sea and land, the moon and star. The work’s symbology indicates that the figure is Aquarius, the Water Bearer. The signs of the zodiac derive from Roman antiquity, visualizing the passage of time through labor and activities associated with different times of the year.

The work is a three-dimensional assemblage: it is made on a wooden base of a recycled printer’s block, to which Saar added scavenged and sculpted pieces of plastic, ceramic, and glass. These personal objects, bearing marks of use and history, lend a magical power to the tiny panel measuring only 3 ¾ × 4 ½ × ¾ inches. 

In Street to Mbari, Jacob Lawrence captured the flurry of a busy outdoor market in Nigeria. Shops line either side of the street while a maze of vendors awaiting discovery fills the distance. The viewer becomes part of the scene amid a crowd of people, young and old, buying and selling. One can almost hear babies crying, chickens squawking, and people chattering as they discuss fabrics and produce. A cacophony of primary colors heightens the sense of commotion. Rolls of fabric show off different patterns and color combinations. Strips of corrugated iron in varying sizes and colors form the shops' roofs and create a visual rhythm across the top of the painting.

Lawrence first studied African art as a young man in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1962 he traveled to Nigeria on an invitation to exhibit his work. In describing the trip, he said, "I became so excited then by all the new visual forms I found in Nigeria—unusual color combinations, textures, shapes, and the dramatic effect of light—that I felt an overwhelming desire to come back as soon as possible to steep myself in Nigerian culture so that my paintings, if I'm fortunate, might show the influence of the great African artistic tradition." It was during a second trip there that Lawrence completed Street to Mbari.

Elizabeth Catlett created this commanding image of Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. 1820–1913), the Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist, pointing the way to freedom. Notice how the outsize figure of Tubman dominates the image, and how the bold and energetic black lines of the print suggest the perilous, fraught conditions Tubman and those under her protection navigated.

Catlett, who was the granddaughter of people who were enslaved, often focused on issues of Black and women’s history in her art. Her artistic influences included the social activism of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, which she learned about as a student at Howard University in Washington, DC. Another teacher, the American painter Grant Wood, encouraged her to draw upon what she knew best. “Of course, it was my own people,“ she noted.

At the time Catlett made this work, the civil rights movement was gaining ground in the United States. 

Joshua Johnson is America’s earliest-known professional African American artist. Few details of his life are known. The son of an enslaved black woman and a white man, Johnson was born into slavery around 1763. A Baltimore County record from 1782 lists Johnson as an apprentice to a local blacksmith and states that he was to be freed within two years. In 1798 and 1802, Johnson advertised his painting practice in local newspapers, describing himself as a “self-taught genius.” Some scholars have suggested that Johnson was influenced by the Peale family of painters in Baltimore, particularly Charles Peale Polk. Beginning in the late 1700s, Johnson began to receive portrait commissions from prominent Baltimore-area families, including the Westwood family depicted here. More than 80 portraits have now been attributed to Johnson.

In this painting, the three Westwood brothers have just come inside with freshly gathered flowers and cherries. Accompanying them is the family dog, who firmly grasps a bird captured on their outdoor excursion. The brothers wear matching trouser suits, fashionable for male children at the time. The younger children, Henry and George, clasp hands, while their older brother, John, extends a protective arm behind them. Johnson's sympathetic pose of the three boys makes their brotherly relationship the subject of this portrait.  

Emma Amos made this self-portrait in 1966, the same year she received her master’s degree. She had been living and working in New York since 1960, and in 1964 became the youngest and sole woman member of Spiral, a collective of Black artists. Spiral formed in response to the momentous 1963 March on Washington to consider the role of African American artists in the civil rights movement.

Amos was a painter, printmaker, and weaver from Atlanta whose finished works incorporate multiple techniques and ideas. “The work,” wrote Amos, “reflects my investigations into the otherness often seen by white male artists, along with the notion of desire, the dark body versus the white body, racism, and my wish to provoke more thoughtful ways of thinking and seeing.”

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works with themes related to identity, representation, mass media, and popular culture. The National Gallery has acquired his stainless-steel wall sculpture A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection) (2020), which draws a fictional map of an African American continent. It is the first sculpture by this celebrated artist to enter the collection.

Eight feet tall with a mirrored metal surface, A Place to Call Home outlines what appears to be the western hemisphere, but is actually North America nearly connected to Africa instead of South America. Maps, as this substitution implies, have often been used to represent the ideas and stories their makers want to tell rather than the actual topography. This map points to feelings of connection and detachment that many African Americans have toward Africa. As Thomas explains, a "mythical connection to Africa is embedded in your identity, but many people go to Africa looking for home and don’t find it because our roots are so diluted there. They also never felt at home in the U.S., where they were born. I wanted to make a place where African Americans come from." And in reflecting all viewers, A Place to Call Home also creates opportunities for empathy across cultures.

Howardena Pindell made her influential video Free, White and 21 following a car accident in 1979 that left her with partial memory loss. In the video, Pindell faces the camera and recounts her personal experiences of racism as an African American woman in America. Throughout the video, she adds to or takes away materials from her head and face, concealing and revealing the social construct of race based on skin color.

These segments alternate with footage of Pindell—dressed as white woman with a blond wig, skin-lightening makeup, and sunglasses—responding to her own testimonials with victim-blaming statements. The video concludes with Pindell's white character stating unapologetically, "You must really be paranoid. I've never had an experience like that. But, then, I'm free, white, and 21."

African American artist Robert Seldon Duncanson was widely recognized during his lifetime for pastoral landscapes of American, Canadian, and European scenery. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to focus on a small group of still-life paintings (fewer than a dozen are known) that Duncanson produced during the late 1840s. Spare, elegant, and meticulously painted, these works reflect the tradition of American still-life painting initiated by Charles Willson Peale and his gifted children—particularly Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale.

Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, signed and dated 1848, is a classically composed work with fruit arranged in a tabletop pyramid. The painting includes remarkable passages juxtaposing the smooth surfaces of beautifully rendered apples with the textured shells of scattered nuts.

The artist's turn from still-life subjects to the landscapes for which he is better known may have been inspired by Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life; Cole's series was exhibited in Cincinnati, where Duncanson lived in 1848. Duncanson soon began painting landscapes that incorporated signature elements from Cole and often conveyed moral messages. Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Duncanson traveled to Canada, where he remained until departing for Europe in 1865. Often described as the first African American artist to achieve an international reputation, Duncanson enjoyed considerable success exhibiting his landscapes abroad.

Less than three weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, Julie Mehretu began work at Crown Point Press. Rather than addressing the hurricane specifically, she took on the dynamic patterns of storms in general. Fluid brushstrokes dominate the working proof for Circulation — they suggest cloudbursts, zigzag lightning, blasting precipitation — and create a tempestuous scene that evokes mythological storms or the biblical Deluge.

