Teaching Packet

Harlem Renaissance

Part of Uncovering America

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On this Page:

  1. Overview
  2. Selected Works
  3. Activity: Respond and Relate
  4. Activity: Of and For African Americans
  5. Activity: African Art, Modern Life, and a Changing World
  6. Activity: Music, Art, and Collaboration
  7. Additional Resources
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.
James Van Der Zee, Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924, printed 1974, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Eric R. Fox), 2015.19.4388

Overview

How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment?

How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues?

How do migration and displacement influence cultural production?

“I believe that the [African American’s] advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the country, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural and the financial center for Negroes of the United States and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples.” —James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” 1925

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and interest in the rapidly changing modern world—many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the first time.

While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts—pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.

Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) is known as the “father of African American art.” He defined a modern visual language that represented black Americans in a new light. Douglas began his artistic career as a landscape painter but was influenced by modern art movements such as cubism, in which subjects appear fragmented and fractured, and by the graphic arts, which typically use bold colors and stylized forms. He and other artists also looked toward West Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as a link to their African heritage. They also turned to the art of antiquity, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of popular interest due to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb. Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902–1993) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980) also explored a streamlined approach that drew from African and European artistic influences.

Sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) worked in a realistic style, representing his subjects in a nuanced and sympathetic light in which black Americans had seldom been depicted before. Painter Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891–1981) began his career during the 1920s as one of the first African American graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the early part of his career, he created intimate and direct portraits, such as Portrait of My Grandmother of 1922.

James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), a photographer, became the unofficial chronicler of African American life in Harlem. Whether through formal, posed family photographs in his studio or through photo essays of Harlem’s cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, diverse, and thriving community.

The formation of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by the Great Migration—the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the continental United States, mainly from rural Southern regions to more populous urban centers in the North. Pursuit of jobs, better education, and housing—as well as escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism—drove black Americans to relocate.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Yet the Harlem Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades. Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Further, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC) in 1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered hands-on art making led by professional artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC was critical in providing black artists continued support and training that helped sustain the next generation of artists to emerge after the war. In subsequent decades, the Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid critical groundwork for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement.

As a final note, women artists were also part of the Harlem Renaissance and participated especially as singers, actors, dancers, and writers. Less well-known are the women visual artists of the period. Gaining access to the visual arts scene was more difficult than entry into the performing arts, as the practice of painting and sculpture in particular were not considered gender-appropriate or “feminine.” Two sculptors, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) and Augusta Savage (1892–1962), the latter an activist, artist, and director of the HCAC, made their mark during the period, but their work has been largely overlooked and is only coming into full assessment by art historians today.

Selected Works

  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • Printed with black ink against eggshell-white paper, the head and neck of a person facing our right in profile fills this vertical woodcut. The person has closely-cropped black hair, a thin neck, and high cheekbones. The eye we can see under an arched brow seems to look straight ahead, and the person has a straight nose, and the lips are closed. The texture and woodgrain of the woodblock surface is visible in the black, printed areas. The artist signed and dated the lower right corner, under the printed image, in graphite: "W. DREWES 1930." A graphite inscription in the lower left reads, "N. 7 1-XXX HARLEM BEAUTY."
  • 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 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.
  • Five young Black men wearing uniforms sit on the front steps of a brick building around a sixth young man, who holds a basketball in this vertical black and white photograph. Three more men stand in a row behind them. They pose on steps leading up to a door covered with a flag and a sign with the Greek letters for alpha phi alpha. The seated men, the players, wear knee pads, knee-high socks, and sleeveless tank tops with the Greek letters. One of the men in the background wears an Alpha Phi Alpha sweater over a shirt and tie. The next wears a sweater jacket and the third a suit jacket, all over shirts and ties. The artist signed this photograph by inscribing the negative, “VANDERZEE N.Y.C. 1926.”
  • A woman’s face and neck are roughly modeled in this dark green, freestanding bronze sculpture. In this photograph, her face is angled to our right. She looks down, chin tucked back into her neck. She has deep-set eye sockets, a thin, blade-sharp nose, and her small mouth is closed, the corners downturned. Light from our left gleams off some of the surfaces, especially in the choppy hair and along the edge of her nose. A long diagonal ridge on the right side of her neck, our left, suggests a tendon stretching as she turns her head. Her neck acts as the sculpture's base. The background lightens from pale gray along the top to white along the bottom, where the sculpture casts a faint shadow to our right.
  • The elongated head and neck of a person with stylized features is carved from beige-colored limestone for this freestanding sculpture. Though mostly carved smooth, the surface of the porous limestone is pocked and textured. In this photograph, the face is angled to our right. Short bangs line the narrow forehead of the tall, oval face. The hair flaring around the crown and behind the tidy, oval ear we see is roughly carved. The marquis-shaped eyes are set high on the face. Eyebrows immediately over the eyes join to make a long, blade-like nose that nearly reaches the bottom of the oval face. The arrow-shape of the nose ends just above a half-moon-shaped lip over a round chin. The long neck continues to a block of limestone that acts as the base. The sculpture is photographed in front of a background that lightens from charcoal gray across the top to nearly white across the bottom.

