Description
The artworks in the exhibition lay out a vision of America from an African American viewpoint. These artists embrace many universal themes and also evoke specific aspects of the African American experience—the African Diaspora, jazz, and the persistent power of religion.
The artists work in styles as varied as documentary realism, abstraction, and postmodern assemblage of found objects to address a diverse array of subjects. Robert McNeill, Richmond Barthé, and Benny Andrews speak to the dignity and resilience of people who work the land. Jacob Lawrence, Roy DeCarava, and Thornton Dial, Sr. acknowledge the struggle for economic and civil rights. Sargent Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Melvin Edwards address the heritage of Africa, and images by Romare Bearden recast Christian themes in terms of black experience. James Porter and Alma Thomas explore beauty in the natural world.
All 100 artworks in the exhibition are drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s rich collection of African American art. More than half of the featured works, including paintings by Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, and Loïs Mailou Jones, and photographs by Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Roland Freeman, and Marilyn Nance, are being exhibited by the museum for the first time, and ten works are recent acquisitions. The exhibition includes fifty-four photographs, which are incorporated into the display while also organizing the exhibition thematically. Individual object labels connect the artists and their works with the artistic, social, and contextual factors that shaped their creation. The exhibition is organized by Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator.
Visiting Information
Publications
Credit
African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum with generous support from Alston & Bird; Amherst Holdings, LLC; Diane and Norman Bernstein Foundation; Larry Irving and Leslie Wiley; the William R. Kenan, Jr. Endowment Fund; Clarence Otis and Jacqui Bradley; and PEPCO. The C.F. Foundation in Atlanta supports the museum's traveling exhibition program, Treasures to Go.
Online Gallery

Richmond Barthé
Bay St. Louis, MS 1901-Pasadena, CA 1989
Blackberry Woman
modeled by 1930, cast 1932
bronze
35 1/2 x 12 1/4 x 16 1/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endownment
The angular grace of Blackberry Woman speaks of stoicism and constancy. The subject—an African American woman in a simple dress who is balancing a basket on her head—is one Barthé may well have seen on market day as a boy growing up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. But she is more than an echo of an image once observed. She has the frontal, linear form found in West African sculpture, which Barthé first saw in Chicago, in an exhibition during The Negro in Art Week in November 1927, when he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

John Biggers
Gastonia, NC 1924-Houston, TX 2001
Shotgun, Third Ward #1
1966
tempera and oil on canvas
30 x 48 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase made possible by Anacostia Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Shotgun, Third Ward #1 is an image of strength and resilience in the face of loss. Children play in a water-soaked street oblivious to the tragedy of the burned-out church behind them. Adults look away, avoiding one another's eyes and the spectacle of the still-smoldering structure. A rash of church bombings in the early 1960s may have been the initial prompt for this painting. But rather than create an image of outrage, Biggers affirmed the sustaining values of faith, heritage, and community through symbolism: the wheel in the air at the upper right edge summons the biblical story of Ezekiel while the grey-haired woman in red is an emblem of constancy and wisdom.

Frederick Brown
born Greensboro, GA 1945
John Henry
1979
oil on canvas
84 x 60 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Gerald L. Pearson
© 1979 Fredrick J. Brown
John Henry tells a story of pathos and protest that lives in the folklore and ballads of America. Countless versions exist, but all of them speak of a slave freed at the end of the Civil War who worked for the C&O Railway and possessed near superhuman strength. Brown, who grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood near the steel mills in South Chicago, blends elements of the original John Henry legend with the lives of contemporary steelworkers concerned about layoffs when the American steel industry began outsourcing jobs abroad. Like the narrator in a Greek tragedy, he has linked the story with contemporary experience.

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
South Capital Street at M Street, Washington DC, February 1972 from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1972, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 11 x 14 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1972 Roland L. Freeman

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
400 Block of East Lorraine Ave, East Baltimore, Maryland, September 1972 from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1972, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 14 x 11 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1972 Roland L. Freeman

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
Bikers take a Break, Sunday Afternoon in Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, Maryland, September 1973 from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1973, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 11 x 13 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1973 Roland L. Freeman
A back story is always featured in Freeman's photographs, providing an implicit chronicle that links the people in his pictures with a larger narrative. Bikers Take a Break is not only an image of hip young men showing off lean bodies, it is also a reminiscence of black Baltimoreans coming together on Sunday afternoons for the beating of the drums, an informal gathering that served as a reminder of a time in history when drumming was banned by slave owners because it kept alive the legacy of African culture.

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
Horse-drawn Cultivator. Mississippi, 1974 from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1974, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 11 1/8 x 14 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1974 Roland L. Freeman
Sometimes humorous, always warm, each photograph by Freeman represents more than the instant it captures. For example, emerging from the woods in search of basket maker Lee Willie Nabors, Freeman came upon a horse-drawn cultivator in a fallow field that Nabors farmed. Silhouetted against the sky, the implement becomes an emblem for the spirit of creativity that even the hard life of the rural farmer cannot stifle. Freeman's photographs tell of African American heritage and folklore and of people for whom the past continues to resonate. They are also the story of Freeman's life, the people he cares about, and the commitments he believes in.

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
Dancing at Jazz Alley. Chicago, Illinois, June 1974 from the series Southern Roads/ City Pavements
1974, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 11 x 14 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1974 Roland L. Freeman

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
Bernice and Vernice Briddel. Snow Hill, Maryland, August 1979 from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1979, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 11 1/8 x 13 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1979 Roland L. Freeman

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
Paul "Hots" Watkins, Stable Manager for Many Years of Diteman's Stable, 1612 Aliceanna Street, East Baltimore, Maryland, December 1979, from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1979, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 14 x 11 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1979 Roland L. Freeman
The Baltimore horse-cart vendors known as "arabbers" hold a special place in Freeman's early development—so much that he dedicated an entire project to an exploration of their lives. The Arabbers of Baltimore is an intimate photographic portrayal of this hard-working and now virtually extinct group in Baltimore. A descendent of arabbers himself, Freeman's closeness to the subject was both difficult and rewarding—he wanted his documentation to reveal the arabbers' rich social history as well as their importance in the African American story.

Herbert Gentry
Pittsburgh, PA 1919-Stockholm, Sweden 2003
Our City
1998
acrylic on canvas
60 x 50 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of the artist
©1998 Herbert Gentry
Our City is a field of barely controlled skeins of color that swirl around a large central head. Above, a face resembling a traditional African mask summons thoughts of Gentry's ancestors. Below is a perched bird, a form that appears often in Gentry's art as a metaphor for the unconscious. Gentry said he painted "people I've met throughout the world—American, African American… who are my friends." Our City has the feel of both a memory painting and an ancestral tree. It evokes the people he knew and the ancestors whose lives and cultures are an inextricable part of his identity.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Just thinking
1984
gelatin silver print
sheet: 20 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the artist
©1984 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
The close focus on the face of the woman in Just Thinkingcreates an unequivocal sense that the viewer is intruding on a private moment. According to Hudnall, "The camera really does not matter; it is only a tool. What is important is the ability to transform an instance, a moment, into meaningful, expressive, and profound statements, some of which are personal, some of which have a symbolic and universal meaning."

Sam Gilliam
born Tupelo, MS 1933
Light Fan
1966
acrylic on canvas
36 1/4 x 36 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Woodward Foundation
Light Fan has the feel of an image seen from space—a sunrise observed from an orbiting capsule through a window struck by a ray of light—or the blue and green depths of an ocean giving way to sun-warmed shallows. The effect is diaphanous; color has bled in irregular pools as the tidal pull of capillary action moved wet pigment around a field of color on a finely woven fabric. Edges freely shift in a way that is both accidental and controlled.

Tony Gleaton,
born Detroit, MI 1948
Padre y Hijo/Father and Son (Isla de Boca Del Toro, Panama) from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America
1992, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 20 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1994 Tony Gleaton

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
Sin Titulo/Untitled (Triunfo, Honduras) from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America
1992, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 14 x 10 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
© 1994 Tony Gleaton

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
Un Hijo de Yemayá/A Son of Yemayá (Hopkins, Belize) from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America
1992, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 14 x 14 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1994 Tony Gleaton

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
El Retorno de Odysseus/The Return of Ulysses (The Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua) from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America
1992, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 20 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1994 Tony Gleaton

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
Hija Negra/Flor Blanca/Black Girl/White Flower (Mango Creek, Belize) from series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America
1992, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 20 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
© 1994 Tony Gleaton
Gleaton has traveled constantly—throughout Mexico, Central America, and to all but three of the countries in South America, photographing people of African ancestry and crafting an "alternative iconography of beauty, family, love, goodness." He says he loves "the other," which he defines as people who are separate from dominant cultural groups. "My work examines our common elements and the disparities, which in making us different, also bind us together in the human condition."

Felrath Hines
Indianapolis, IN 1913-Silver Spring, MD 1993
Red Stripe with Green Background
1986
oil on linen
51 x 39 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Dorothy C. Fisher, wife of the artist
©1986 Dorothy C. Fisher
Red Stripe with Green Background plays with perception. A field of slightly variant shades of green is divided by red, yellow, and blue horizontal stripes. Above and below, white pyramids pierce the green plane offering optical "windows" to a space beyond. The slightly off-center elements seem like playful dancing forms that speak to freedom and the joyousness of the human spirit.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Street Champion
1986
gelatin silver print
sheet: 16 x 19 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1986 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
Hudnall uses juxtaposition and subtle contrast to create meaning in his pictures. In Street Champion a boy brandishing boxing gloves, a girl holding a baseball bat, and their friends mug for the photographer against a backdrop of drying laundry and carpeting. The brick street and crumbling porch supports framed by modern multi-storied buildings signal that they live in an aging residential pocket within an urban environment. But their smiling faces reveal that they are oblivious to the impact of encroaching development on their carefree lives.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Lady in Black Hat with Feathers
1990
gelatin silver print
sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
© 1990 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
The Guardian
1990
gelatin silver print
sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1990 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
Many of Hudnall's photographs focus on children and the elderly. "A unique commonality exists between young and old," he observes, "because there is always a continuity between the past and the future. It is this commonality which I strive to depict in my work." In The Guardian, for example, a father enfolds his young daughter as they stand along a street reflected in the mirrored lenses of his glasses. The American flag tucked behind his ear suggests more—that in addition to warmth and affection, he is passing on a sense of community and patriotic pride.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Just Us
1991
gelatin silver print
sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1991 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Looking Out
1991
gelatin silver print
sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1991 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Miss Bow from Laurel
1992
gelatin silver print
sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the artist
©1992 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
Hudnall credits his father, an amateur photographer, and his grandmother, who kept a family album, with teaching him the importance of documenting people and the meaning of community. Hudnall grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in an area where everyone considered their neighbors to be members of their extended families. Hudnall says his work is about "the simple things in life. How we live from day to day, what we do on special holidays, family kinds of things and so forth. And this has been my mainstay in photography."