In contrast, the crisper lines and radiating red parabolas added to the final print call to mind contemporary meteorological imagery: weather maps, Doppler radar, storm fronts, wind speeds, vectors, and so forth. Having pushed Circulation in one direction, Mehretu changed course, transforming a freely drawn, turbulent scene into a more precise, scientific, and modern view.

Painted 11 years after Henry Ossawa Tanner first settled in Paris in 1891, this rapidly executed plein-air oil sketch is one of the artist’s rare depictions of the French capital. His vantage point is from the right bank of the Seine looking west toward the towers of the Palais du Trocadéro, the exhibition hall built for the 1878 World’s Fair. A diffuse, hazy light fills the scene, which is free of human activity save for a solitary figure dressed in black at the lower right. With short, loose brushstrokes laden with paint, Tanner captured the scattered reflections of light across both river and sky. This small, evocative painting possesses the mood and mystery that are characteristic of the artist’s better-known religious subjects.

Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. Although Tanner achieved some success as a painter in the United States, he left for Europe as a young man to escape racial prejudice. Tanner spent most of his professional career in France, where he exhibited paintings at the Paris Salon and in expositions.  

This is one of two different calling cards that Adrian Piper made in the late 1980s. She gave this version to people who made racist remarks in front of her.

Now based in Berlin, Germany, Piper is an artist and philosopher who changed her racial designation to “gray” in a 2012 performance piece. She has identified as African American and multiracial in the past. Her participatory and performative works challenge assumptions about social structures. They usually ask individuals to reflect or act in some way.

Into Bondage is a powerful depiction of enslaved Africans bound for the Americas. Shackled figures with their heads hung low walk solemnly toward slave ships on the horizon. In a gesture of despair, a lone woman at left raises her bound hands, guiding the viewer's eye to the ships. Yet even in this grave image of oppression, there is hope. Concentric circles—a motif frequently employed by Aaron Douglas to suggest sound, particularly African and African American song—radiate from a point on the horizon. The male figure in the center pauses on the slave block, his face turned toward a beam of light emanating from a lone star in the softly colored sky, possibly suggesting the North Star. The man's silhouette breaches the horizon line in a sign of strength and hope.

In 1936, Douglas was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Installed in the elegant entrance lobby of the Hall of Negro Life, his four completed paintings charted the journey of African Americans from slavery to the present. Considered a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural phenomenon that promoted African and African American culture as a source of pride and inspiration, Douglas was an inspiring choice for the project.

The Hall of Negro Life, which opened on Juneteenth (June 19), a holiday celebrating the end of slavery, was visited by more than 400,000 fairgoers over the course of the five months that the exposition was open to the public. This commemoration of abolition, and the mural cycle in particular, served as a critical acknowledgment of African American contributions to state and federal progress. Unfortunately, of the four original paintings, only two—Into Bondage and Aspiration (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)—remain.

We see Margaret Burroughs’s (1915–2010) mastery of the linocut technique in the marks and textures she creates—wavy strands of the boy’s hair, thin lines that define the folds of his top, the effect of light striking the bricks—all of which impart a lively, somewhat anxious element to a seemingly still subject.

Burroughs was an extraordinary artist, poet, educator, curator, and activist who played a key role in advancing opportunities for Black artists and bringing recognition of the contributions of Black art, history, and culture to American life. In Chicago, she helped establish the renowned South Side Community Art Center and founded the DuSable Museum of African American History. As an artist, Burroughs worked in a variety of media, including painting and sculpture, but she is perhaps best known for her linocuts of African American leaders, historical events, and scenes of daily life featuring Black people that were seldom seen in art museums and galleries.

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David C. Driskell (1931–2020) was an accomplished artist, celebrated curator, and one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of African American art. The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first painting by Driskell, Current Forms: Yoruba Circle (1969), which was inspired by the West African aesthetic and religious traditions that Driskell immersed himself in during travels to Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Nigeria beginning in 1969.

Current Forms: Yoruba Circle features the symbol of Shango, the orisha (deity) of fire, thunder, and justice. Shango was revered among communities of enslaved people in the Caribbean and the Americas and is still venerated by many from across the African Diaspora. In this painting, Shango’s circular head dominates the canvas, while the figure’s lower half contains calligraphic swirls and shapes evocative of Yoruba masks and motifs. Vibrant fields of pinks and blues frame and segment the figure of Shango, and the surface is animated by active strokes and splashes of purple, orange, and blue paint. Driskell merges color field and action painting with West African symbolism in a bold, compelling image that exemplifies his signature style.

Driskell had deep ties to the Washington, DC, area. He received his BA in art from Howard University in 1955 and an MFA from the Catholic University of America in 1962. He taught and chaired the art department at Howard University (1962–1966) and the department of art at the University of Maryland, College Park (1976­­–1998), which established the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora in 2001.

Chakaia Booker (b. 1953) works almost exclusively with recycled tires to transform familiar symbols of urban waste and blight into extraordinary compositions of renewal. 

In Egress, numerous long, spiraling bands and short, spiky shards of rubber appear to unfurl from within and pour over and around the pedestal. The layers curl, pile, and protrude to form a mound that is simultaneously monstrous and playful, hard and soft, abstract and representational. While the plantlike, layered form recalls ivy or fern, the tracks, treads, and manufacturer name (Cooper) embossed on the sidewalls remind us of the medium's previous automotive life.

Booker's artistic practice is highly physical, from transporting the tires to reshaping them with machinery. Her use of discarded rubber references industrialization and factory labor as well as transportation, consumer culture, and environmental concerns. Her process of salvaging beauty from scraps of black rubber serves as a metaphor for Black American experiences of struggle, strength, and survival.

Details of the tires demonstrate the capacity for meaning in Booker's forms: the varied tones that parallel human diversity, the treads suggestive of African scarification and textile designs, and the visible wear and tear that evokes the physical marks of human aging and inevitable distress in life. As she has said, "[my] intention is to translate simple yet complex materials into imagery that stimulates people to reconsider the expressive nature of art and how broad, complex cultural transformations can continue to be expressed through common materials."

