African American Art Teacher Resources

Teacher Guides

Teacher Guides are free, downloadable PDFs.

African American Artists: Education and Equity

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How did African American artists respond to cultural and educational opportunities?

This portion of the Affirmation Today module explains the cultural impact of Supreme Court decisions on the African American community.

Primary Subject and Grade: Visual Arts 5–12, U.S. History 5–12.

Components: Historical Context, Images and Descriptions, Student Activity Suggestions, Bibliography.

Standards: Visual Arts K–12.6 Making Connections Between Visual Arts and Other Disciplines; K–12.4 Understanding the Visual Arts in Relation to History and Cultures; K–12.3 Choosing and Evaluating a Range of Subject Matter.

U.S. History Era 7 The Emergence of Modern America (1890–1930); Era 8 The Great Depression and World War II (1929–1945), Era 9 Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s).

African American Artists: Masking Matters

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How did the Harlem Renaissance influence African American artists?

This portion of the Affirmation Today module explains the conscious attempt to express ancestral heritage and racial pride through art.

Primary Subject and Grade: Visual Arts 5–12, U.S. History 5–12

Secondary Subject and Grade: Language Arts 7–12, Music 7–12.

Components: Historical Context, Images and Descriptions, Excerpts, Student Activity Suggestions, Bibliography.

U.S. History Era 7 The Emergence of Modern America (1890–1930); Era 8 The Great Depression and World War II (1929–1945)

Language Arts K–12.1 Reading for Perspective; K–12.2 Understanding the Human Experience; K–12.3 Evaluation Strategies; K–12.11 Participating in Society,

Music 7–12.8 Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts; 9–12.9 Understanding music in relation to history and culture.

African American Artists: My People, Our People

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How can art, music, and literature combine to provide a multifaceted view of the African American experience?

This portion of the Affirmation Today module explores the diverse experiences of and cultural connections among African Americans and how African Americans influenced and contributed to American Culture.

Primary Subject and Grade: Visual Arts 5–12, U.S. History 5–12

Secondary Subject and Grade: Language Arts 7–12, Music 7–12.

Components: Historical Context, Images and Descriptions, Excerpts, Student Activity Suggestions, Bibliography.

U.S. History Era 2 Colonization and Settlement (1585–1763); Era 4 Expansion and Reform (1801–1861); Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1860–1877); Era 7 The Emergence of Modern America (1890–1930),

Language Arts K–12.1 Reading for Perspective; K–12.2 Understanding the Human Experience; K–12.3 Evaluation Strategies; K–12.11 Participating in Society,

Music 7–12.8 Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts; 9–12.9 Understanding music in relation to history and culture.

African American Artists: Myth and Modern Society

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How have contemporary African American artists incorporated classical mythology in their art?

This portion of the Affirmation Today module explores how myths transcend time and place and how mythology is used as commentary on experience.

Primary Subject and Grade: Visual Arts 5–12.

Secondary Subject and Grade: Language Arts 5–12.

Components: Historical Context, Images and Descriptions, Excerpts, Student Activity Suggestions, Bibliography.

Language Arts K–12.1 Reading for Perspective; K–12.2 Understanding the Human Experience; K–12.3 Evaluation Strategies; K–12.11 Participating in Society.

Bill Traylor: Perspective-Taking within Historical Context

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How can analysis of artworks created by Bill Traylor help students consider whose stories get told in history? How does our understanding of the past and the present change when we consider multiple perspectives?

This teaching resource prompts student inquiry into the artwork and life of Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949), a man born into slavery who lived his entire life in Alabama. The activities in this resource help students consider possible multiple readings of Traylor’s work and challenge students to question the perspectives and stories hidden within or missing from the telling of American history.

Primary Subject and Grade: Social Studies 7-12, Visual Arts 7-12

Secondary Subject: Language Arts

Components: Teacher Guide, Looking Questions

Standards: U.S. History Content Standards Era 5 (The Civil War and Reconstruction) through Era 8 (The Great Depression and World War II). The resource also supports the following Historical Thinking Standards: Historical Comprehension, Historical Analysis, and Interpretation, Historical Research Capabilities.

Videos

Mark Bradford on Amendment #8

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Artist Mark Bradford discusses his use of materials, his interest in abstraction, and his thoughts on having Amendment #8 in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

MARK BRADFORD: The materials that I use and have really always used have always been paper. The tools of civilization, how we build and destroy ourself, are the materials that I'm really interested in, and paper is one of the main ways in which information is displayed. Paper in itself is simply a bunch of fragments held together by a binder. I always saw it as pigment dried in a binder and cut into eight and a half by eleven blocks. Just in my head I thought, "Oh, well, you just have to wet it so that it can move like paint."