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
born Hattiesburg, MS 1946
Hip Hop
1993
gelatin silver print
sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in.
Museum purchase
©1993 Earlie Hudnall, Jr.

Richard Hunt
born Chicago, IL 1935
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism, is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to he resisted, and when to be obeyed." —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, 1852. From the series Great Ideas.
1975
chromed and welded steel
32 x 50 5/8 x 33 3/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Container Corporation of America
In 1975, Hunt was invited by the Container Corporation of America to create a sculpture for the Great Ideas project, a program that commissioned artists to interpret the writings of the world's eminent thinkers. Hunt chose a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel Blithedale Romance (1852) as his title and theme. Intending to evoke the feelings generated by the lines beginning "The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool," Hunt explained that the sculpture's wheel and open, boxlike structure suggest motion in restraint. The arms that project into space imply man's striving for heroic deeds.

Richard Hunt
born Chicago, IL 1935
Study for Richmond Cycle
1977
soldered, bolted, and burnished copper with wood edging
19 x 60 3/4 x 24 3/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Transfer from the General Services Adminstration, Art-in-Architecture Program
Study for Richmond Cycle began life as a model for a huge plaza sculpture outside the Social Security Administration building in Richmond, California. Richmond Cycle is composed of two distinct parts that are separated spatially but united visually by virtue of shared material and surface finish. The large biomorphic mass that seems to emerge from the ground and then arc back calls to mind a living form, an enormous tree that has fallen to the earth or a primordial animal taking its last breath. Together the elements evoke the cycle of life in which age and the weight of experience are paired with the lightness and promise of youth.

Malvin Gray Johnson
Greensboro, NC 1896-New York City 1934
Brothers
1934
oil on canvas
38 x 30 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Harmon Foundation
Johnson painted Brothers in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Charlottesville, Virginia. The boys' overalls and bare feet, and the angled picket fence that blocks recessive space, locate them in a small-town setting. During his career, Johnson moved easily between explorations of modernist composition and what was then known as "racial art"—art that paid homage to contemporary African American life and its ancestral roots. The children's faces show no emotion; the only hint of their relationship comes through the placement of the younger boy, who leans against the protective shoulder of his stronger, older brother.

Sargent Johnson
Boston, MA 1887-San Francisco, CA 1967
Mask
about 1930-1935
copper on wood base
15 1/2 x 13 1/2 x 6 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of International Business Machines Corporation
Johnson learned to work copper sheet metal in the 1920s as an assistant in the studio of sculptor Beniamino Bufano, one of his instructors at the California School of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The stylized oval of the face, generous lips, and wide nose reflect Johnson's aim to show the "pure American Negro." He said he wanted to depict the "natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip, that characteristic hair, bearing and manner." With Mask, Johnson situated the image of the black face within a dialogue about race taking place among the poets and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes.

Jacob Lawrence
Atlantic City, NJ 1917-Seattle, WA 2000
Bar and Grill
1941
gouache on paper
16 3/4 x 22 3/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design
Lawrence experienced firsthand the daily reality of Jim Crow segregation in New Orleans, where legislation required that he ride in the back of city buses and live in a racially segregated neighborhood. His anger is apparent in Bar and Grill, which shows the interior of a café with a wall that divides the space into two distinct realms—one occupied by whites, the other by blacks. Lawrence says little about the individuals beyond their skin color and the way they are treated (customers on the left are cooled by a ceiling fan), but the skewed vantage point from behind the bar emphasizes the artificiality of the two separate worlds.

Jacob Lawrence
Atlantic City, NJ 1917-Seattle, WA 2000
Community (study for mural, Jamaica, NY)
1986
gouache on paper
sheet: 30 x 22 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Transfer from the General Services Adminstration, Art-in-Architecture Program
©1986 Jacob Lawrence
Community celebrates the multivalent character of American life. In the 1980s, Lawrence was one of eight artists commissioned to create works on the theme of community for the Joseph P. Addabbo Federal Building in Jamaica, New York. It was an apt subject for Lawrence, who frequently acknowledged the value and encouragement of the black community. Walking the streets of Jamaica, Lawrence said, "I was aware of the warmth, rapport, and the exciting movement and counter movements of its many inhabitants. The geometric and organic structures of the doors and various kinds of apparel and facial expressions give an overall special quality to a stimulating and unique environment."

Hughie Lee-Smith
Eustis, FL 1915-Albuquerque, NM 1999
Confrontation
about 1970
oil on canvas
sheet: 33 x 36 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design
With its half-demolished wall, odd configuration of poles, hula-hoop–like ring, and distant vista of calm water and low mountains, Confrontation presents an incongruous and unsettling image. But something is familiar about the scene; a quality of déjà vu provokes memories of difficult personal encounters. We assume a connection between the two young women yet it is impossible to know the reason for their estrangement. Throughout his life, Lee-Smith explored the themes of the human condition and the wedges—social, individual, and racial—that thwart human interaction. But in Confrontation, Lee-Smith introduced a sense of possibility. The crumbling wall that separates the women from the landscape is not an insurmountable barrier; the serene world beyond is accessible by skirting boundaries.

