The spruce-green silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing among palm fronds looks up at a faint red star against a field of green circles radiating out from the horizon in this abstracted vertical painting. The scene is made with mostly flat areas of color to create silhouettes in shades of slate and indigo blue, lemon-lime and pea green, plum purple, and brick red. To our right of center, the man faces our left in profile. His eye is a slit and he has tight curly hair. The position of his feet, standing on a coffin-shaped, brick-red box, indicate his back is to us. He stands with legs apart and his arms by his sides. Terracotta-orange shackles around his wrists are linked with a black chain. A woman to our left, perhaps kneeling, holds her similarly shackled hands up overhead. A line of shackled people with their heads bowed move away from this pair, toward wavy lines indicating water in the distance. The water is pine green near the shore and lightens, in distinct bands, to asparagus green on the horizon. On our left, two, tall pea-green ships sail close to each other at the horizon, both titled at an angle to our right. Concentric circles radiate out from the horizon next to the ships to span the entire painting, subtly altering the color of the silhouettes it encounters. To our left, a buttercup-yellow beam shines from the red star in the sky across the canvas, overlapping the man’s face. Spruce-blue palm trees grow to our right while plum-purple palm fronds and leaves in smoke gray and blood red frame the painting along the left corners and edge. The artist signed the painting in the lower right, in black, “AARON DOUGLAS.”
Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Collection), 2014.79.17

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance was a period of artistic and cultural rebirth among African Americans between 1918 and the mid-1930s. Many Black artists experienced a freedom of artistic expression for the first time. They asserted pride in Black life and identity, called out inequality and discrimination, and responded to a rapidly changing modern world.