What constitutes a painting, and who are the gatekeepers of that?

I'm sure that me being a painter was a very political gesture for me. If you're Black and from South Central, you have a lot of identity stuff that you could just fall right into. I just thought I was going to do abstract work, but it was going to talk about race, class, culture, and all these things, but I was going to do it from an abstraction place, which gave me freedom. Then I was going to look outside. I wasn't going to do this kind of hermetic, interior, close the world off, which is historically what we understand abstraction as being. I was going to have a relationship with the world and with politics because I was interested in those things.

I was really starting to get very interested in the foundations of our country. The Amendments, or the Bill of Rights, are still what we go to. Interesting enough, it is on paper. I mean, it is one of our historical documents, one of our most important documents are on paper. We put paper in the photocopier, so it's both precious and not precious at all. It's both protected by security guards and shredded.

So "Amendment #8" is actually part of the "Bill of Rights" series. There are certain fragments that cling to the edges of the composition. Certain words flow in and out, they're legible and not legible, they hint, but in some ways that's how we really do understand the dense documents. We will never fully understand. They're so dense, but we pull, and we glimmer, and we dive, and we project onto these documents. At the time of the Constitution, certain people weren't even human, women didn't have rights, so we moved them forward as the country moves forward. We amend what we excluded in a way.

What better place than the Smithsonian to have an Amendment painting? It just fits; it makes sense. If you look at what's going on in the media at the moment with Black male bodies and me being a Black male and doing an Amendment painting and sitting in the Smithsonian—that's just super layered.

Artist Mark Bradford creates abstract work that engages with questions of race, class, culture, and politics. Find out about why he gravitates towards paper as his primary material and what he thinks about having Amendment #8 in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Mickalene Thomas on Portrait of Mnonja

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Artist Mickalene Thomas discusses her work Portrait of Mnonja. Thomas explains her inspirations for the painting, the role that performance plays in her practice, and the connection between Portrait of Mnonja and Ambassador Susan Rice.

MICKALENE THOMAS: Hi, I’m Mickalene Thomas. I’m here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and I’m here to speak about my painting Portrait of Mnonja. Mnonja is a friend. I met her many years ago through other friends at a party. She is Senegalese, and so we hit it off. I wanted to photograph her, so I invited her to my studio to one of my settings that I built up in the corner, a little tableau of an interior. I invited her to be one of my models for a photoshoot.

I would say the essence of Mnonja in this painting is power, sophistication, beauty, and also a little vulnerability. I think most of my sitters and the women that I gravitate towards have all of those attributes that I look for and want to convey in my work. For this particular one I feel like she’s owning and claiming her space, which is very exciting. Looking at her up close, I’m always looking for, “Oh, I could have made it this way or that way,” but I think she’s just made exactly the way she needs to. I think she represents the American experience because she represents a whole line of women that have come before her and women that are coming after her.

I was asked to make this painting for Arts and Embassies for Ambassador Susan Rice. I thought that it would be really important to convey a female figure from my perspective and from my practice, someone who imbued the sense of what Susan Rice represented at that particular time and political stance and power but also patriotic. That’s why looking through all of my clothes that I had for Mnonja, I selected these particular colors, really subtle signifiers that would represent our flag but also represent the United States and represent Susan Rice’s position and also represent her being this African-American woman in this highly profiled position and a sense of power.

Performance plays a huge role in my practice, and I like to think that my work with any of the models that come to my space is a collaborative act. What I do and the hope is that we are both contributing almost like two dancers that come for a performance. I often think and believe that portraiture is a representation of the person who’s painting them and that a lot of times the sitters become a vehicle for the person, for the artist. I use everything in the work as how I see myself. They become sort of these stand-ins for me, and in some level they may be considered mostly self-portraits.

Artist Mickalene Thomas explains her inspiration for Portrait of Mnonja, the role that performance plays in her practice, and the connection between Portrait of Mnonja and Ambassador Susan Rice.

Nick Cave on Soundsuit

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Artist Nick Cave discusses his work “Soundsuit.”

NICK CAVE: Hi, I'm Nick Cave, a visual artist, speaking at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The first "Soundsuit" came about in '92 and it was in response to the Rodney King incident. It was a really, really difficult time for me. As a young, Black male, I was really questioning everything, and so feeling dismissed, discarded, viewed less than—I was just trying to process that. What does that mean? How does that relate to who I am and what it is that I'm trying to do?

I found myself one day in the park. I looked down on the ground and there was this twig. I just started collecting these twigs. I had no idea how they were going to be used, but then I brought them back to the studio and started to build this object.

Subconsciously, yes, I knew it was a garment of some sort, but I was not thinking about it in that way. I was thinking about it as a form, as this sculpture, building this surface and then I realized I could put it on. The moment I put it on and started to move it made sound.