Norman Lewis
New York City 1909-New York City 1979
Evening Rendezvous
1962
oil on linen
50 1/4 x 64 1/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
Lewis often asserted that art could not solve society's problems, but Evening Rendezvous is a deeply political painting. The abstract dabs of white emerging from a gray twilight are hooded Klansmen, gathered around a bonfire suggested by the hot reds at the center of the image. Angular white shapes in the foreground describe men closest to the headlights of their cars, while those at the top are obscured by blue smoke. The combination of red, white, and blue mocks the patriotism that the Klan claimed as its defense.

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005
Untitled (Woman on Bench) from the project The Negro in Virginia
1930s
gelatin silver print
sheet: 8 1/8 x 10 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill
In 1938, twenty-year-old Robert McNeill was hired to take photographs for The Negro in Virginia, one of more than a dozen black-oriented history projects launched by the Federal Writer's Project in the late 1930s. With a three-and-a-half week deadline and a small amount of film, McNeil had to choose his shots carefully. It was a challenging assignment through which he sought to dispel myths about slavery and focus attention on the contemporary lives of black Virginians.

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005
Jet Age
1930s
gelatin silver print
sheet and image: 7 1/8 x 8 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-died Washington, DC 2005
Spring Planting from the project The Negro in Virginia
1938
gelatin silver print
sheet and image: 9 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005
New Car (South Richmond, Virginia) from the project The Negro in Virginia
1938
gelatin silver print
sheet 10 x 8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005
Make A Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York)
1938
gelatin silver print
sheet: 8 x 10 in.
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill
In 1937, after enrolling at the New York Institute of Photography, McNeill did a series on black domestic workers for Fortune magazine. The sophisticated composition and nuanced handling of light and space in Make a Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York) did not, however, mask the irony in the image of women waiting on a street corner hoping to pick up a day's work in front of a poster advertising a movie for those with leisure time. When Fortune rejected the pictures, Flash!, a magazine aimed at middle-class black readers, published them as a thirteen-photograph feature.

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005
Laborer (Stevedore Longshoreman, Norfolk, VA), from the project the Negro in Virginia
1938
gelatin silver print
sheet: 10 x 8 1/8 in.
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill
Cropped to focus on a single dockworker, Laborer (Stevedore Longshoreman, Norfolk, Virginia) shows not the labor but the waiting, which sometimes lingered for days because the men were not permitted on the pier until called to work. It is an image of both dignity and resignation. "The look says 'what the hell are you doing photographing me,'" remarked McNeill, "and I think it says a lot more."

Claude Clark
Rockingham, GA 1915-Oakland, CA 2007
Resting
1944
oil on canvas
30 x 25 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Harmon Foundation
The title, Resting, coupled with the man's bare feet and everyday clothes, suggest that he is taking a momentary break from farm work. Although his eyes are hidden by a red hat, his face is attentive as he regards the unseen viewer. The palette of ochres, blues, reds, and greens and the loosely brushed shapes of his body and the landscape behind him are liberally laid down with a palette knife. Although Clark was born in Georgia, where his father worked as a tenant farmer, his family was part of the great migration of African Americans who moved from rural southern towns to the urban North in the 1920s.

Eldzier Cortor
born Richmond, VA 1916
Southern Gate
1942-43
oil on canvas
46 1/4 x 22 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection
Painted in the early years of World War II, Southern Gateoffers a surreal, dreamlike picture of a solemn young woman standing in a space defined by a once-elegant wrought-iron fence, a river, and the steeple of a distant church. They are evocative elements—the river is a traditional metaphor for passage, the fence an emblem of both confinement and of safe haven from the outside world. Wearing a necklace adorned with a cross and with a bird perched on her shoulder, she invites associations with the Virgin Mary; but Cortor's figure is as physical as she is innocent, an Edenic Eve who stands outside the sacred garden.

Allan Rohan Crite
Plainfield, NJ 1910-Boston, MA 2007
School's Out
1936
oil on canvas
30 1/4 x 36 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Transfer from the Museum of Modern Art
Crite thought of himself as an artist-reporter whose assignment was to capture the daily lives of ordinary people. His skill as an acute observer of American life is apparent in School's Out, which shows dozens of children leaving the annex of Everett elementary school in Boston's South End at a time when boys and girls were taught separately. Although Crite acknowledged that School's Outmay reflect a romanticized view it also presents a universal statement about community, stability, and the bonds of family life.

Emilio Cruz
New York City 1938-New York City 2004
Angola's Dreams Grasp Finger Tips
1973
acrylic on canvas
84 1/8 x 84 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection
Angola's Dreams was inspired by Cruz's sympathy for two Angolan men he met in Rome who had spent their lives trying to secure support for the country's struggle for freedom from Portugal. In Cruz's words, "these two bedraggled spirits were perhaps the most intense individuals I have ever met. Neither one could speak English so we communicated with Spanish mixed with Italian, perhaps at times assimilating Portuguese.… Our souls touched and I understood the life that blooms when people have dedicated their lives to what they believe to be a just cause."

Beauford Delaney
Knoxville, TN 1901-Paris, France 1979
Can Fire in the Park
1946
oil on canvas
24 x 30 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase
Can Fire in the Park is as much a swirling vignette of thickly applied paint as it is an image of a place. Delaney developed a vocabulary of signs—streetlights, fire hydrants, manhole covers, and zigzagging fire escapes—that became emblematic riffs on city life. In Can Fire the bright yellow orbs of streetlamps and the glow of the moon against a cloud-filled night sky embrace the men with waves of color and light. Delaney struggled financially for most of his life, so this empathetic scene may also represent a night he once spent on a park bench and the amity he shared with other homeless men.