In 1927 James Weldon Johnson, a key figure in what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, published his masterwork, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Inspired by African American preachers whose eloquent orations he viewed as an art form, Johnson sought to translate into verse not only the biblical parables that served as the subjects of the sermons, but also the passion with which they were delivered—the cadence and rhythm of the inspirational language. Identifying black preachers as God's instruments on earth, or "God's trombones," Johnson celebrated a key element of traditional black culture. Years before the publication of his poems, while traveling through the Midwest as a field organizer for the NAACP, Johnson witnessed a gifted black preacher rouse a congregation drifting toward sleep. Summoning his oratorical powers, the preacher abandoned his prepared text, stepped down from the pulpit, and delivered—indeed, performed—an impassioned sermon. Impressed by what he had seen, Johnson made notes on the spot, but he did not translate the experience into sermon-poems until several years later. Upon publication, God's Trombones attracted considerable attention—not only for Johnson's verse, but also for the astonishing illustrations that accompanied the poems. Created by Aaron Douglas, a young African American artist who had recently settled in Harlem, the images were an early manifestation of a compositional style that would later become synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance. Drawn by the cultural excitement stirring in Harlem during the mid-1920s, Douglas arrived in New York in 1925. He soon became a student of Winold Reiss, a German-born artist and illustrator and early proponent of European modernism in America. It was Reiss who encouraged Douglas to study African art as well as the compositional and tonal innovations of the European modernists. Before long, illustrations by Douglas began appearing in The Crisis, the NAACP publication edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League. Impressed by these illustrations, James Weldon Johnson asked Douglas to illustrate his forthcoming book of poems, God's Trombones. On short deadline, Douglas created eight bold and unmistakably modern images that clearly reflect the influence of Reiss as well as the artist's close study of African art.  

Several years after the publication of God's Trombones, Douglas began translating the eight illustrations he had created to accompany Johnson's poems into large oil paintings. The Judgment Day, the final painting in the series of eight, was the first work by Douglas to enter the Gallery's collection. At the center of the composition a powerful black Gabriel stands astride earth and sea. With a trumpet call, the archangel summons the nations of the earth to judgment.

The artist Lois Mailou Jones often visited the Caribbean nation of Haiti, depicted here, during her life, through her marriage to Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel. In this scene of everyday life, Mailou Jones has taken care to show adults and children at work and at play, living in a dense community of brightly colored stacked houses.

Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance of her youth, Mailou Jones cultivated a lifelong interest in African and African Diasporic cultures and artistic traditions. In the 1960s, she traveled to 11 African countries to meet, learn from, and document the work of contemporary artists. Through teaching at Howard University for more than 40 years, Mailou Jones raised awareness of the contemporary artistic traditions developing in Black communities across the globe for a generation of Black artists in the United States.

Horace Pippin turned to art after serving in World War I in the African American regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Pippin was shot by a sniper and lost full use of his right arm, receiving an honorable discharge from the military. He returned to his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and taught himself to paint using his left arm to support his injured arm. By the late 1930s his work had attracted the interest of such notables as the artist N. C. Wyeth, critic Christian Brinton, and collector Albert Barnes.

This painting belongs to a series of semi-autobiographical domestic interiors that Pippin painted from 1941 until his death in 1946, the best known among them being Domino Players (Phillips Collection, Washington, DC). Most of these scenes represent members of African American families pursuing a variety of activities in a single multipurpose room. The paintings all have the same quiet, peaceful ambience and feature many of the same common household items, such as rag rugs, quilts, a stove, and an alarm clock. What distinguishes School Studies and gives added significance to the work’s title is the way the three figures, instead of interacting, have turned their backs to each other and seem lost in their own inner worlds.

Although she is best known for her rhinestone-encrusted paintings, celebrated African American artist Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) has made photographs since the beginning of her artistic career. Melody: Back (2011), a Polaroid print that depicts a seated nude woman, draws on European art history with the model mimicking the pose of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's The Grand Odalisque (1814).

Instead of placing her figure on sumptuous silks, as Ingres did, Thomas has used boldly patterned fabrics, and her black model proudly displays a tattoo on her back that says "Only God Can Judge Me." Proclaiming her subject's beauty and sexuality, Thomas provocatively challenges cultural stereotypes while creating a richly textured work of art.

This work is known by two titles: Mother and Awaiting His Return. The woman who dominates the composition stares into space, her strongly modeled figure a study in patience. Given the work's date (1945), the framed star in the background (a symbol of the US military), and the word mother inscribed in the lithograph's lower left corner, the two titles make equal sense. The woman's face is easily interpreted as that of a mother waiting for a loved one to return from service in World War II. Artist Charles White has chiseled her facial features with determination while infusing her expression with sadness. The cubist faceting of her figure imparts a feeling of solidity and strength in her that is reinforced by her imposing size and foreground placement. Her hands and face are nearly architectural, with their sharp edges and straight-line markings of light and shadow. Yet her tired eyes, her chin set into the palm of her hand, and the merest hint of doubt in her expression signal concern.

In 1942 White, primarily known as a painter of historical murals, shifted his focus to portraits of everyday African Americans on the advice of Harry Sternberg, an instructor at the Art Students League, New York. White's portraits, including Mother, depict anonymous people dealing with situations common to the black experience. The meticulous draftsman used his skill to render human emotion and endurance in the face of such obstacles as discrimination. His works from the 1950s, the decade when the civil rights struggle exploded in the United States, show the cost of such perseverance in images of black men and women fighting for social justice.

A Shopper at the Fair, Columbus, Ohio, is part of a series of photographs Ming Smith made at the Ohio State Fair. The series is named after a 1977 Alice Coltrane album: Transcendence. Transcendent on the whole, Smith’s photographs create the kind of soaring sensation in the heart—the simultaneous flutter and deep calm—that occurs before art that taps into one’s inner life. 

Smith was a member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of African American photographers formed in 1963. Kamoinge, the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting and working together,” described an ethos of mutual support and productive critique. Largely shut out of mainstream publications, fine arts institutions such as ours, and the commercial gallery system, Kamoinge took on the responsibility to, as Louis Draper, a founding member, put it, “speak of our lives as only we can.”

Over the course of her five-decade career, Smith has fulfilled this mandate of recording Black life in all of its complexity. She said, “Being a black woman photographer was like being nobody. It was just my camera and me. I worked to capture black culture, the richness, the love. That was my incentive.”

In Shopper, a lone Black figure walks through a fair holding a shopping bag at his side. One might be tempted to view it as a simple, leisurely picture, but of course, simple, leisurely pictures of Black men were not—still are not—commonplace. To make these kinds of pictures was Smith’s transcendent, revolutionary, resistant act.

She has labeled him a shopper, not a looter; a visitor, not a trespasser; a community member, not an imposter. He belongs. In the stillness of a breezeless summer night, the flag above him hangs limply, but the angle of his hat and his upright posture communicate youth, confidence, and leisure. He reminds me of my late father, who spent much of his youth on naval submarines wearing just such a hat.

The shopper passes by a panel depicting a bronzed surfer riding a breaking wave. A winged band of lights divides the ebony sky from the fair below, the two illuminated arcs meeting over the head of a larger-than-life hula dancer. Her grass skirt and haku lei, or flower crown, are just visible in the minimal light. The dancer and surfer were no doubt meant to transport the shopper from landlocked Ohio to tropical Hawaii. 

