Celebrating The Accomplishments of Black American Artists

February is Black History Month, also known as African American History Month, making it a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of African American artists. Since 1976, this month has been officially designated in the United States. The annual celebration is also held and widely celebrated in Canada and UK. With great pleasure, I present a few of them here for inspiration. Read about the contributions of some leading African American Artists and how they changed the course of history, their artistic efforts and for raising awareness about the world which we cohabit through story telling and social activism.

Also read “Famous Black Artists Who Confronted Racism and Inequality”.

Harriet Powers

Harriet Powers (October 29, 1837 – January 1, 1910) was an American folk artist and quilter born into slavery in rural northeast Georgia. Powers used traditional appliqué techniques to make quilts that expressed local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events. Powers married young and had a large family. After the American Civil War and emancipation, she and her husband became landowners by the 1880s, but lost their land due to financial problems. Only two of her quilts are known to have survived: Bible Quilt 1886, shown above, and Pictorial Quilt 1898.

Her quilts are considered among the finest examples of nineteenth-century Southern quilting. Her work is on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) was an African American printmaker and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20th century. Her subjects range from sensitive maternal images to confrontational symbols of Black Power, and portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. Her work is a mixture of abstract and figurative in the Modernist tradition, with influence from African and Mexican art traditions. According to the artist, the main purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics.

Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold (born 1930) has had an extremely diverse and broad artistic practice that includes many media such as painting, quilts, sculptures, performance art and children’s books. She stated, “My ideas come from reflecting on my life and the lives of people I have known and have been in some way inspired by. The story quilts grew out of my need to tell stories, not with pictures or symbols alone, but with words. The Purple Quilt, panels of text from Alice Walker’s ”The Color Purple”, reinforce portraits of characters found in the novel.”

Kara Walker

Kara Walker (Born 1969) is an African American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist and film-maker who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker lives in New York City and has taught extensively at Columbia University. At the age of 28 she received a MacArthur fellowship. In 2007, she was listed among Time Magazine‘s 100 Most Influential People in The World.

Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was an African American painter, storyteller and educator, known for his portrayal of African American life. He referred to his style as “dynamic cubism”. The New York Times recognized Lawrence as “One of America’s leading modern figurative painters”. The Seattle Art Museum offers the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, a $10,000 award to “individuals whose original work reflects the Lawrence’s concern with artistic excellence, education, mentor ship and scholarship within the cultural contexts and value systems that informed their work and the work of other artists of color.”

Augusta Savage

Augusta Savage (1892-1962) was a leading sculptor and artist of the Harlem Renaissance. She experienced racial discrimination by an art program’s selection committee and worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts. In 1934 she became the first African-American artist to be elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Her Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, in Harlem was open to anyone who wanted to paint, draw, or sculpt. Her many young students included Jacob Lawrence.

Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin was a self-taught painter born in 1888. Some of his best-known works of art address America’s injustice of slavery and racial segregation. Pippin’s art is included in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was the first African American artist to be the subject of a monograph, Selden Rodman’s Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America of 1947.

Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews (1930-2006) was a figurative painter in the expressionist style who painted a diverse range of themes of suffering and injustice, including The Holocaust, Native American forced migrations, and most recently, Hurricane Katrina. As a social activist, he co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) an organization that protested the ‘Harlem on my Mind’ exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in 1969.

Robert Seldon Duncanson

Robert S. Duncanson (1821 – December 21, 1872) was a 19th-century American landscapist of European and African ancestry. Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist. The artist spent the majority of his career in Cincinnati, Ohio and helped develop the Ohio River Valley landscape tradition.

Duncanson’s success as an artist is partially attributed to the many abolitionist patrons who supported him. Abolitionist patrons provided him with ample commissions, acquired his paintings, financed his travel to various locations nationally and abroad, and introduced him to other prominent people in the art community. Abolitionists were motivated to support artists like Duncanson because it emphasized the abilities of African Americans to participate in and contribute to mainstream culture

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) helped to bring African American and Latino experiences into the elite art world through his graffiti works. His art focused on “suggestive dichotomies”, such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. In the 1980s, he exhibited his neo-expressionist paintings in galleries and museums around the world. A retrospective of his art was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992.

Joshua Johnson

Joshua Johnson was an American painter from the Baltimore area of African and European ancestry. Johnson, often viewed as the first person of color to make a living as a painter in the United States, is known for his naïve paintings of prominent Maryland residents. Johnson received his freedom in 1782 and began advertising, identifying himself as a portrait painter and limner (an illuminator of manuscripts, or more generally, a painter of ornamental decoration) as of 1796.

The History of Black American History Month

In 1915, historian Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson and his associate Jesse E. Moorland created the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, or ASALH) to promote black history and recognize achievements of African-Americans.

Dr. Woodson chose the second week of February to commemorate black history because the birthdays of both President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederic Douglass are contained within that week.

In 1976, by decree, President Gerald Ford expanded the week into the month of February. He declared, “In celebrating Black History Month we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Where To Find More African American Artists

To find a list of many African American Artists and links to their Wikipedia pages visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_visual_artists

The Studio Museum in Harlem is “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by Black culture.

Update:  Located on Harlem’s famed 125th Street, with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard on one side and Lenox Avenue on the other, the physical building that houses the Studio Museum has been closed since 2018 due to a $175 million multi-year expansion project. Part of its collection has been touring nationally in the show “Black Refractions.”

Also read “Famous Black Artists Who Confronted Racism and Inequality”.