Joseph Delaney
Knoxville, TN 1904-Knoxville, TN 1991
Penn Station at War Time
1943
oil on canvas
34 x 48 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Joseph Delaney
For almost sixty years Delaney painted life in New York City with the discriminating eye of a caricaturist: "The real community is out there in the street where everyone is equal." Penn Station at War Time is an amusing image of travelers struggling to make their way through a dense mass of people as they rush to catch their trains. Only a few stand out in the tangle of torsos and limbs. Despite its apparent spontaneity, Penn Station at War Time is a sophisticated painting. Delaney bisected the canvas horizontally to contrast the volumetric expanse of the architecture with the linear energy of the crowd below.

Thornton Dial, Sr.
born Emelle, AL 1928
died McCalla, AL 2016
Top of the Line (Steel)
1992
mixed media: enamel, unbraided canvas roping, and metal on plywood
65 x 81 x 7 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift from the collection of Ron and June Shelp
Dial created Top of the Line (Steel) in response to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, after a jury acquitted four white policemen in the beating of an unarmed black motorist. The verdict ignited looting and rioting that lasted several days. Top of the Line re-creates the frenzy of the streets. Rope-outlined figures swirl in a dense field of color and line, grasping at pieces of automobiles and air-conditioners. Bold touches of red suggest violence; black-and-white figures symbolize racial tensions; red, white, and blue strokes, faint notes of patriotism, interweave the canvas in clusters.

Melvin Edwards
born Houston, TX 1937
Tambo
1993
welded steel
28 1/8 x 25 1/4 x 22 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment and the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program.
©1993 Melvin Edwards
Edwards created Tambo in 1993 to commemorate Oliver Tambo, the president of the African National Congress, who, with Nelson Mandela, transformed the ANC in the mid-1940s into an activist organization that called on South Africa's black population to engage in nonviolent forms of civil disobedience against apartheid laws. Tambois a sculpture of allusion and history, an assemblage of steel implements that speak to their original industrial origins, and to metaphorical possibilities. The I-beam fragments and wrenches allude to Tambo's efforts to repair society; the shovel and spear symbolically honor the son of peasant farmers who devoted his life to securing equality for South Africa's black residents.

Fredrick Eversley
born New York City, 1941
Untitled
1974
cast polyester resin
19 5/8 diam. x 6 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase
Eversley speaks of energy, space, time, and matter—concepts familiar to physicists and mathematicians and to an electrical engineer who gave up a career in the space program to make sculpture. The disc form of this untitled work is the result of the centrifugal process. Its highly polished surface concentrates ambient light in a bright central orb that shines like a distant star in the emptiness of space and draws the viewer into a cosmic place. But the parabolic shape also acts like a lens that captures light and the reflections of objects around it into a miniature black universe that dramatically alters relationships in the surrounding space.

Roland L. Freeman
born Baltimore, MD 1936
Resting on the Goalpost, Washington DC., June 1969 from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements
1969, printed 1982
gelatin silver print
sheet: 11 x 14 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of George H. Dalsheimer
©1969 Roland L. Freeman
Freeman has been on the streets since he was an eight-year-old who skipped school to ride the Baltimore trolleys. He worked with the arabbers, vendors who peddled ice, coal, and fresh produce from horse-drawn wagons, sold newspapers door-to-door, and joined a street gang. Concerned that back-alley life would lead to trouble, his mother sent him to live on a tobacco farm in southern Maryland. These experiences, and the people he met, shaped the work of a man who in 2007 was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship and the Bess Lomax Hawes Award for a lifetime of artistic excellence and contributions to the nation's traditional arts heritage.

Sam Gilliam
born Tupelo, MS 1933
The Petition
1990
mixed media
96 x 60 x 32 in.
Smithsonian American Art Musem
Gift of the James F. Dicke Family
©1990 Sam Gilliam
Gilliam laid down the thick paint color over color and then raked the surface to reveal the multiple hues beneath. Edges are crisp and three-dimensional. Arches intersect and reach out, articulating positive form and empty space before spiraling back to draw the viewer into the work's industrial physicality. The Petition reflects a world created by man. Its materials—sheet metal, aluminum honeycomb, and industrial-weight paint—allowed no accidents in its construction.

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
Gina (Mexico) from the series Africa's Legacy in Mexico
1986, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 14 x 11 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1994 Tony Gleaton
Gleaton's photographs, and his mission to discover the range and nature of African diasporic life in the Americas, are inevitably entangled with issues of racial and cultural identity. But his portraits—Gina (Mexico) is one, Peluqueríaand Padre y Hijo are others—are often frontal and as formal as the images of models and socialites he photographed in the 1970s for British Vogue. Abstracting his subjects from the reality of day-to-day life, he invests each child, mother, fisherman, or boy swimming in the Caribbean with a sense of dignity and individuality that transcends time and place.

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
Familia Del Mar/Family of the Sea (Livingston Guatemala), from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America
1988, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
12 x 15 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1994 Tony Gleaton
In Familia del Mar, the gazes—of the father concentrating on straightening his nets, the mother who watches him work, and the baby facing the photographer—illuminate the emotional relationships within the life of the family. Rather than passively recording interactions he happens to encounter, Gleaton positions his subjects and structures his images to reveal psychological connections, and he adjusts the tonalities of pictures shot in natural light when he prints them in the darkroom. "What you see in a photograph," he says, "is rarely what really is. We give it meaning."