  • Three people with dark brown skin lie on a marigold-orange ground that extends toward a high horizon line in this stylized, vertical painting. An ant and two other bugs cling to a screen of tall, moss-green, flame-shaped leaves that span the width of the composition and separate us from the people. Beyond the leaves, the large soles and rounded toes of the woman’s feet are almost half the height of the painting. She holds a rifle against her body, which is enclosed in a mostly round, periwinkle-blue shape with narrow strips of cranberry-red around the top, left, and bottom. Her head is tilted sharply to our left, her ear near her shoulder so her face points upward in profile. Her nose and mouth are created with thin strokes of golden yellow. Her closed eyes are marked with slivers of white, and a raspberry-pink scarf covers her hair. A slender green stem with pointed leaves rises at an angle next to her head. Beyond her, a man lies with his body curled, so his body curves toward us with his head to our right. He wears only black, shin-length pants. His bald head rests on crossed arms, and his ankles are also crossed. His closed eyes are painted with white and his features outlined in gold, like the woman. Just behind him, a woman curls around an object held in one large hand. Fields of pink and blue, in the same shades as the other woman, read as a blue cap and skirt, and a pink wrap or blanket. A round, brown shape within an off-white field appears to be a baby cradled close to her head. One tall, blade-like leaf grows up behind her shoulders. The orange ground comes to a point to our left of center and dips down to our right. The area beneath the straight horizon line is filled in with midnight blue, nearly black. Above, a sapphire-blue band fills the top quarter of the composition. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “Jacob Lawrence 67.”
  • A Black woman, young man, and young boy pose against a painted backdrop in this vertical photograph. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but is printed in warm tones of golden and dark browns. The man and woman have slight smiles, and all three look at us. At the center, the slender woman sits on a wooden chair with her body angled slightly to our left, though she turns her head to us. Her skin tone is a little lighter than that of the man and boy, and her hair is styled in an ear-length bob. Her scoop-neck, sleeveless, ankle-length dress shimmers as if covered with beads or sequins. She wears round glasses, dangling earrings with pearls, and short and long strands of pearls. Light catches two rings on her left hand and a bangle bracelet encircles each arm. Her shiny, high-heeled shoes have a lattice-like pattern cut into the tops around the T-straps. She holds an object, perhaps with feathers, in her lap. To our left of the woman, the young, cleanshaven man stands facing us with his weight equally balanced on both feet, positioned slightly apart. He rests his left hand, on our right, on the back of the woman’s chair and holds his flat-topped, brimmed hat in the crook of his other elbow. His dark, crisply pressed uniform has a snug fitting jacket with a high collar, shiny buttons in a row down the front, and a braided cord looped over his left shoulder and under his arm. The jacket is cinched with a wide belt and a thin leather band runs diagonally across his chest. To our right of the woman, the boy stands with one ankle crossed in front of the other and his right arm, on our left, resting on the arm of the woman’s chair. In that hand, the top of his hat is a bright white oval. He rests his other hand near the top of a child-sized cane, close to his body. His hair is cut very short. The boy’s dark sailor’s suit has white stripes around the neck and at the cuffs. A white bulldog puppy with darker spots around its eyes stands at the boy’s feet, partially hidden by fabric that hangs off a piece of furniture in the lower right. A wooden table behind the boy holds a stack of a few books and a bouquet of wilted, light colored flowers. The background behind the people has a painted or wallpapered section to our left and an arch leading to a curtained window to our right. Parts of the photograph are noticeably out of focus, particularly the background.
  • This free-standing, bronze-colored sculpture shows the head, neck, and the center of the collarbone of a young, bald boy. In this photograph, the boy faces us with his chin slightly lowered. He looks out from under a projecting brow. He has a flaring nose and his full lips are closed. The hollow of his throat is deep, and light glints off the tendons to each side. His chest is cropped to either side of his neck to create a trapezoidal shape just below his collarbone. The sculpture sits on a thin wooden base. The background is fog gray.
  • The spruce-green silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing among palm fronds looks up at a faint red star against a field of green circles radiating out from the horizon in this abstracted vertical painting. The scene is made with mostly flat areas of color to create silhouettes in shades of slate and indigo blue, lemon-lime and pea green, plum purple, and brick red. To our right of center, the man faces our left in profile. His eye is a slit and he has tight curly hair. The position of his feet, standing on a coffin-shaped, brick-red box, indicate his back is to us. He stands with legs apart and his arms by his sides. Terracotta-orange shackles around his wrists are linked with a black chain. A woman to our left, perhaps kneeling, holds her similarly shackled hands up overhead. A line of shackled people with their heads bowed move away from this pair, toward wavy lines indicating water in the distance. The water is pine green near the shore and lightens, in distinct bands, to asparagus green on the horizon. On our left, two, tall pea-green ships sail close to each other at the horizon, both titled at an angle to our right. Concentric circles radiate out from the horizon next to the ships to span the entire painting, subtly altering the color of the silhouettes it encounters. To our left, a buttercup-yellow beam shines from the red star in the sky across the canvas, overlapping the man’s face. Spruce-blue palm trees grow to our right while plum-purple palm fronds and leaves in smoke gray and blood red frame the painting along the left corners and edge. The artist signed the painting in the lower right, in black, “AARON DOUGLAS.”
  • A hilly terrain with ridges, bushes, trees, and rocks outlined in dark brown and filled in with earthy tan and pecan brown, goldenrod yellow, and moss and emerald green almost fills this nearly square, stylized landscape painting. Framing the scene is a steel-gray, broken tree trunk to our left and a small grove of leafless bushes, with vertical, nearly straight branches to our right. Another grove of tightly spaced tree trunks is clustered near a smoky, plum-purple ridge at the back center, and a touch of clear blue toward the lower right corner suggests a winding stream. A narrow band of sapphire-blue sky along the top edge of the canvas is streaked with white clouds painted with long swipes of the brush. The artist signed the work in the lower left corner, “Hale Woodruff.”
