They Broke Barriers and Raised Awareness

(Originally published on May 17, 2020 and updated in April 2022) As we try to cope with the horror of one pandemic we battle another deadly and appalling disease known as racism.  Around the world, protesters are gathering peacefully to call attention to racial inequity and strive to achieve justice and reform. I join you in this period of profound grief and outrage — not only for George Floyd and his family but for the many others who are and were victims of racist violence.  As a writer in the arts, I wish to pay homage to some of the many famous black artists who have confronted racism and inequality. They have faced discrimination, persevered, shared their artistic visions, and contributed to bringing positive change through art and advocacy. I hope you enjoy reading about them here and will spend time learning more about them.

Let’s follow their lead and continue to stand up to injustice and work together to build a more compassionate and united world.

Jacob Lawrence was known for his portrayal of African American life and referred to his style as “dynamic cubism”.  The New York Times recognized him as “One of America’s leading modern figurative painters”. He was also a professor at University of Washington in Seattle. In addition to teaching, he spent much of his latter part of his life painting commissions, producing limited-edition prints to help fund nonprofits like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Children’s Defense Fund and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Kara Walker is a 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. At the age of 13 when her family moved to Georgia she began to create art that focused on issues of race. She received a BA degree (1991) from the Atlanta College of Art and her MA degree (1994) from the Rhode Island School of Design. There, she began working in the silhouette form while exploring themes of slavery, violence, and sex found in sources such as books, films, and cartoons. 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.

Romare Bearden was a founding member of the art group known as The Spiral, formed in the early 1960’s in Harlem, “for the purpose of discussing the commitment of the Negro artist in the present struggle for civil liberties.”  During the civil rights movement, he created works in collage and expressed representational and more overtly socially conscious aspects in his work. His lifelong support of young, emerging artists led him and his wife to create a Foundation in his name to support young or emerging artists and scholars. In 1987, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. His work in collage led the New York Times describing him as “the nation’s foremost collagist.

Faith Ringgold‘s artwork was inspired by the people, poetry, and music she was exposed to in her childhood and also reflected the racism, sexism, and segregation she faced. In 1963 she began her celebrated series of paintings called “American People”, which portrayed the civil rights movement from a female perspective. In the 1970’s she created African-style masks, painted political posters, and lectured frequently at feminist art conferences. She also actively fought to acquire racial integration within the New York art world. She initiated a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art and helped win admission for black artists to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970, she and her daughter founded  the advocacy group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation.

“Faith Ringgold: American People”, through June 5, 2022, the most comprehensive assessment to date of the artist’s impactful vision. This major retrospective at the New Museum in New York looked at the remarkable life and work of artist Faith Ringgold, 91, who has fought for change in the art world and beyond for 60 years. Learn more about this exhibition.

Bill Traylor (1853–1949) is recognized as the only known artist enslaved at birth to make a significant body of drawn and painted works of art and regarded as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. His paintings and drawings are visually striking and politically assertive. His use of simplified forms surprisingly reveal the complexity of his world and desire for self-definition in a segregated culture. His compelling imagery charts the crossroads of radically different worlds — rural and urban, black and white, old and new — and reveals how one man’s visual record of African American life gives larger meaning to the story of his nation.

Alma Woodsey Thomas was born in 1891 in Columbus, GA. Her family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1906 to escape racial prejudice. Stylistically, her art has qualities similar to West African paintings as well as Byzantine mosaics. The expressionist painter and art educator was the first person to graduate from Washington, D.C.’s Howard University’s fine arts department in 1924, after which she gained an MA in art education from Columbia University in 1934. She was also the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and within the same year an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She stated, “Creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time… common to the whole civilized world, independent of age, race and nationality.”

Harriet Powers began quilting in rural Georgia while she was a slave. Her quilts represent the finest ones created of her time. She used traditional appliqué techniques to record local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events. Through her narrative quilts she communicated themes from her own experience and the techniques from the age-old crafts of African Americans. Her art was shown in the Smithsonian. In 2009, Powers was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement Hall of Fame.

Augusta Savage, a leading sculptor and artist of the Harlem Renaissance, 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. She won the Otto Kahn Prize in a 1928 exhibition at The Harmon Foundation with her submission “Head of a Negro”. She publicly critiqued the director of The Harmon Foundation, Mary Beattie Brady, for her low standards for Black art.

Benny Andrews, a figurative painter in the expressionist style he painted a diverse range of themes of suffering and injustice, including The Holocaust, Native American forced migrations, and Hurricane Katrina. Andrews created art education programs to serve underprivileged students at Queens College. As a social activist, he co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. As an artist advocate on behalf of artists of color Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Roy DeCarava, and others he contributed to their increasing visibility and reputation in museums and the historical canon.

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.

Gordon Parks was the first famous pioneer among black filmmakers and was prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism for three decades. He was the first to produce and direct major motion pictures  that focused on issues of civil rights, poverty and African-Americans. His iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940’s are held in the highest esteem. He is known for creating the “blaxploitation” genre.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was known as a self-taught artist who created graffiti works that focused on “suggestive dichotomies”, such as wealth versus poverty and integration versus segregation. He used social commentary to identify with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. He confronted political issues and criticized colonialism and support for class struggle. A retrospective of his art was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992.

Roy DeCarava was a black and white photographer known initially for capturing the atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance, the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in that community. He used photography to counter what he described as “black people… not being portrayed in a serious and artistic way”. He was the first African-American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1955 he established A Photographer’s Gallery in New York, NY to show work by the great names of American photography. In 1963, he co-founded and became the first director of the Kamoinge Workshop, a Harlem-based collective that supported the work of black photographers through exhibitions, public programs, group critiques, and published portfolios. He received the Benin Creative Photography Award for his contributions to the black community as a creative photographer.

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. Stylistically, she combined abstract and figurative in the Modernist tradition, along with elements from African and Mexican art traditions. Her purpose was “to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics”. She has had a huge influence on art students seeking to depict race, gender and class issues.

Catlett worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) from 1946 until 1966. However, she came under surveillance by the United States Embassy because some of the members were also Communist Party members, and because of her own activism which led to an arrest in 1949. Catlett was barred from entering the United States and declared an “undesirable alien.” She was unable to return home to visit her ill mother before she died. In 1962, she renounced her American citizenship and became a Mexican citizen. In 1971, after a letter-writing campaign to the State Department by colleagues and friends, she was issued a special permit to attend an exhibition of her work at the Studio Museum in Harlem

More Resources

Visit Wikipedia – List of African-American Artists

The Studio Museum in Harlem is located on Harlem’s famed 125th Street, with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard on one side and Lenox Avenue on the other, Its website is “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by black culture. It is a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society.”  Update:  the physical building that houses the Studio Museum has been closed since 2018 due to a $175 million multi-year expansion project. Part of the museum’s collection has been touring nationally in the show “Black Refractions.”