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, MI 1948
Peluquería/Barber Shop (Oaxaca, Mexico) from the series Africa's Legacy in Mexico
1990, printed 1994
gelatin silver print
sheet: 12 x 12 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1994 Tony Gleaton
Traveling the dusty back roads of the Americas by bicycle, bus, or in a converted 1972 Army ambulance, Gleaton sought out communities that bear traces of Africa's legacy in the New World. In Mexico he made his home in isolated villages in Oaxaca and on the Costa Chica south of Acapulco and sought out a village called Nacimiento de los Negros (Birth of the Blacks); in Bolivia he lived with descendants of the African slave trade.

William H. Johnson
Florence, SC 1901-Central Islip, NY 1970
Sowing
about 1940
oil on burlap
38 1/2 x 45 3/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Harmon Foundation
Sowing presents a simple narrative of farm life suggestive of Johnson's upbringing in South Carolina, but the brilliant palette disguises elements of tension. The plow the man grips is stained with red streaks. The woman's hand is tightly clenched as she holds the seed above the soil before releasing it. A ghost moon in the sky hints at things both visible and unseen.

William H. Johnson
Florence, SC 1901-Central Islip, NY 1970
Early Morning Work
about 1940
oil on burlap
38 1/2 x 45 5/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Harmon Foundation
Early Morning Work presents a clear narrative: the day's chores must be done. But the scene is more than a reminiscence of farm life. It affirms the idea that Southern blacks maintained connections with the cultural heritage of Africa. Though seemingly primitive, the flattened forms and deliberately naïve perspective Johnson used were informed by years of artistic discipline. The man's profile is a beautifully rendered drawing of an African mask. Hands and mule hoofs are disproportionately large, while the horizontal stripes offer a visual cadence punctuated by the circular forms of a wheel and chickens pecking at the ground.

Loïs Mailou Jones
Boston, MA 1905-Washington, DC 1998
Self Portrait
1940
casein on board
18 1/4 x 15 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of the artist
Jones went to Africa for the first time in 1970, at age sixty-five, but the forms, rhythmic cadences, and vibrant color she associated with the ceremonies of Africa had infused her art since her student years. These influences are apparent in Self-Portrait, in which Jones links her identity with traditional African sculpture.

Loïs Mailou Jones
Boston, MA 1905-Washington, DC 1998
Moon Masque
1971
oil and collage on canvas
41 x 30 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of the artist
At the center of Moon Masque is a papier-mâché replica of a heart-shaped white Kwele mask from Zaire surrounded by masklike profiles and designs drawn from Ethiopian textiles. Though stylized, the faces resemble actual individuals whose profiles are juxtaposed with tears falling from the eyes of the mask. It is tempting to speculate that the mask, representing heritage and tradition, weeps for the situation of contemporary African peoples.

Loïs Mailou Jones
Boston, MA 1905-Washington, DC 1998
Initiation, Liberia
1983
acrylic on canvas
35 1/4 x 23 1/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of the artist
Jones was especially sensitive to the rights and roles of women. For many years she felt forced to ship rather than deliver her work in person so museums would not reject them because they had been done by a black female artist. In Initiation, Liberia, she interpreted the Sande society initiation ritual. The swath of white paint across the young woman's eyes indicates her role as an initiate. The mask partly obscures her distinctive personality but combined with the receding profiles at the left of her head, suggests continuity over generations that is implied by the ritual ceremony.

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005
Railroad Crossing Guard (Richmond, Virginia) from the project The Negro in Virginia
1938
gelatin silver print
sheet: 10 x 8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill
McNeill was hired to take photographs for the publication The Negro in Virginia, one of more than a dozen undertakings on the subject of black life and history launched by the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s. Using text by African American authors, interviews with former slaves, statistical surveys, and photographs, the project sought to dispel myths about slavery and focus attention on the contemporary lives of black Virginians. McNeill understood that editors aimed for a noncontroversial book. "What they wanted were pictures of people at work, pictures that would show the soul of people in their jobs…even for people in menial occupations.… I tried to be as positive as I could."

Robert McNeill
Washington, DC 1917-Washington, DC 2005)
Western Union Messenger (Norfolk, Virginia) from the project The Negro in Virginia
1938
gelatin silver print on paper
sheet: 10 x 8 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum Purchase
©1938 Robert McNeill

Keith Morrison
born Linstead, Jamaica 1942
Zombie Jamboree
1988
oil on canvas
62 x 69 3/16 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Catherine Walden Myer Fund and the Director's Discretionary Fund
For Zombie Jamboree, Morrison drew on a personal lexicon of myths and images. Both sacred and secular, it derives simultaneously from the memory of the death of a childhood friend and the artist's encounter with Christianity and vodun, the religion traditional to his native Jamaica. The large central figures are fantastical animals—a spotted hyena-like creature with bared teeth that sparks an impression of evil and greed confronts a protective horse while a hissing snake, the Christian symbol of sin, hovers above. Dotted around this improbable cast of characters are Christian crosses, dancing skeletons, and two black figures, one wearing a mask, the other with arms raised, suggesting African rituals.