  • Shown from the knees up, a woman with brown, wrinkled skin, wearing a white blouse, apron, and black skirt is shown in front of a pale gray background in this vertical portrait painting. Straight-backed, she faces and looks at us with her hands resting in her lap. Her wavy, iron-gray hair is parted in the center and pulled back from her face. Her eyebrows are slightly raised, and her face is deeply lined down her cheeks and around her mouth. She wears a heart-shaped brooch with a red stone at its center at her neck and a gold band on her left ring finger. The light coming from our left casts a shadow against the wall to our right. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner: “A.J. MOTLEY. JR. 1922.”
  • A winged person blowing a horn stands silhouetted in lilac purple against a field of alternating celery and muted lime-green bands in this abstracted vertical painting. The person’s body is angled toward us but they look over their shoulder, to our left in profile, as they hold a horn to their lips. The horn reaches into the top left corner of the composition, and the wings extend off the top edge of the canvas. A shallowly curving slit indicates the eye. The person stands with each foot on two rounded forms like stylized hills. The mound on our right is higher so the knee is bent, and the person holds a skeleton key in the hand propped on that knee. The hill to our right has wavy bands of muted pine and sage green, and the hill to our left has a zigzag line of the sage across the darker green. Farther from us, four people, smaller in scale, are outlined as amethyst-purple silhouettes. One person to our right of the angel kneels and raises their hands high overhead, face turned to the sky. Two more people standing on or behind the left mound are framed between the trumpeter’s legs. The fourth person stands with hands clasped, also looking up. Concentric arcs of lemon yellow and pale green suggest a sun in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work with dark green paint in the lower right corner: “A. Douglas ’39.”
  • Shown from the shoulders up, a woman and man, both with brown skin, look at each other in this horizontal portrait painting. Their bodies are angled toward each other and both have black hair, dark eyebrows, and full, coral-red lips. To our left, the woman faces our right in profile. She has a delicate nose and high cheekbones. Her eyes are painted with black lashes over black eyes, without the white of the eye. A gold disk earring hangs from the ear we can see, and she wears white and royal-blue beads in two necklaces. Her hair is combed or styled close to her head, and a swath of brick-red fabric, flecked with golden yellow, wraps around the back of her neck. A scarf with butter-yellow, denim-blue, and red stripes in a plaid pattern is draped across her shoulders, over a rose-pink garment. To our right, the man’s face is angled toward the woman but we see both eyes and the far cheek. His hair is closely cropped and he has a rounded nose, curving brows, and full cheeks. The shadows and folds of his white garment are painted with streaks of teal blue. The background behind the pair is patterned with bands and geometric designs of mustard yellow, scarlet red, and teal, with some stylized leaves in emerald and forest green. The artist signed the work in red paint in the lower right corner, “Lois M. Jones.”
  • Made with mostly square or rectangular pieces of patterned paper in shades of asparagus and moss green, sky blue, tan, and ash brown, a man with brown skin sits in the center of this horizontal composition with a second person over his shoulder, in the upper left corner of this collage. The man’s facial features are a composite of cut-outs, mostly in shades of brown and gray, as if from black-and white photographs, and he smokes a cigarette. He sits with his body angled slightly to our right and he looks off in that direction, elbows resting on thighs and wrists crossed. His button-down shirt and pants, similarly collaged, are mottled with sky blue and white. One foot, on our right, is created with a cartoonish, shoe-shaped, black silhouette. The paper used for the other foot seems to have been scraped and scratched, creating the impression that that foot is bare. A tub, made of the same blue and white paper of the man’s suit, sits on the ground to our left, in the lower corner. The man sits in front of an expanse made up of green and brown pieces of paper patterned with wood grain, which could be a cabin. In a window in the upper left, a woman’s face, her features similarly collaged, looks out at us. One dark hand, large in relation to the people, rests on the sill with the fingers extended down the side of the house. The right third of the composition is filled collaged scraps of paper patterned to resemble leafy trees. Closer inspection reveals the form of a woman, smaller in scale than the other two, standing in that zone, facing our left in profile near a gray picket fence. She has a brown face, her hair wrapped in a patterned covering, and she holds a watermelon-sized, yellow fruit with brown stripes. Several blue birds and a red-winged blackbird fly and stand nearby. Above the woman and near the top of the composition, a train puffs along the top of what we read as the tops of trees. The artist signed the work in black letters in the upper right corner: “romare bearden.”

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The backs of two splayed hands, palms down with one coming down from the top and one up from the bottom, nearly fill this vertical photograph and are shown lightly entwined in a field of dark fabric. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but is printed in tones of golden and dark brown. The thumb of the left hand, coming up from the bottom, points upward so the fingers splay elegantly to our left. The forefinger and thumb touch to hold a needle stitching the dark fabric. The right hand comes down to our right and almost touches the left hand. The index finger is bent under at the first knuckle, and the ring and pinkie fingers gently curve downward into the fabric. The middle finger extends straight and is capped with a shiny thimble, which nearly touches the thumb of the opposite hand. The skin on the hands and wrists is smooth and the photograph is lightly blurred, creating the impression of a patina. The folds of the gathered fabric create a shadowy pinwheel effect.

Photography 

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was the first to permanently record an image using light in 1837. His daguerreotype changed the way we consume images. Many innovations like stereographic photographs and tintypes would follow but it was George Eastman’s invention of the Kodak film camera in 1888 that made cameras widely available.

Black Artists