Smith’s was one of the first Black families to move into a white area of Columbus in the 1950s. Her interest in college was rebuffed by a high school counselor who told her she could only aspire to become a domestic worker. Despite these low expectations, she attended Howard University, where she took photography courses and graduated with a microbiology degree.

For Smith, transcendence was about moving beyond the racism she experienced. She left Ohio for New York and moved spiritually to a place of recovery—“to forget all that, forgive and forget,” she says. 

Bob Thompson's Tree is based on the fantastical, morally charged work of Francisco de Goya, the Spanish master known for his scathing commentary on the Spanish royalty and religious persecution in the late 18th century. Thompson's painting combines two consecutive plates from Goya's 1799 collection of etchings Los caprichos: Volaverunt (They Have Flown) on the left and Quien lo creyera! (Who Would Have Thought It!) on the right. Instead of merely re-creating Goya's etchings, however, Thompson produced a different narrative by modifying the characters and adding new elements. Goya's adulteress becomes a redheaded, winged angel holding an uprooted tree. Her human form watches over several bestial figures, suggesting that human reason presides over primal instincts. To unify Goya's two images, Thompson incorporated the color red throughout the work and positioned the tree on a diagonal.

Thompson attended the University of Louisville in Kentucky before moving to New York City in 1959. In New York he studied the old masters at the city's museums and became friends with luminaries such as jazz musician Ornette Coleman and multimedia artist Red Grooms. Thompson traveled to Europe on a fellowship, painting Tree in Paris. Like Tree, many of his paintings are renditions of old master compositions. Sadly, Thompson died in Rome of complications after gallbladder surgery at the age of 29, cutting short his promising career.

Simone Leigh (b. 1967) is the first Black woman artist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale’s 127-year history. Her work was also included in the Biennale’s central exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant. Sentinel is a new edition of the sculpture from the US pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Leigh describes her work as auto-ethnographic, in which she examines assumptions about the female body, race, beauty, and community. More than 16-feet tall, Sentinel towers over the viewer, suggesting a lookout or guard who keeps watch over the world around it. Leigh has created her own formal vocabulary that involves abstraction of the female body, often representing it as an architecture, as seen in the scale and columnar form of Sentinel.

The bronze sculpture creates a long elegant black line, from its fused legs to its attenuated neck. It also features Leigh’s signature formal devices of the faceless figure and vessel-like head. The horizontally placed bowl on top of the figure recalls histories of labor and consumption of the body, while the erasure or elimination of the face suggests the historic anonymity and obscurity of Black women and femmes as well as their withholding of self as a form of protection and self-preservation.

Sentinel recalls the influence of African forms in modern art, as its abstracted figure also suggests a nkisi or African power figure believed to contain divine energy and knowledge.

Daybreak - A Time to Rest is one in a series of panel paintings that tell the story of Harriet Tubman, the famed African American woman who freed enslaved people using a fragile network of safe houses called the Underground Railroad. This abstracted image emphasizes Tubman's bravery in the face of constant danger. Lying on the hard ground beside a couple and their baby, she holds a rifle. Her face, pointing upward to the sky, occupies the near center of the canvas, her body surrounded by purple. Tubman's enormous feet, grossly out of proportion, become the focal point of the work. The lines delineating her toes and muscles look like carvings in a rock, as if to emphasize the arduous journeys she has made. Reeds in the foreground frame the prone runaways. Three insects (a walking stick, a beetle, and an ant) are signs of activity at daybreak.

Jacob Lawrence is renowned for his narrative painting series that chronicles the experiences of African Americans, which he created during a career of more than six decades. Using geometric shapes and bold colors on flattened picture planes to express his emotions, he fleshed out the lives of Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and African Americans migrating north from the rural south during and after slavery. Lawrence was 12 in 1929 when his family settled in Harlem, New York, at a time when African American intellectual and artistic life was flourishing there. As a teen, he took classes at the Harlem Art Workshop and Harlem Community Art Center, where he studied works of art by African American artists and learned about African art and history. Lawrence went on to create images that are major expressions of the history and experience of African Americans.

Like today’s personal social media accounts, family photo albums typically present positive, cheerful moments in the life of a family, obscuring or omitting any troubling or shameful events. Clarissa Sligh decided to mine her family photo album and reconsider events from her childhood in 1950s segregated Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. She Sucked Her Thumb is from the resulting series of works called Reframing the Past.

The title of this collage could refer to several of its details. In the top right quadrant a nearly camouflaged passing train with billowing smoke travels to an unknown location. The central figure, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, appears lost in thought. A woman stares at the viewer with a disproportionately large eye, her hand on the windowsill. In the "background" (at right), blue birds fly. These elements and others recall Romare Bearden's childhood in rural North Carolina and personify journeying, a central theme in African American history. The train suggests the Underground Railroad—the network of abolitionist-run safe houses that secretly transported people escaping enslavement—and the post-slavery migration of African Americans, primarily northward, to seek better lives.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised primarily in the surrounding Mecklenburg County, Bearden eventually settled in New York City to finish college at New York University. He was a social worker there for several decades, during which time he spent nights and weekends on his art. Originally an abstract painter, Bearden began creating collages in the early 1960s using images from photo-magazines such as Life and Ebony. In addition to his unflinching, faceted images of black life, Bearden is remembered for his published books on art and aesthetics and for his political energy on behalf of black culture.

This intensely colored work, Caribbean Dreams (2001), is by E. J. Montgomery, a multimedia abstract artist, influential curator, and international program developer for the distinguished Arts America Program of the United States Information Agency. She was part of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives (BWA) in Philadelphia. Among the themes explored by BWA artists are cultural identity, political and social issues, portraiture, and landscape, as well as patterning and pure abstraction.

Since its founding in 1972 by Philadelphia artist Allan Edmunds (b. 1949), the BWA has become recognized internationally as a center for printmaking. Its creation coincided with a resurgence of printmaking in the United States that had begun in the 1960s as newly established workshops across the country encouraged artists to explore the potential of this medium. There was also a growing awareness of how the breadth of the nation’s cultural heritage might shape a new “American” identity, a sentiment reflected in the artists who created prints at the workshop.

Over the years, the diversity-driven BWA has developed a wide range of programs, including artist residencies and exchanges, exhibitions, lectures, and mural and video projects, with a particular focus on producing and sharing art that inspires and connects communities around the globe. To date, the BWA has sponsored over 300 residencies for artists from 35 states and 15 countries and has toured exhibitions to more than 25 cities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the United States.

Sam Gilliam's draped paintings such as Relative pushed the notion of what painting was and could be. By moving his canvases off their stretcher bars, Gilliam allowed them to shift and flow as fabric is meant to do. The folds in the canvases, however, were not created at random but instead reflect Gilliam's specific idea about how he wanted his paintings to be installed. Relative, while still hung on a wall, becomes a part of its setting and interacts with and within that space. Lighting in the room affects the way shadows from the canvas fall on the wall. Physical movement around the painting can cause the fabric to stir, altering our perception of it. The ample folds demonstrate the painting's flexible properties, highlighting nuances of stained colors and hinting at what the creases conceal. Viewers can indulge in the continuous play between action and stillness, bright color and dark shadow.

Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Like Alma Thomas, he settled in Washington, DC, and taught art in the public schools. Also like Thomas, he was a member of the Washington Color School and the larger color field movement. Gilliam's experimentations with color and abstraction resulted from an interest in moving away from figurative imagery to adopt color as the main subject of his paintings.

Genesis Tramaine (b. 1983) creates expressionist portraits of men and women that combine vigorous handling of materials with intuitive, spiritual inspiration. Blending a provocative use of color with an urban-inspired, mixed-media approach, she describes her practice as focused on the shape and definition of the "American Black Face" and as using exaggerated features to capture the spirited emotions of the untapped, underrepresented souls of Black people.

Enlivened by New York graffiti from the 1980s and imagined images of gospel hymns sung Sunday morning during church, Clinging unto the Lord is typical of her recent work: head-and-shoulder portraits based on individual sitters or biblical figures and painted in a trance-like frenzy that can be compared to speaking in tongues. Tramaine's Christian faith informs all aspects of her practice, from prayers said before, during, and after painting, to evangelical titles and inscriptions on the tacking margins of her canvases, to small "spirit guide" figures depicted within the larger work.

Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris offers a tripled image, its single subject captured as if in a time lapse. Whether with eyes closed meditatively (on the left) or gazing into space (on the right), Sir Charles is alternately thoughtful and vigilant. Larger than life-size, this imposing figure clearly signals 1970s fashion, pop culture, and the assertion of black identity in the generation following the civil rights era. Barkley Hendricks cast his friends, lovers, family members, and men and women he met on the street as portrait subjects. Stark and monumental against a monochromatic ground, his portraits fix acutely on the individuality and self-expression of his subjects.

Hendricks said that a painting he saw in 1966 while visiting the National Gallery in London—a portrait by Flemish master Anthony van Dyck featuring a red velvet coat—was a point of departure for this work. Intending to make a replica of the Van Dyck image, Hendricks received permission to paint as a copyist in the museum. But once in the process, he realized he could not copy another artist's work, "no matter how much I like it," he said. Years later, he painted Sir Charles with Van Dyck's red coat in mind. Other writers have likened Sir Charles to the iconic three graces—artistic muses (usually female) as portrayed by European old masters such as Botticelli and Rubens in three different attitudes, one usually with her back toward the viewer. It might be said that Hendricks's artistic muses relate to classical Western art history as well as sources personal to the artist.

Hendricks, who was born in Philadelphia, studied there at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University. He taught at Connecticut College. The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he exhibited his work at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum at Connecticut College; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University organized a career retrospective of Hendricks's work, Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool.

Rozeal created this painting after learning about the 1990s trend of ganguro, in which young Japanese women began wearing long nails, dying their hair blonde, and applying makeup to darken their skin tone. The artist recalled, “I said, what? Why? I read further, and they were enamored with hip hop. So I said, oh! Hip hop made it to Japan (This is 1997). That’s amazing! Wait. They’re darkening their skin? That sucks. That’s terrible. Why are they doing that? Don’t they know how hard it is to be dark on this planet?”

In response Rozeal made a work that raises questions about cultural appropriation, code switching, agency, and beauty. afro.died, T. is a mash-up of hip hop, classical Japanese Kabuki theater, and Japanese ukiyo-e imagery. Rozeal’s mom took her to a Japanese Kabuki performance when she was a child, and the imagery created by all-male casts stuck with the artist. “Back and forth” written in the background of the painting recalls a 1994 Aaliyah song, “Back & Forth,” as well as the idea of switching between cultures or “codes.” The woman’s over-the-top appearance and dress reference depictions of women in hip hop culture and “female beauties” favored by artists working in 18th-century Edo, Japan. The woman’s makeup references the ganguro trend, as well as blackface, the application of makeup by non-black performers to appear black. Read aloud, the title of the work sounds out “Aphrodite,” the Greek goddess of love and beauty, but in written form it mentions the death of an afro.

The woman in African Nude, wearing only a large necklace, reclines on an overstuffed settee. Her alluring position is similar to the pose found in classic images of odalisques—enslaved women in the Ottoman Empire whose identities became sexualized and popularized during the 19th century. Yet unlike the seductive odalisque seen in Western art, whose gaze challenges by staring directly at the viewer, the nude in Wells's work, with eyes downcast, appears unhappily submissive and ill at ease amid the oversize lush plants and gala colors of the background. The viewer is thus left unsettled, as if unwelcome despite the outwardly inviting scene.

James Lesesne Wells was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1902 and received BS and MS degrees from Columbia University. He had a long career in printmaking, first participating in the Federal Art Project, which encouraged the development of art in the United States during the Great Depression, and then teaching at Howard University in Washington, DC, for almost four decades. Wells was active in the civil rights movement and often depicted the struggles of African Americans in his work. African Nude, which Wells created late in life, reflects his printmaking skill, interest in traditional African aesthetics, and commitment to representing African American history and experiences.

The unevenly spaced, staccato brushstrokes on the white canvas form a visual rhythm, as if the artist had painted a cantata, a type of musical composition. Tremendous delicacy is shown in the play of space and color, with the white "background" as important to the overall effect as the red bursts of color. The harmonic color field is no accident; the compositional and color structure of Red Rose Cantata derives from Alma Thomas's interest in nature and music, in its linear organization with organic variations.

Thomas came into the professional art world late in life, after teaching art for 35 years in the Washington, DC, public schools. Her age, however, did not prevent her from gaining recognition as an artist. In 1972, one year before she painted Red Rose Cantata, Thomas had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—the museum's first solo exhibition for an African American woman. Thomas and Sam Gilliam were the only two African American members of the Washington Color School. She and other artists, Gilliam among them, are associated with the larger color field movement, which probed the use of solid color in abstract paintings. Thomas continued painting in her signature style, drawing on nature and music for inspiration, until her death in 1978 at age 86.

In the sweeping silhouette of Lever No. 3, a viewer might see either a long-necked animal or a mechanical arm, as suggested by the work's title. While Martin Puryear's sculptures often recall familiar forms, they encourage individual interpretations. This work explores a delicate balance between the heavy, solid-looking "body" and the elegant, weightless reach of the giraffe-like "neck." The play between opposing values—heavy and light, animal and mechanical, space and form, movement and stasis—imbues the sculpture with a sense of animation, vitality, and changeability.

While the central form of Lever No. 3 appears to be sculpted from a heavy block of wood, it is actually a hollow shell, carefully constructed of thin, bent planks of wood. The sculpture is stained light gray, which unifies its appearance but also creates a somewhat uneven patina that emphasizes its hand-crafted quality. Like Lever No. 3, Puryear's sculptural objects often blend qualities of fine art and finely crafted utilitarian objects.

Puryear was born in Washington, DC, in 1941. After earning his BA there from Catholic University, he joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where he had the chance to study woodworking techniques such as basketry and carpentry. Puryear then attended the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and independently continued his studies in woodworking. He received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a 30-year retrospective exhibition of his work.

This pivotal work by Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), a leading figure of contemporary art, exemplifies the artist’s skill in using art as a vehicle to question the social dynamics of race, gender, and power. As a visual storyteller, Ringgold is known for her thought-provoking depictions of the difficult realities of the American experience.

For Ringgold, the American flag is a potent and powerful symbol. She has said, “The flag is the only truly subversive and revolutionary abstraction one can paint.” This painting is part of her first fully developed body of work, The American People Series (1963–1967). Considered to be among her most powerful series, it features unflinching and often puzzling depictions of the racial tensions and political divisions in the United States during the 1960s.

The Flag is Bleeding examines American identity and history in and through an iconic depiction of the flag, one of Ringgold’s signature motifs. The painting features a semitransparent US flag with colors that appear to bleed or run as a bold backdrop to the ambiguous interactions of three figures—a Black man, a white woman, and a white man—who stand with arms linked. The Black man, who holds a knife with one hand and covers his bleeding heart with the other, simultaneously protects the wound and pledges allegiance to the flag. The vague and shifting relationships of the figures speak to the violent protests in Los Angeles, Detroit, Washington, DC, and elsewhere during the politically turbulent era of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the late 1960s.

Ringgold is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher, and lecturer whose multifaceted career spans six decades and encompasses a variety of media: paintings, prints, collages, drawings, sculpture, textiles, and children’s books. Her works explore many themes—the race, gender, and class in the United States, as well as history, memory, family, community, and popular culture—all conveyed in a simplified representational style that she has termed “Super Realism.” Ringgold received her BS degree in fine arts and education and MA in fine arts from the City College of New York and is a professor emeritus of art at the University of California in San Diego. After struggling for many years to gain proper recognition in the art world, she has been acclaimed as one of the leading artists of our time, receiving more than 80 awards and honors, including 23 honorary doctorates.

Throughout her career, Ringgold has been driven by a commitment to political change and an interest in world art. During the early 1960s, she created her first political paintings, The American People Series (1963–1967), and had her first and second one-person exhibitions at Spectrum Gallery in New York. In the early 1970s, Ringgold began making tankas (inspired by the Tibetan art form of paintings framed in richly brocaded fabrics), soft sculptures, and masks. She later used this medium in her masked performances of the 1970s and 1980s. Inspired by African art during the 1960s, it was not until the late 1970s that she traveled to Nigeria and Ghana to see the rich tradition of masks that have continued to be a great influence.

The densely layered image of Slum Gardens No. 3 signals claustrophobia. A large tree with a thick, spiked vine winding its way up the trunk defines the right side of the work. Weeds and flowers blanket the bottom half of the image, almost obscuring the wooden shack (left) and the staircase. Plants invade a picket fence and piece of railing in the lower foreground. We sense that the vegetation will soon overtake the entire area, turning the "garden" into a neighborhood menace. The muscularity of the work, emboldened by thick, heavy lines of black charcoal, contributes to the intimidating quality of the plant life.

Joseph Norman frequently uses landscape imagery to convey meaning. For this work he drew on his experiences growing up in Chicago and on a 1990 trip to Costa Rica, where he witnessed the effects of poverty on various neighborhoods. Slum Gardens No. 3 is not a view of a specific place; rather, it visualizes the concept of "slums" from regions around the world. Here, the overgrowing landscape serves as a metaphor for the lack of attention paid to impoverished neighborhoods. Not only are the physical environments of such areas neglected, but, as Norman's drawing suggests, its social and economic problems are ignored as well.

Norman was born in Chicago in 1957. He received a BS in art education from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1980 and an MFA six years later from the University of Cincinnati. After teaching drawing for nine years at the Rhode Island School of Design, he took a professorship at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2001.

Untitled, #20 is a collage both intricate and seemingly precarious in its construction. Hundreds of small circular pieces, remnants from a hole-puncher, cover the surface of the paper. Some lie flat while others cluster in piles or hang off the edges. A grid created by monofilament provides a substructure for the outwardly haphazard composition, and a light coating of powder imparts an iridescent quality. Although numbered, each piece is randomly placed. The use of numbers and a grid suggests a mathematical and perhaps methodical approach to balancing randomness and premeditation.

Howardena Pindell was born in Philadelphia in 1943. She received her BFA from Boston University and her MFA from Yale University. Throughout her career, Pindell has used a variety of techniques and materials in her art, including fabric and video. Like Untitled, #20, her other work explores structure and texture in the process of making art.

The imprints of six steam irons mark this work on paper. Beneath each silhouette, in large capital letters, is the name of an iron manufacturer—Casco, General Mills, Monarch, Silex, Presto, with one "unknown." What do we make of this image, framed in an old window?

For the past 20 years Willie Cole has selected and transformed particular items discarded from our vast consumer culture, such as irons, shoes, and lawn jockeys, into objects that resonate with metaphorical meaning—particularly cross-referencing African cultural history and the African Diaspora. The iron silhouettes in Domestic ID, V call up the slave era in America, when African women served as forced domestic laborers, and the period after emancipation, when they took in laundry as one of the few lines of work open to them. The irons' singed imprints also evoke the rituals of scarification, practiced within certain African and other cultures, and branding, which expunged identity to mark humans as slave property—perhaps reinforced by the iron marked "unknown." Other references inhabit this powerful image, such as the similarity of the iron's shape to boats that plied the slave trade across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the near-whiff of heat and steam that seems to evoke the hot, backbreaking work of plantation life.

Mounting his image in a window, Cole literally reframes history in a way that summons the readymade art of surrealist and Dada artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Such wry yet serious correspondences of history, art, and racial politics anchor Cole's reputation in the art world. Educated at Boston University School of Fine Arts, the School of Visual Arts (where he received a BFA), and the Art Students League, Cole has exhibited his work throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

In Untitled (Two Necklines), identical photographs of an unidentified African American woman, shown from mouth to breastbone, hang in circular frames, between them a list of words engraved on plaques. The double image suggests tranquility and composure: the woman's white shift is clean and simple, her mouth at ease, the curve of her breastbone elegantly arced. But the plaques feature words describing circularity and enclosure that are ominously electrified by text on the final plaque, which reads, "feel the ground sliding from under you."