I've made maybe 500, maybe even more, of this particular sort of form. Why do I continue this body of work? I think it's as simple as these issues still continue to be relevant in my life. At the end of the day, it's all about power and it's all about standing up. How do we confront and stand up to something?

The particular piece that's here at the museum, I was thinking about, in terms of getting to the form, was ideas of power. I started to think about the miter hat form, the Klan uniform, the head of a missile, head of a condom. I put all of that together and that's how this form came about.

There's two parts of that piece that are relevant. At the lower right-hand side there is this doily that looks like a pretzel, that's somewhat large. It's that kind of object that determines how the rest of the piece is going to be handled. It's really about where do I place that to where it really becomes a real signifier within the rest of the development of the surface. Also, the bottle cap doilies that are on the back of that particular piece. Being able to collect a collection of maybe 20 of those, and that just offers a different kind of surface application. It's almost sort of like a form of body adornment. There is this raised surface that happens within that piece.

I think when I looked at the piece today—I hadn't seen it in a long time—it’s always interesting to come to the museums and see a piece. I looked at that particular doily and thought that was the reason why this piece happened. It's nice to be able to know the starting point within a work and how that dictates how I'm going to treat the rest of the surface.

Artist Nick Cave discusses creating his first Soundsuit in 1992 in response to the Rodney King beating. He explains the ideas and materials that inspired him to make the Soundsuit in SAAM’s collection–one of approximately five hundred Soundsuits the artist has made over the years.

Kerry James Marshall on SOB, SOB

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An interview with artist Kerry James Marshall at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Kerry James Marshall is one of the leading contemporary painters of his generation. Over the span of his career, he has become internationally known for monumental images of African American history and culture.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: Cornel West had a phrase that I was really struck by when I first read it. He said, "There are things that you cannot not know." When it comes to history, and in particular to the history of African Americans, or Africans in America, there are things that you cannot not know.

Really, in order to have a complete understanding of where you are situated in your own present moment, you have to locate yourself in relationship to some parts of history. That's a lot of what this picture is kind of about.

If you came to my house and looked through my library, you would see my wife and I have a huge concentration of books that are on African history, African-American history, American history, African culture. All of those different aspects of the history of Black people from around the world. If you look through the titles of the books, you'll see that the range of subjects that they cover relative to Black history, culture, and also the kinds of stories that Black people tell is really broad.

A part of the reason some of those titles are there is to introduce some of those authors and some of those books to the art viewing public. The painting is as much an invitation to also come to know as it is demonstration of the kind of conflicts in knowledge that somebody who has already arrived at this knowledge might experience.

Our conception of what constitutes the best that can be done in artwork still revolves around those paintings that are the foundation of art history, and those paintings all have a European origin. Our concept of what's beautiful and what's important operates within that realm, as well. For me, as an African American or a Black person going to the museum and looking at those works, even though I like a lot of things I might be looking at, there really is a limit to your ability to appreciate things that don't include you as a fundamental part of their value system.

For me, the only way to really come to terms with that is to introduce images that contain Black figures and not Black figures they were marginal in terms of their position in the narrative but central to the narrative. I committed myself to only making Black figures in my paintings because there are not enough paintings in museums anywhere, really, that have black figures as the central subject of those pictures.

One of the devices artists use to encourage people to think again about the importance of a thing is to change the scale of the object. If you have things that we're used to seeing in a really small format, if you double that size or increase it exponentially, then all the sudden it assumes a lot more importance than it would have if it remained at the scale that we commonly experience those things at.

I did make the frame. It's a way of kind of locating it amongst the kind of common, popular, vernacular approach. It seems like something that’s more familiar to people who often think of museums and artworks as really, really distant from their experiences. If you come up to a thing that has got this really ornate, gold frame and you look at the picture inside and you don't like it, then that becomes that thing where people say, “Well, I just must not be smart enough.” Those people don't come back to the museum, more times than not.

A part of what I was trying to do was to create a garment that didn't have a place in time—that couldn't be located as a kind of ‘70s fashion, or ‘80s fashion, or ‘50s fashion because there's nothing like that that has ever existed. It becomes a curious artifact of the picture. It's sort of this ambivalent zone, too, so you can't quite place it. You don't quite know what it is. It's odd, and it's sort of intriguing in a way. So that's a part of what I was trying to do. This is early on in the process. I had never really sewn a thing before in my life.

