“What became of the Black People of Sumer?” the traveller asked the old man, “for ancient records show that the people of Sumer were Black. What happened to them?” “Ah,” the old man sighed. “They lost their history, so they died.”
—A Sumer Legend, in CHANCELLOR WILLIAMS,
The Destruction of Black Civilization
A history of the visual artists of the Chicago Renaissance remains to be written.
—MELANIE ANNO HERZOG, Elizabeth Catlett
The catalytic forces of the Great Depression made visible Chicago’s African American arts renaissance, but decades of African American achievements in the arts prepared the ground for this emergence. Largely overlooked by art historians and other art mavens, Chicago’s history of African American art has been preserved and articulated by a small core of ardent adherents who experienced this visual arts renaissance.
The most widely accepted theory among renaissance adherents places Chicago’s visual arts renaissance from the beginning of the New Deal in 1932 to 1950, when postwar Chicagoans experienced newfound prosperity but also Cold War politics. For example, although it was not the intent of her research project, art historian Elizabeth Anne Herzog’s research supported the flourishing of the black arts in Chicago. While gathering information on Elizabeth Catlett’s brief 1940 and 1941 stays in Chicago, Herzog became acquainted with and impressed by the little-known achievements of some Works Progress Administration (WPA) era artists. Influenced by her findings, Herzog wrote, “This was the period, of the Chicago Renaissance in the literary and visual arts, characterized by writers, playwrights, and visual artists who came together on Chicago’s South Side to produce incisive, socially critical forms of cultural expression for a predominantly African American audience.”1
According to this framework, the efflorescence was ignited by: (1) the inflow of black southerners into Chicago; (2) the creation of the WPA’s Federal Art Project (FAP) administered by the Illinois Art Project (IAP); (3) the founding of the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC); and (4) the artistic production and promotion of Chicago black arts scene by leading artists, such as Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, William Carter, Eldzier Cortor, Gordon Parks, Charles Sebree, and Charles White.
By contrast, other scholars have turned the chronology of this Chicago movement backward. In her essay about the Chicago African American artist Archibald J. Motley Jr. and the Art Institute, art historian Elaine D. Woodall noted that the artistic and literary momentum in Chicago “began during the early 1920s that sparked the city’s ‘Negro Renaissance.’”2 Stretching the chronology and geography even further, music historian Samuel Floyd Jr. placed Chicago’s artists as part of a global movement across a half century. Chicago’s African American artists became part “of a worldwide movement that had its beginnings in the 1890s and continued into the middle of the twentieth century,” according to Floyd, and “the Negro Renaissance embraced Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Paris, London, and other large cities around the world.”3 And writing specifically on the visual arts, in 2005, painter and curator Jonathan Liss marked the importance of the migration of blacks to Chicago as a catalyst for new forms of art. “Chicago played an important role in the history of African American visual art during the first half of the 20th century,” he concluded. “As thousands of black families moved to the city after World War I, black artists found new opportunities to develop tight-knit communities.”4
While the precision of these and other renaissance theories has not been tested through more thorough research, the explanations advanced to bolster the 1932–50 renaissance theory prove insufficient. Since the WPA began in 1935 and the SSCAC did not open its doors until late 1940, these institutions sustained more than sparked the visual-arts renaissance. In addition, the renaissance’s vanguard artists had not attained the artistic maturity to represent an efflorescence that began in 1932. With an average 15.6 years of age, Margaret Burroughs, John Carlis Jr., Eldzier Cortor, Charles Sebree, and Charles White were high school students in 1932. While talented, these artists would have been the first to admit that they were not artistically mature so early. While a few others had finished high school, many had just arrived in Chicago to begin professional training. William Carter, a recent St. Louis high school graduate, arrived in Chicago in 1931 to attend classes at the School of the Art Institute. And artists like Gordon Parks did not relocate from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago until 1940.