Activity: Respond and Relate

James Lesesne Wells, Looking Upward, 1928, woodcut in black on laid paper, Ruth and Jacob Kainen Collection, 1994.87.9

Looking at the image set, you will see that artists explored different aspects of African American life and identity during the first part of the twentieth century.

Have students evaluate the images to discover what some of the connecting ideas among them may be. Students can start by examining elements of art including colors, forms, lines, textures, and shapes. Then they can move on to exploring what subjects are pictured (e.g., slavery, beauty, family, music) or what statement they believe the artist may be making.

Ask small groups of students working together to arrange the works according to three or four connecting ideas.

Activity: Of and For African Americans

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.
Richmond Barthé, Head of a Boy, c. 1930, painted plaster, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2014.136.295
Printed with black ink against eggshell-white paper, the head and neck of a person facing our right in profile fills this vertical woodcut. The person has closely-cropped black hair, a thin neck, and high cheekbones. The eye we can see under an arched brow seems to look straight ahead, and the person has a straight nose, and the lips are closed. The texture and woodgrain of the woodblock surface is visible in the black, printed areas. The artist signed and dated the lower right corner, under the printed image, in graphite: "W. DREWES 1930." A graphite inscription in the lower left reads, "N. 7 1-XXX HARLEM BEAUTY."
Werner Drewes, Harlem Beauty, 1930, woodcut in black, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1974.84.1
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.”
Archibald John Motley Jr., Portrait of My Grandmother, 1922, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, Avalon Fund, and Motley Fund, 2018.2.1

“We younger negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” —Langston Hughes, published in the Nation, 1925

Mainstream publications of the 1920s circulated racially stereotyped images and ideas that rankled the black intelligentsia and writers of the time. In response, the artists in this module and figures such as philosopher Alain Locke and activist W. E. B. Du Bois introduced complex and nuanced concepts of black individuality through publications such as The Crisis, Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life, Messenger, and Fire!

These three images represent individualized portraits of African Americans, which were infrequent in popular culture and art prior to the Harlem Renaissance. Study each image and notice the details that make the works of art specific portrayals of individuals.

  • Make comparisons. Pair the Richmond Barthé sculpture and Werner Drewes woodcut. Discuss what they have in common and how they are different. Start with basic information, such as the fact that the works are in different mediums, that one is a boy and the other a woman, and then try to go deeper, looking at how each artist chose to represent his subject.
  • Next compare the Drewes woodcut with the painting by Archibald John Motley Jr. Repeat the exercise detailed above.
  • Why does Langston Hughes, in the quote above, claim the right for African Americans to be beautiful “and ugly too”? How are standards of attractiveness determined?

Activity: African Art, Modern Life, and a Changing World

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.”
Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1
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
Overlapping, geometric shapes painted in tones of tan, oatmeal, and coffee brown and outlined in black cluster along the center of this tall, vertical, abstract painting. Except for the outlines, the paint is put on in long, horizontal strokes to create patches of color. The unpainted canvas shows through in some areas, especially in the lower corners and up along the right edge. A few shapes could recall body parts, like curved shapes for breasts near the top and an angled line for an elbow. The artist signed the work with black paint at the lower center: “Picasso.”
Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman, 1910, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1972.46.1
A woman’s face and neck are roughly modeled in this dark green, freestanding bronze sculpture. In this photograph, her face is angled to our right. She looks down, chin tucked back into her neck. She has deep-set eye sockets, a thin, blade-sharp nose, and her small mouth is closed, the corners downturned. Light from our left gleams off some of the surfaces, especially in the choppy hair and along the edge of her nose. A long diagonal ridge on the right side of her neck, our left, suggests a tendon stretching as she turns her head. Her neck acts as the sculpture's base. The background lightens from pale gray along the top to white along the bottom, where the sculpture casts a faint shadow to our right.
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), model 1909, cast before 1932, bronze, Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of Mitchell P. Rales, 2002.1.1

In France, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro opened in Paris in 1878. Its ethnographic displays introduced both artists and the general public to objects from Africa, the Americas, and Asia. World’s fairs of the period, which took place in Europe and the United States, similarly offered expositions of cultures from around the world together with industrial and scientific exhibits and demonstrations.