Such meticulous alignments of words and image fuel the subtle yet startling power of Lorna Simpson's work, which for more than two decades has probed the spectral issues of race, sex, and class. Like this one, her images are often truncated, replicated, and annotated with words that force the viewer to interpret. Here, the framed photographs and words inscribed on plaques are literally and metaphorically black and white; the background of the final plaque is a haunting blood red. One is hard pressed to deny the implications of this personal yet dehumanized image and its attendant language of racial pathology.

Simpson's interest in the relationship between text and images began during her career as a documentary photographer. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She is recognized as one of America's ranking masters of potent, poetic work in photography and film. Her works signal what is most personal about identity while simultaneously touching upon clichés and assumptions that can disfigure or destroy it.

African American artists working in the 1980s and 1990s often focused on black identity as culturally and socially constructed. Artists including Glenn Ligon moved from using the black figure to employing text as a way to explore perceptions and understandings of race. In Untitled: Four Etchings [A–D], Ligon quoted from Zora Neale Hurston's essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928) and Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952). Selections from both literary works are written in the first person, often repeating the word "I." In the process of deciphering the text, the viewer becomes the "I" and thus inhabits the person questioning their own self and identity.

Untitled: Four Etchings [A] (above) and [B] repeat, over and over, sentences from Hurston's essay: "I do not always feel colored" [A] and "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" [B]. As the viewer reads, the texts become increasingly difficult to decipher. Smudged and broken type interferes with legibility, suggesting the viewer's literal and intellectual struggle to read the sentence and understand its implications.

Etchings [C] and [D], both black type on black paper, also make the reader work to comprehend the meaning. Their nearly identical texts taken from Ellison's monumental novel are almost indiscernible—"invisible" like the story's protagonist.

Text [C]:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side-shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only themselves, or figments of their imagina-

Text [D] is the same, except that it ends:
...figments of their imagination—indeed everything

Artistically speaking, those with power are usually those who assign a subject's identity. And once such identity has been given, it accumulates historical authority as years, decades, and centuries ensue. Central to this phenomenon is the role of gaze—the idea that viewers have the power to define what they see. In the art of our times, however, the authority of gaze has been tested and upended. Here, Lorna Simpson weighs in.

The artist presents two binoculars and, between them, a series of phrases. You might pick up one of these looking devices—perhaps to spy?—and thus see what the text haltingly, disjointedly describes. But Simpson has placed the binoculars face down, simultaneously promising and frustrating vision. Text and binoculars each furnish only partial knowledge, underscoring the inherent problem of relying on only written or visual information to understand a person or situation. Simpson has examined the relationship between text and image over many years, challenging concepts of truth, history, and identity. Here, gaze is thwarted by its instruments, and knowledge is crippled by incompleteness. You may assign meaning to this image, but Simpson reminds the viewer: it is not necessarily correct.

Text:
can see the moisture of her breath while she sings—an interior wall blocks the view of the other—can see the badge #'s—full moon perfect light—undressed completely and got into the tub to his left—motionless—kept a log of observations—curvaceous—went unnoticed by the naked eye—tried to hold in view—just shadows—near sighted—gruesome—remembered everything—right in the line of vision—they moved three steps back and out of view

On August 28, 1963, photographer Roy DeCarava was present for the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In this striking photograph, DeCarava turned away from common displays of political demonstration—placards and crowds—to capture the confidence, interiority, and stoicism of an isolated marcher. DeCarava described this powerful portrait, with its subtle gradations of gray and black, as representing “a beautiful black woman who was beautiful in her blackness. . . . I wanted to pay homage to that person, that spirit.”

Celebrated as one of the first African American photographers to embrace and explore the black experience in his art, DeCarava spent much of his career chronicling daily life in Harlem, the civil rights movement, and jazz musicians. His overarching goal, however, was not documentary realism but rather “creative expression,” as he explained, “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.” No matter the subject, DeCarava’s photographs reveal a keen interest in exploring the symbolic significance of blackness, as can be seen in his evocative, highly acclaimed book The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a fictional story of life in Harlem with text by Langston Hughes.

DeCarava’s influence extended far beyond his own photographs. In 1955 he founded A Photographers’ Gallery, one of few commercial spaces in New York where photographers—including such emerging artists as Harry Callahan and Minor White—could exhibit their work.

In Walker's cut-paper silhouettes, troubling narratives of violence, lust, and exoticism play out. Her work draws upon imagery common in the antebellum South and is controversial for its use of racial stereotypes of both blacks and whites. Walker focuses on the role of stereotypes in shaping history and their complex function in American race relations today. The abbreviation "Inc." in the work's title alludes to the institutionalization of racism and the implicit cultural approval of such degrading images. By suggesting narratives that complicate distinctions between fact and fantasy, victim and predator, black and white, Walker's work confronts the viewer with the uncomfortable challenge of self-reflection. 

Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, Walker moved to Atlanta, Georgia, at age 13. Her transition from an integrated town to the racially divided atmosphere of the South had a profound impact on her. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, having begun her exploration of the silhouette while in school. At age 27, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award. Her first retrospective exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007.

A rich and complex religious practice is displayed in the Washington, DC, home of Ella Watson, a cleaning woman who worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during World War II. Her altar—composed of statues of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Our Lady of Lourdes, St. Joseph, St. Martin de Porres, St. Anthony, and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, as well as two elephants, two crucifixes, candles, and a rosary—intermingles with her everyday life reflected in the mirror. Appearing in the reflection is a child’s doll propped against stacked boxes, while Watson herself wears a floral apron over her polka-dot dress. Through her open window, a Coca-Cola delivery truck and lush summer foliage are visible at the intersection of 11th and P Streets, in northwest Washington. Over the course of a month, the photographer Gordon Parks created a series of about 90 pictures of Watson, including his most iconic photograph, Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman (American Gothic), in which he posed her with a broom and a mop before an American flag. Made under the auspices of the Historical Section of the FSA, which was headed by Parks’s mentor Roy Stryker, the series was not published by the government at the time.

Parks purchased his first camera in late 1937 while working as a waiter for the Northern Pacific Railway. By the early 1940s he was immersed in some of the most important artistic circles and dynamic photographic projects of his generation. From his rural roots in Kansas, where poverty and racism were widespread, to his meteoric success as a photographer for Life magazine and a filmmaker in Hollywood, Parks was both an instigator and witness of social and aesthetic change during his storied career.

May Flowers, a compelling photograph of three young African American girls, succinctly addresses the issues of race, class, and gender that the American artist Carrie Mae Weems has explored for decades. Related to a video Weems made in 2002 titled May Days Long Forgotten, the photograph evokes both spring’s renewal and May Day, the international workers’ holiday. Befitting these themes, May Flowers depicts girls from working-class families in Syracuse, New York, wearing floral-print dresses. Its tondo format, truncated foreground space, and tight focus on the figures harks back to Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child, while its subject—adolescent girls with flowers in their hair, lounging on the grass—recalls both 19th-century paintings and photographs, such as those by Édouard Manet and Julia Margaret Cameron. Weems intensified this historical character by printing the photograph in sepia tones and placing it in a circular frame like those gracing the walls of 19th-century parlors.

Yet the color of the girls’ skin belies such a history, even as their beauty and knowing expressions—especially the authoritative look of the central figure—challenge viewers to question why they have been excluded for so long. Further complicating and enriching the work, Weems glazed it with a piece of convex glass of the type commonly used in 18th- and 19th-century mirrors, as if to suggest that the image represents a reflection of the world at large.

Weems received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and has been honored with numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013.

Standing side by side amid elements of middle-class comfort and in front of an elaborately painted backdrop, the subjects of James Van Der Zee’s Couple exude poise and sophistication. Their elegant dress, direct gazes, and tender yet assured body language demonstrate confidence and security in their place in society. Created at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1929), this photograph exemplifies the spirit of an artistic, literary, and social movement that sought to assert black creativity and self-determination in the aftermath of World War I and the first wave of the Great Migration north.

Van Der Zee opened his first independent photography studio in 1916. He later established his GGG Photo Studio, which was named for his wife Gaynella, who assisted with the subtle poses, polished styling, and selective placement of studio props that imbued Van Der Zee’s portraits of luminaries and everyday people alike with a cosmopolitan refinement. His famous subjects included pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey, poet Countee Cullen, boxers Joe Louis and Jack Johnson, and singers Mamie Smith and Hazel Scott.

Self-taught, Van Der Zee began photographing his family and friends in his hometown of Lenox, Massachusetts. His later work as a photographer in Harlem built on these familial beginnings by emphasizing motherhood, marriage, and community through careful collaboration with his sitters to combine their personal identities with their social standing and aspirations. His photographic career continued into the late 1960s with mail-order retouching and calendar work.

Alma Thomas loved to explore color—which she did as an artist and art teacher in Washington, DC, public schools for over 35 years. Many of her paintings include only one color or a few colors. Her paintings show her love of nature and music.

Alma Thomas painted at her kitchen table, which had a view out to her garden to inspire her color choices and brushstroke shapes. She painted from her imagination, too. In some of her paintings she imagined what Earth might look like from space—inspired by the Apollo moon landings she viewed from her television screen.

Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975–1995, that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. In 2012 the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago organized a survey exhibition titled Dawoud Bey: Picturing People that traveled to museums in the United States. That same year the Art Institute of Chicago acquired the complete vintage group of Harlem, USA photographs and mounted the first exhibition of that work since it was shown at Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press also published the complete Harlem, USA project for the first time. A 40-year retrospective publication of his work, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, will be published by the University of Texas Press in September, 2018.

In addition to many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, Bey's works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the United States and abroad, including the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Guggenheim Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bey has received multiple fellowships and honors over the course of his long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a 2015 United States Artist Fellow. In 2017 Bey received a MacArthur Fellowship. His critical writings have appeared in publications throughout Europe and the United States, including High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975, The James Van Der Zee Studio, and David Hammons: Been There and Back. He has curated a wide range of exhibitions at museums and institutions including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Projects), and the Hyde Park Art Center. In 2018 a major retrospective monograph, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, 1975–2017, will be published by the University of Texas Press.

Bey holds a MFA from Yale University School of Art. He is a professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he began teaching in 1998, and served as the 2008–2010 Distinguished College Artist. He is represented by Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; and Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935), one of the best known and most revered quiltmakers, uses complex geometric and color structures in an ingenious elaboration on the traditional practice of quilting in strips and blocks.

In a quilt she made in 2002, rectangles of brown wool and blue denim are juxtaposed with brightly colored strips and squares that play off the structural framework of the "Housetop" pattern, a conventional design of concentric squares that is popular among the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

According to Bendolph, her works draw inspiration from the colors, shapes, and patterns of the world around her, resulting in designs that are abstract remappings of the visual environment. 

There is perhaps no individual who embodies the power of photography more than Gordon Parks. Photographer, poet, musician, storyteller, activist—Gordon Parks shaped the times in which he lived as much as he was shaped by them. Though his career as a photographer spanned six decades, it is the period from 1940 to 1950, the focus of the exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950, that most significantly defined his point of view as an African American artist and documenter of American life at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement.

In 1937, while working as a waiter on the North Coast Limited passenger train, Parks saw magazines featuring Depression-era photographs—images like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant agricultural worker’s family, Nipomo, California that recorded the social and economic conditions of migrant farmers across the country. For Parks, images of dust bowl migrants reminded him of his own struggles and inspired him to purchase his first camera, a life-changing decision. He later recalled, “I was convinced of the power of a good picture.”

During the first decade of his career, Parks, a self-taught photographer, captured the beauty, power, and stature of Chicago socialite Marva Louis; the spirituality of churchgoers in Washington, DC; and portraits of prominent African Americans like Richard Wright and Marian Anderson. But he would also use his camera to shine a light on the injustices faced by black Americans, showing the poverty, violence, and oppression that defined the decade from 1940 to 1950. In the midst of World War II, with the American military still segregated, photographs like Washington, D.C., Government charwoman (American Gothic) make a bold statement about the disparities between the promise and realities of the American Dream. When given the chance, Parks chose to “fight back” against the inequalities he witnessed; his choice of weapons was a camera.

The photographs in this image set speak to the power of Parks’s voice as an artist. His images certainly serve as documents of specific moments in time; but individually and as a group they also reveal humanity, implore empathy, pose questions, provoke outrage, and even inspire activism. Though taken decades ago, Parks’s photographs capture individuals and represent issues and themes that still resonate deeply with us today.

Renée Stout (born 1958, Pittsburgh) earned her BFA in painting from Carnegie-Mellon University. When she moved to Washington, DC, in 1985 she began to explore her African American heritage through a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography, and installation. Stout became the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

Her work encourages self-examination, reflection, and levity, pulling from current events and everyday life. Stout writes, “I see each one of my pieces as a fragment or installment in an ongoing narrative that’s my contribution to telling the story of who we are as a society at this point in time.”

Stout is a recipient of the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize (2012), David C. Driskell Prize (2010), a Joan Mitchell Award (2005), The Pollock Krasner Foundation Award (1991 and 1999), the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (1999), and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1993).

American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex body of work which masterfully weaves together visual influences ranging from the Renaissance to modernism with principles of rhythm and improvisation drawn from his study of African cultures and American jazz.