I wanted to try to convey, or at least give people access to, was a certain level of ambivalence in what the character or the figure was thinking after having read through and gone through some of those books. The thought balloons there and the phrase, “SOB, SOB,” those two sounds. Yes, it's, on the one hand, a kind of sad recognition of some sort of painful insight, maybe. But on the other side of it, it's a fairly powerful rebuke of some of the things you might have come to learn in history. I think that ambivalence, that place in between where you experience both a certain sadness and also a certain kind of anger about the things that you've discovered. This is really a part of what the picture is about. Then the question becomes after you began to know those things that one cannot not know, then what do you do with that information? What do you do with it? What do you do about it?

The most important achievement I can make, on the one hand, is to first have this work have arrived at the Smithsonian. The fact that it's here is a great achievement. Anybody who walks through the building can look at it or not look at it, but if it wasn't there, then they wouldn't have that option. Then by the extension from there, it becomes as much a part of the narrative what has value in art history as anything that had already been there. Those two things are more important for me than anything else that accompanies what people call success in the art world. That matters the most.

When I hear from some young person that they saw a picture of mine and that it had an impact on them, I feel that, well, I guess it's a good day and it's all been worthwhile.

Artist Kerry James Marshall, creator of SOB, SOB, explains his commitment to making Black figures the central subjects of his paintings: "There are not enough paintings in museums anywhere, really, that have Black figures as the central subject.”

Lava Thomas on Requiem for Charleston

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Lava Thomas discusses her work Requiem for Charleston, which honors the nine men and women who died in a shooting on June 17, 2015, inside the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The artist explains her use of materials, including tambourines, black lambskin, black acrylic disks, and pyrographic calligraphy.

Artist Lava Thomas discusses her materials and process–including tambourines, black lambskin, black acrylic disks, and pyrographic calligraphy–for making Requiem for Charleston, which honors the nine men and women murdered on June 17, 2015, inside the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Mingering Mike on His Process and Inspirations

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In 2013, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired a collection of over 150 artworks made between 1969 and 1976 by a self–taught Washington, D.C. artist known only by his alter-ego, Mingering Mike. During his rare media appearances, the artist always wears a disguise in order to maintain his anonymity.

The Mingering Mike collection comprises artworks constructed as part of the artist’s youthful fantasy of becoming a famous soul singer and songwriter, including LP albums made from painted cardboard, original album art, song lyrics and liner notes, and self-recorded 45 rpm singles.

For more on Mingering Mike, check out Can Mike Really Sing?, an episode of SAAM’s web series Re:Frame

SAAM’s collection includes over 150 artworks made between 1969 and 1976 by a self–taught Washington, D.C. artist known only by his alter-ego, Mingering Mike. During his rare media appearances, the artist always wears a disguise in order to maintain his anonymity.

Soul Superstars, Album Covers, and American Art

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What do musicians, aliases, and the nation’s capital have to do with American art?

SAAM's Re:Frame explores American art’s many meanings and connections with experts across the Smithsonian.

In this episode of SAAM's award-winning web series Re:Frame, join host Melissa as she crisscrosses the Smithsonian to learn about artist Mingering Mike and the historical significance of the Howard Theatre.

More Resources

Explore the Civil Rights Movement through American Art

This interdisciplinary resource includes close-looking questions, related resources from across the Smithsonian, and artist biographies for more than two dozen African American artists:

Charles Henry Alston
Rev. Henry Clay Anderson
Cornelius M. Battey
Romare Bearden
Elizabeth Catlett
Allan Rohan Crite
Beauford Delaney
Thornton Dial, Sr.
David C. Driskell
Roland L. Freeman
Sam Gilliam
Earlie Hudnall Jr.
William H. Johnson
Barbara Jones-Hogu
Jacob Lawrence
Norman Lewis
Robert McNeill
Gordon Parks
Earle Richardson
Augusta Savage
Lorna Simpson
Henry Ossawa Tanner
James VanDerZee
Charles White
Ernest C. Withers

The Struggle for Equality

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Take a deep dive into Charles White’s The Children (1950) and Jacob Lawrence’s The Library (1960) on the education resource The American Experience in the Classroom.

Civil Rights: Then and Now

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Look closely at By Any Means Necessary (after Malcolm X) (2008) by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. alongside SOB, SOB (2003) by Kerry James Marshall on the education resource The American Experience in the Classroom.

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African American Art Teacher Resources

Discover how to integrate American art into your classroom

African American Artists: Education and Equity

African American Artists: Masking Matters

African American Artists: My People, Our People

African American Artists: Myth and Modern Society

Bill Traylor: Perspective-Taking within Historical Context

Mark Bradford on Amendment #8

Mickalene Thomas on Portrait of Mnonja

Nick Cave on Soundsuit

Kerry James Marshall on SOB, SOB

Lava Thomas on Requiem for Charleston

Mingering Mike on His Process and Inspirations

Soul Superstars, Album Covers, and American Art

Explore the Civil Rights Movement through American Art

The Struggle for Equality

Civil Rights: Then and Now