Art as Black and White: examining interactions between race in the 20th century through Black artist experience.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between African-American art throughout the 20th century and mainstream art critics’ perspectives of the African-American community. Aaron Douglas’, Jacob Lawrence’s, and Jean Michel Basquiat’s experiences as artists spanned the 20th century. The study examined approximately 40 primary documents written by White individuals who played a role in the mainstream art world during the 20th century. The analysis determined that there was no change in the perspectives of the White majority towards the African-American community in response to Aaron Douglas’, Jacob Lawrence’s, and Jean Michel Basquiat’s art. Two main themes emerged regarding White response to these artists. First, the White majority seems to have felt threatened by the African-American community and utilized its power to keep African-American art confined to its own community. Second, the White majority commodified African-American art in order to keep it outside the mainstream. Therefore, the key contribution of this study is to document one important way that racism seeped into the arts. Not only can the findings be applied to other methods of cultural production, but the construction of this study can provide a model for other studies dealing with similar qualitative materials.

Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis, sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.

The Border Crossing Narrative and the Disruption of Southern Borders

With the view that crossing a border is a transformative experience, this chapter provides groundwork for the rest of the study and focuses on collective narratives of movement, specifically at ways they create new communities, break down borders, and upset Southern identities. This chapter is the most expansive in examining various types of texts. Looking at personal narratives, visual arts including work by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and Dorothea Lange, literary texts by writers including Frances E.W. Harper, Wilma Mankiller, William Attaway, and Harriette Arnow, and articles and advertising from newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the chapter focuses on the hybrid identities created in and by Southern Border Crossing Narratives and examines the Border Crossing Narrative as a site of confrontation and struggle, as not only a narrative that can be created and maintained, but also one that others can attempt to control.