1800s → today
Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Romare Bearden’s collages. Faith Ringgold’s story quilts. Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley. American art written by and for Black people. Centuries deep, still unfolding.
Where this art lives
African American art is a parallel American art tradition that the standard art-history curriculum has only recently begun teaching with any seriousness. The work was always there. The institutions weren’t looking.
From the 19th century (Henry Ossawa Tanner, Edmonia Lewis) through the Harlem Renaissance (Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage), through the 20th century (Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Charles White), through the contemporary moment (Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley) — the lineage is unbroken.
Contemporary African American artists now dominate auction records and major museum acquisitions. The 2018 Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald marked an inflection point. The work is no longer a footnote.
The artists
Some historic, some living. All deserve attention beyond the footnote.
Painted the 60-panel Migration Series (1941) at age 23 — the story of the Great Migration of Black Americans north. Half the panels are in the Phillips Collection (DC), half in MoMA. Together: one of the most important American paintings.
Master of collage. Cut up photographs and magazines to make tableaux of Black American life. Jazz musicians, Southern churches, Harlem streets. His collages are encyclopedic.
Story quilts. Tar Beach (1988) is in the Guggenheim. Also wrote and illustrated children’s books. Taught for decades. Civil rights activist as well as artist.
Paints Black figures in spaces of beauty, ordinary domestic dignity, and explicit blackness — pigment so dark it absorbs the room. Major retrospective at the Met. One of the most important living American painters.
Painted Michelle Obama’s presidential portrait. Renders Black skin in grayscale to invite the viewer past racial assumption into the subject’s humanity. Tightly controlled, deeply moving work.
Materials & techniques
African American art doesn’t have a single medium. Painting, collage, quilting, sculpture, photography, digital. The materials follow the subject.
Centering Black subjects who were absent from official American art history is itself the political and artistic move. The figure is the material.
Many of these artists work from family photos, magazine clippings, civil rights documentation. The archive is material.
Many works engage directly with specific places (Harlem, the South, the Great Migration route). Geography is material.
How to learn from this tradition
Visit the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC, free). The Studio Museum in Harlem. The High Museum (Atlanta) has strong African American holdings. The Phillips Collection (DC) houses Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.
Read: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983. African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond. Subscribe to Hyperallergic, Cultured Magazine, the Studio Museum’s programs.
Follow contemporary Black artists on social media. The conversation is now — and you can be in it.