1600-10-23 On this date, we examines African American art painting, carving, graphic arts, and crafts created by people of African descent in the United States and influenced by African and African American culture. During Americas early years, between the 1600s and the early 1800s, African-American art had many forms and definitions. A small drum, wrought-iron figures, ceramic face vessels, and some domestic architecture found among enslaved black communities in the south are similar to comparable crafts, objects, and structures of West and Central Africa. In contrast, black artisans created art that, despite occasional portrayals of black subjects, was done in a Western European fashion. From the Civil War years through the Post-Reconstruction period, some sculptors and landscape artists referred to black American social conditions that transcended race and class politics. Yet, the difficulty that these artists grappled with at various points in their careers justified the African-American designation of their work. A similar political/apolitical junction is present in the work and lives of artists working between 1865 and 1900. Painters created moody scenes of white-on-black violence that characterized black lives at the end of the century. In contrast, the Athens, Georgia, seamstress Harriet Powers created at least two powerful Bible quilts that bore strong similarities to West African textile arts, especially to the cloth trim from the Akan and Fon peoples. In the first two decades of the twentieth century painters and sculptors of distinguished (and affluent) black Americans, were evident. In the journal The Voice of the Negro Artist, John Henry Adams, Jr., created dozens of finely drawn African-American portraits. In works of the sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, topics such as emancipation would be important for artists and intellectuals in the years to come. The social and political anxieties that many African-Americans felt just after World War I were softened by migrations to the urban North. There, relief from the old South helped create the New Negro Arts Movement, or Harlem Renaissance. The collective result was a focus on African-Americans, their art, and a larger modernist vision. The pages of The Crisis, Opportunity, New Masses, and other reviews of the 1920s and 1930s helped to spread Harlem Renaissance imagery. The works of James Lesesne Wells, Albert Alexander Smith, and Aaron Douglas were among the artwork published. During the Depression and World War II years, many artists in the 1930s made representations under the Federal Arts Projects of the Works Project Administration. These artists had not attended art school and their works were often unsophisticated. In the final years of the Federal Arts Projects, several painters emerged out of obscurity and into national prominence. Others achieved a measure of success in the larger world of art as well, often fusing the style preferences of the day with the artisan’s fondness for selected African-American subjects. The balancing act between race awareness in art and visual assimilation into the white culture was torn away by several artists after World War II. The works here connected to Africa, black America, and to the evolving civil rights struggle spotlighting a different definition of what was then described as modern Negro art. These works, in conjunction with the late 1950s civil rights boycotts, lunch-counter sit-ins, and attacks on blacks by angry whites, took on an even greater power in communicating African-American aspirations and dreams. A sense of cultural authority became the benchmark for the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. During this period African-American writers, performing artists, and visual artists made black culture and the political struggles of black peoples worldwide their raison dêtre. Slogans like Black is Beautiful and Black Power as well as the development jazz and soul music became the soundtrack for many visual artworks. Some examples came through the Chicago-based black artist collective AFRI-COBRA, which added African textile-inspired, mixed-media works and influential art manifestos that helped organize expositions of black artists in Africa and North America. Many artists whose careers extended back 30 years resurfaced with a renewed sense of racial and political solidarity. These advancements were made more emphatic by artists like the Washington painter Alma Thomas, who, at the age of 80 was the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at New Yorks Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. Artists and audiences grew more acquainted with the diversity of expressions of Black culture. Thus, the times created an increase of artists and works operating under the mandate of African-American art. By the mid- to late-1980s, earlier definitions of African-American art would be replaced with the postmodernist belief of art-as-performance, critical study of art, society through ones work, and the test of identity, geography, and history. By 1975, sculptures from black hair, food, artifacts, and the like commented on black identity. Cartoon-like paintings that poked fun at the art establishment and performances that placed racism at the center of art matters helped create a different set of visual standard in modern art: This inventive group includes sculptors, photographers, visual artists, painters, and conceptualists. Through installation of 21st century art, we have questioned American history and the psychology of racism so that their display can no longer be viewed as like the past. Reference: The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage by Susan Altman Copyright 1997, Facts on File, Inc. New York ISBN 0-8160-3289-0
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:23:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015