Gordon Parks
Fort Scott, KS 1912-New York City 2006
Harlem
about 1948
gelatin silver print
sheet and image: 12 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
©1948 Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks
Fort Scott, KS 1912-New York City 2006
Harlem--Gang Warfare
1948, printed 1950s
gelatin silver print
sheet and image: 19 1/8 x 15 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
©1948 Gordon Parks Foundation
In 1948, Parks approached Life magazine with a proposal to do a freelance story on Harlem's gangs. Editors, fascinated, offered Parks two hundred dollars to do the piece. "Harlem Gang Leader Red Jackson's Life Is One of Fear, Frustration and Violence" was a dramatic and poignant story told through unforgettable images and extended captions. Light barely touches the shadowy figures in Harlem—Gang Warfare, one of the photographs included in the essay. Shot from below, the picture captures the aggression but also the vulnerability of the young gang members.

Gordon Parks
Fort Scott, KS 1912-New York City 2006
Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
gelatin silver print
sheet and image: 13 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
©1950 Gordon Parks Foundation
After the death of his mother, sixteen-year-old Parks's close-knit family split up and he went to live with a sister in St. Paul, Minnesota. The arrangement lasted only a month. Evicted by his brother-in-law, he took to the streets. Working as a waiter in a dining car for the Northern Pacific Railroad, Parks discovered the power of documentary photography—images of "men, women, and children caught in their confusion and poverty" taken by Roy Stryker's team of Farm Security Administration photographers—in magazines riders left behind, and he began taking pictures.

Gordon Parks
Fort Scott, KS 1912-New York City 2006
Ali Jumping Rope
1966
gelatin silver print
sheet and image: 13 3/8 x 9 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
©1966 Gordon Parks Foundation
Parks completed some three hundred assignments for Lifemagazine over a twenty-year period. He shot fashion spreads in Paris and portraits of such luminaries as Alexander Calder, Aaron Copland, and Malcolm X. In 1966, in Ali Jumping Rope, Parks caught the heavyweight champion with his back to the camera and both feet off the ground. The photograph, printed in soft tones, confirms that its maker neither interrupted Ali's training regimen nor intruded on his personal space. In fact we see Ali's face only in the mirror.

James A. Porter
Baltimore, MD 1905-Washington, DC 1970
Soldado Senegales
1935
oil on canvas
18 1/4 x 14 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase made possible by Anacostia Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Porter painted Soldado Senegales, a portrait of expatriate Senegalese dancer Feral Benga, in 1935 while in France on sabbatical leave from Howard University. Rather than picture the West African in one of his flamboyant dance moves, Porter posed him in the khaki uniform and fez of a French colonial soldier. It is a distinctly modernist painting and a subtle comment on European colonial occupation in Africa during the early years of the twentieth century. The striated red background and thin black lines that outline Benga's shoulders emphasize the shallowness of the pictorial space. The touches of green that highlight the sitter's forehead recall the canvases of Henri Matisse.

James A. Porter
Baltimore, MD 1905-Washington, DC 1970
Still Life with Peonies
1949
oil on canvas
40 x 30 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment and the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program
The softly brushed lines and gently calibrated color of Still Life with Peonies reflects Porter's thinking about the confluence of the personal and the contextual in the practice of art. The exuberant vase of flowers negotiates with (and against) the vertical rungs and curved handrail. The simple screen and striped wallpaper serve as counterpoints to the energy of the peonies' petals. Presented as the primary focus of the composition, Porter has depicted the flowers carried by his wife, Dorothy, when she was honored at Howard University in 1947, while the painting-within-a-painting represents a canvas Porter completed during a research trip to Cuba and Haiti.

Charles Searles
Philadelphia, PA 1937-New York City 2004
Celebration
1975
acrylic on canvas
27 1/2 x 81 3/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Transfer from the General Services Adminstration, Art-in-Architecture
In 1974, Searles was invited to paint a mural for the William J. Green Jr. Federal Building in his hometown of Philadelphia. Celebration, a study for that mural, fuses the energy of an American street festival with memories of Searles's 1972 trip to Nigeria. The canvas is filled with syncopated color, the echoing forms of circular drumheads, and the waving arms of dancers. Searles suggests the duality of the human psyche by dividing the figures vertically into light and dark sections. At the bottom center, he included a child with a masklike face and spiky hair in homage to his young daughter, who died in 1971.

Renee Stout
born Junction City, KS 1958
The Colonel's Cabinet
1991-1994
mixed media: carpet, chair, painting, and cabinet with found and handmade objects
67 1/2 x 60 x 50 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson
©1994 Renee Stout
The Colonel's Cabinet is a narrative of exploration and memory that traces the life of one Colonel Frank. Like the gentleman travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created "cabinets of curiosities" filled with artifacts of distant people and places, the fictitious Colonel Frank collected small treasures to remind himself of where he had been and individuals he had met. An invented persona based on Stout's father, who, she said, brought the world to her shy and introspective mother, the colonel also reflects Stout's own search for a personal history.

Alma Thomas
Columbus, GA 1891-Washington, DC 1978
Light Blue Nursery
1968
acrylic on canvas
49 x 47 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the artist
The chromatic impact of Light Blue Nursery is dramatic. Small blocks of irregularly configured primary colors dance across a bright white surface in horizontal rows that echo the ordered energy of a formal garden. Secondary and tertiary hues—pinks, purples, and greens—serve as borders and accents, reflecting Thomas's conviction that she could play with perception and optical interaction in images drawn from her visual experience of the natural world. Although seemingly constructed of spontaneous strokes of the brush, the forms, like the colors, are thoughtfully calibrated.