In the United States, galleries and museums had been showing African works since about 1914, mostly as artifacts for ethnographic study rather than works of art. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the first exhibition of African sculpture and artifacts as art in a modern art museum. The exhibition was called African Negro Art and showed approximately 600 works of African sculpture, textiles, masks, and other objects.

Aaron Douglas and Pablo Picasso created avant-garde works of art about 25 years apart. They came from different cultural perspectives, yet both took inspiration from African art. Douglas and fellow visual artists Hale Woodruff and Archibald John Motley Jr. lived in Paris for periods of time to paint and study European art, whose influences they absorbed in their work.

  • Read short biographies of Douglas and Picasso on a trusted source.
  • Look carefully at the works of art and respond to the following questions:
    • How does each artist use line, shape, form, and color?
    • How are the artists’ approaches similar or different?
    • Consider the cultural context of the works of each artist and how it might have influenced his practice. What were the biographical/personal, political, social, economic, artistic, and geographic factors that may have influenced the artist?
    • Develop lists of these factors for the Douglas and Picasso objects.

Activity: Music, Art, and Collaboration

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.”
Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1

Artists during the Harlem Renaissance often worked collaboratively. Visual artists inspired one another and absorbed the influence of poets, writers, musicians, dancers, and actors. They captured the people, their aspirations, and the scenes of the time.

Some artists made personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as links to their African heritage.

Gospel, jazz, and blues music, developed by artists of the African diaspora, was a central feature of the Harlem Renaissance. Aaron Douglas often depicted musical instruments and people dancing in his art. An example includes his illustration in God’s Trombones on the page facing the verse “The Prodigal Son.”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), author of God’s Trombones, wrote poems, editorials, and books that explored the shifts in racial attitudes, black empowerment, and civil rights building during the first part of the 20th century. His work brought him into contact with prominent figures of the period, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and President Woodrow Wilson. Among his diverse accomplishments, Johnson also wrote the lyrics for the black spiritual song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

In the preface to God’s Trombones, Johnson talks about the “old-time preacher” within the black community: a model of leadership, promoter of literacy, beacon of hope during dark times, and a uniter of diverse people of African and Caribbean descent who were brought to America and enslaved.
For Johnson, the trombones of the book’s title and Douglas’s illustrations had specific symbolism, relating to a sermon he heard delivered by a charismatic preacher:

“…He [the preacher] strode the pulpit up and down in what was actually a very rhythmic dance and brought into play the full gamut of his wonderful voice, a voice—what shall I say? Not of an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice—and with greater amplitude.” —James Weldon Johnson, preface, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, 1927

Choose one of the following sermons from Johnson’s God’s Trombones: “The Creation,” “The Prodigal Son,” or “Noah Built the Ark.” Distribute copies and have students read the verse and write down the poem’s subject, its narrator or protagonist(s), and its tone. Does the language seem formal or informal? Vivid or subdued? Ask students to note any unfamiliar words. Ask students to identify parallel elements in Johnson’s text and Douglas’s illustrations.

Additional Resources

Africana Age: African and African Diasporan Transformations in the 20th Century, Maps, New York Public Library

Africana Age: African and African Diasporan Transformations in the 20th Century, The New Negro Renaissance, New York Public Library

Harlem Renaissance: A Resource Guide, Library of Congress

The Harlem Renaissance, Online Educational Resources, Humanities Texas

Jim Crow Laws, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historical Park, National Park Service

Musée du quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, offering a brief history of its ethnographic/colonial collections

National Museum of African American History and Culture

National Museum of African Art

One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Museum of Modern Art

“On ‘The Creation’ and God’s Trombones,” Modern American Poetry

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

“With Powerful Murals, Hale Woodruff Paved the Way For African-American Artists”, NPR

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Educational Resource:  Harlem Renaissance

How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment? How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues? How do migration and displacement influence cultural production?

A pale-skinned young woman with copper-orange hair, wearing a turquoise-blue robe, stands in a pastel-infused landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The woman fills most of the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile with her head bowed as she looks down at the silver and brown box she holds in her right hand, closer to us. Her body angles away from us so we see her back. Her hair is held back under a gold-colored headand, and her blue robe falls over a white skirt. Beyond her, rocky mountains in ice blue and pale lilac purple span the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up the painting, beneath a pale, rose-pink sky. An area of mottled parchment-white to our right of the person could be a field. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, rounded and organic shapes in scarlet red, turquoise, lapis blue, golden and lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange could be abstracted earth or flowers at the woman’s feet.

Educational Resource:  Pandora's Box

Educational Resource:  From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection