This special three-part series will highlight the input of African-Americans in our collective history that oftentimes is overlooked in traditional classes and showcases important African-Americans in the fields of: Art, Literature, Music, Photography, Sports, and Politics.
After completing two classes in the History of Art and two classes in History of Photography, one would think that you would have a competent understanding of visual art in our world. After having the day off for Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, I began to think about the upcoming black history month.
I posed a question to a photographer who had taken all of the required art and photo history classes, "Can you name any black artists or photographers?" After about 30 minutes of dialogue we came up with photographer Gordon Parks and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. I was so ashamed that at Columbia, a very diverse school, that I could only name two African-American artists.
A question that I hear often in February is, why is Black History Month the shortest month of the year? Many people think that is just another way to make it seem less important. February actually has historical significance.
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“The Banjo Lesson”
Tanners painting shows a positive image of a touching moment of an elder teaching a young boy how to play the banjo. The banjo holds significance to African-American history because it originated in Africa and was used in religious ceremonies.
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In 1926, the first "Negro History Week" was invented by Carter Godwin Woodson to showcase and celebrate the often forgotten experiences of blacks in America. This week was chosen because the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas fell close together, as well as the founding of the NAACP.
It wasn't until 1972 that the week was renamed "Black History Week," and expanded into a whole month in 1976. In 1978 the U.S. Postal Service began issuing special stamps for Black History Month that highlighted many important African-Americans.
Since the arrival of Africans in America there have been many important artists; however, they were not given credit for many great works like the iron work in New Orleans’ French Quarter to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello home. Black-American artists combined many African traditions and European influences.
In the 19th century there were few black artists, many weren't allowed to study art, or even learn how to read. Joshua Johnson was one of the first black artists in America, and during the peak of his career, he was one of the top painters in Baltimore.
Very few details are known about the life of Johnson, but we do know that almost 80 paintings have been attributed to him. Johnson was born into slavery around 1763, as the son of a white man and a black woman. He was purchased by his father from the owner of his mother when he was a one-year-old. Johnson was freed from slavery in 1782, and was a portrait painter from 1796 to 1824.
Most of his work was commissioned portraits of wealthy people and portraits of freed slaves, since by 1815 the number of free African-Americans outnumbered the slave population in Baltimore, MD.
Henry Ossawa Tanner was one of the first black painters to gain acclaim in America in the 1960s, although he was a famous painter in France during his lifetime 1859- 1937. The story of Tanner’s life is the biggest proof of how America looked at minorities and didn't allow them to participate in many things that were reserved for "White America."
Tanner was born in Philadelphia and began painting when he was 17, and four years later enrolled in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest art school in America, where he was the only black student at the time.
In 1888, Joseph C. Hartzell, a bishop from Cincinnati, Ohio, who helped Tanner open a photographic studio in Atlanta, Ga., arranged a one-man show in Cincinnati. Hartzell bought the entire collection of paintings and allowed Tanner to travel to Paris to enroll in the Académie Julian in Paris in 1891. Tanner began to paint with lighter colors and focused on the mystical and elusive qualities of life, to give his painting a dramatic and inspirational appeal. He painted mostly landscapes of Paris and Biblical scenes.
Paris was a place that Tanner was able to work and exhibit his work without the racial barriers that existed in America in the late 1890's. He won many awards from the exhibitions in the Paris Salons including a medal in 1897, and the French government purchased the painting, a rare occurrence for an American artist.
Tanner's career and reputation as an artist grew and he stayed true to his artistic style amid a changing art world in France. Dada, Cubism, Post Impressionism, and many other new forms of painting were becoming the new thing in art. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and in 1927, Tanner became the first black American in the National Academy of Design.
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Henry Ossawa Tanner; “Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds” (1910), shows delicate, otherworldly angels hovering over a landscape that engulfs the tiny human figures.
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Tanner was also the first African-American painter to have a painting chosen for the art collection of the White House. It seems that color barriers kept many Americans from seeing this work. Thirty years after his death, America discovered Tanner when the Smithsonian exhibited several of his paintings.
This was the first solo exhibition of an African-American artist in America. In 1991 the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the city of his birth, amassed a large retrospective of Tanners work.
Edmonia Lewis is known to be the first woman of mixed African-American and Native- American descent to become a popular sculptor. Lewis was born around 1843, her father was African-American and her mother was a member of the Ojibwa community. Although Lewis was an orphan and grew up with the Native-American tribe, her brother insisted she attend college.
In 1859, Lewis was enrolled in Oberlin College, a major center for the abolitionist movement. Lewis was accused of attempted murder when two girls got sick from drinking wine that Lewis allegedly served, and she was also accused of stealing paintbrushes when a teacher found some missing. Lewis wasn't permitted to graduate and moved to Boston in 1863.
She first got a taste of sculpture when abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison introduced her to sculptor Edward Brackett, and quickly became her mentor.
She first started to make medallions of Civil War heroes. One of her most famous was a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a young man from Boston, who led an all black battalion against the Confederate soldiers.
Lewis moved to Rome and established a studio there in 1865. The peak of her career was when Lewis created The Death of Cleopatra and entered it into the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
This sculpture now rests in the Smithsonian, but for years was shuffled around Chicago and was sold from a saloon on Clark St. in 1892, then was bought as a monument for a horse track in Forrest Park because the owner’s favorite horse was name Cleopatra. In 1980, a fire inspector found it in a salvage yard.
This piece is as mysterious as Lewis herself, who disappeared around 1911 in Rome and was never heard from after. There have been many important black artists in the 20th century that made very important work, and there are museums being erected all over the country that specialize in African-American art.
The DuSable Museum of African-American art in Hyde Park is a great example of one of these museums. People everywhere are beginning to understand the importance of some early African-Americans artists.
Photographs courtesy of:
www.liunet.edu
www.smithsonianmag.com
www.nmaa-ryder.si.edu |