Alma Thomas
Columbus, GA 1891-Washington, DC 1978
Celestial Fantasy
1973
acrylic on canvas
60 x 54 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Bequest of the artist

Bob Thompson
Louisville, KY 1937-Rome, Italy 1966
Enchanted Rider
1961
oil on canvas
62 3/4 x 46 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection
In some of Thompson's canvases, the artist revisited mythical and allegorical subjects; in others, Christ images, Madonnas, and Christian saints served as vehicles for exploring the battle between good and evil. Enchanted Rider depicts a figure astride a winged steed whose hoofs trample a devil-like monster. The subject may be Pegasus, the flying horse from Greek mythology who defeated the fearsome Chimera, but the faint cross at the center suggests a religious theme. According to legend, St. George held a cross to protect himself when he attacked a dragon that was terrorizing a village. When he slew the dragon and rescued a princess, the town's citizens adopted Christianity in gratitude.

James VanDerZee
Lenox, MA 1886-Washington, DC 1983
Evening Attire
1922
gelatin silver print
sheet: 10 x 8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program
VanDerZee is best known for the studio portraits he made in Harlem after World War I. His sensitivity and the pride he felt from living and working within the community are clear in elegant and graceful images that challenged prevailing stereotypes. The sitter in Evening Attire is dressed in a beaded evening gown, an elegant, full hat, and a fox tail wrap; she holds a spray of flowers. Her stance, coupled with the backdrop, the brocade table cover, and a decorative figurine, evokes formal Victorian home interiors seen in Edwardian portraiture and nineteenth-century cartes de visite, the small photographs people used as calling cards in the late nineteenth century.

James VanDerZee
Lenox, MA 1886-Washington, DC 1983
Studio Portrait of Young Man with Telephone
1929
gelatin silver print
sight: 9 x 7 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program

Ellis Wilson
Mayfield, KY 1899-New York City 1977
Field Workers
about 1948-51
oil on fiberboard
29 3/4 x 34 7/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Harmon Foundation
A lush jungle of flowering tobacco plants provides the backdrop for a family of field hands who walk in frieze like procession along a rough dirt path. The hoes and head coverings convey the nature of their toil in the heat of a late summer sun, yet their upright postures and steady gait suggest liveliness. Faces are hidden in shadow and bodies are defined by unmodulated shapes of the brightly colored clothing. Field Workers speaks eloquently to the condition of a particular family's life—and by extension to the lives of all who toil on the land.

Kenneth Victor Young
born Louisville, KY 1933
Untitled
1973
acrylic on canvas
37 5/8 x 37 5/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Mr. Val E. Lewton
The black orbs in Kenneth Young's untitled abstraction are deceptive. They seem alternately microscopic, like organisms floating in a fluid field, or cosmic, like bits of matter captured in a split second. Opaque at the center, the spheres are fluid at their edges. The space, too, is ambiguous. Deep reds seem distant; electric blues propel dark forms forward from unfathomable depths. Energy and matter were apt subjects for Young, a physicist who turned to painting: "I've always been interested in . . . outer space, inner space, and the development of what occurs—force, magnetism, and that kind of thing."

Malvin Gray Johnson
Greensboro, NC 1896-New York City 1934
Self-Portrait
1934
oil on canvas
38 1/4 x 30 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Harmon Foundation
The compressed space in Self-Portrait speaks to Johnson's profound awareness of modernist compositional devices. The easel at the left side of the canvas identifies him as an artist, and the masks in the background make an assertive statement about his African American heritage. In 1934, the year he painted his self-portrait, Johnson joined the ranks of the Public Works of Art Project, the first of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal art programs, which paid artists a monthly stipend. Although the job lasted only six months, Johnson was finally able to paint full time. Ironically, the year proved to be Johnson's most prolific but also the last of his short life.

John Scott
New Orleans, LA 1940-Houston, TX 2007
Thornbush Blues Totem
1990
painted steel
97 3/4 x 63 1/2 x 37 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase
Scott learned well the lessons of his blues and jazz sources. The brightly colored surfaces of Thornbush Blues Totem not only define the relationship among the cut and bent metal parts; the sequencing of color also echoes the way musicians modulate tempo and pace. Blue and orange establish structure; the varying distances between stripes and bands are intervals that quicken or slow the pulsing cadence. For him, interval, rhythm, and space are interdependent elements in a swirling dance of color and form.
Artists
Sculptor and painter. Barthé's forte was realistic sculptures of religious subjects, figures in African-American history, and stage and dance celebrities.
Born in North Carolina; studied in the U.S. and in Paris; lived mostly in New York City.
Thornton Dial was born into a sharecropping family in rural Alabama, on the eve of the Great Depression. He experienced the trauma and tumult of both Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights movement. Profoundly influenced by Dr.
Melvin Edwards was raised in Houston, Texas. His artistic talent was recognized at an early age, and he was encouraged to study the works of European old masters at the Museum of Fine Arts.
"It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip and that characteristic hair, bearing and manner; and I wish to show that beauty not so much to the white man as to the Negro h
Now in her eighth decade as an artist, Lois Mailou Jones has treated an extraordinary range of subjects—from French, Haitian, and New England landscapes to the sources and issues of African-American culture.
Painter. A social realist, Lawrence documented the African American experience in several series devoted to Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, life in Harlem, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Robert McNeill's interest in photography was sparked during a demonstration in a high school physics class. At the age of eighteen his first photograph, that of Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens, was published in five Washington-area newspapers.
The multi-talented Porter was an artist, scholar, educator, and mentor.
During the 1960s Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her.