The late 1930s emergence of Chicago’s younger generation of black artists became abundantly clear in the Hull House’s 1939 Negro in Art exhibition. This exhibit of seventy-two paintings, drawings, and sculptures included works by Cortor, Sebree, White, Henry Avery, William Carter, Charles Davis, Raymond “Ramon” Gabriel, Bernard Goss, Fred Hollingsworth, and Earl Walker. Persuaded by the quality of the seventy-two works included in this exhibition and subsequent interviews with a few of its most promising artists, Willard Motley wrote an article of praise. But Motley emphasized the potential of these artists rather than their current prominence: “This present generation hasn’t found itself yet and realizes it. Some of the artists are still students. But one day they undoubtedly will have something powerful to say.” Moreover, Motley noted, these young artists and students were “following the trail blazed years ago by William Scott, Archibald Motley, Charles Dawson, and William Farrow.”5
In addition to the artists named above, at least a half-dozen others made up the early 1920s group of African American artists. A whole decade before the Depression, Henry Brown, Pauline Callis, Elmer Simms Campbell, Leroy Holmes, Leslie Rogers, and Vincent Saunders Jr. had spearheaded a period of unprecedented artistic momentum and vitality that contributed to Chicago being known by some as “one of the centers of Negro art” or “the center of Negro art.” Scholars have begun to recognize the significance of this earlier group who migrated to Chicago as a place to express their art. “While Harlem has been heralded as the center,” historian Davarian Baldwin notes, “when most migrants connected freedom with the urban North, ‘the mecca was Chicago.’”6
As Baldwin and others have discovered, the achievements of Chicago’s African American artists were not limited to painters. Filmmakers, for example, also contributed to the 1920s perception of Chicago representing the early-twentieth-century “mecca” of black expressive culture.7 In 1910, William “Bill” Foster (1884–n.d.) launched America’s black independent film movement when he founded Foster Photoplay Company in Chicago and produced The Railroad Porter two years later. This movement flourished during the next decade; between 1912 and 1920, black independent film companies sprang up in Chicago including the Ebony Motion Picture Corporation, Peter P. Jones Photoplay Company, Royal Gardens Motion Picture Company, Micheaux Book and Film Company, and Unique Film Company. In addition to newsreels, these companies produced more than fifty films by 1920.8
Visual artists during this earlier period served as role models, teachers, and mentors for this younger generation. Artists such as Dawson, Farrow, Motley, and Scott remained active through the post–World War II era.9 This interaction with younger artists, coupled with their lengthy careers, made both their presence and works relevant to the later era. Rather than discrete and unrelated periods, the Negro renaissance and Chicago Renaissance felt adjoined and transgenerational.10 By re-adjoining these periods, this chapter employs a wider lens to examine the productivity and innovations of black artists in Chicago.
The tragic Great Fire of 1871 led Chicago’s leaders to remake the city with a greater attention to urban culture. A small group of prominent white Chicago leaders envisioned a new city as a world-class center of banking, commerce, and transportation, but they also promoted Chicago as a center for the arts. Included among the cultural and educational institutions established between 1871 and 1899 were the Auditorium Theatre, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Hall, Chicago Public Library, University of Chicago, Newberry Library, and Field Columbian Museum (the Field Museum of Natural History).
During this late-nineteenth-century period of rebuilding, a legion of Chicago organizations emerged to adapt vacant and underoccupied downtown office and factory buildings into artist and musician studios. These projects included Weber Music Hall, the conversion of loft studios in the Athenaeum Building (1885), and the conversion of the Studebaker brothers’ former carriage factory and showroom into artist and musician studios.11 By 1904, a feature article in the New York Evening Post deemed the Fine Arts Building’s tenth-floor architect and artist studios as the “Chicago Parnassus.”12 Yet, perhaps the most significant new space for art came with the opening of Hull House on the Near West Side for immigrants and other working-class Chicagoans. Through its Butler Gallery, art school, and industrial arts department, the Hull House offered the most comprehensive art programs in the State of Illinois.13
Yet, these same institutions (with the exception of the Art Institute) practiced racial exclusion. For example, in her 1913 report, “The Colored People of Chicago,” Hull House board of directors member and wealthy philanthropist Louise deKoven Bowen revealed that “though Hull House was not exactly segregated many of its residents felt that the presence of blacks might discourage other groups from coming. The settlement seemed unwilling to come to grips with the ‘black problem’ in its own environs, yet Hull House was willing to be concerned with the same ‘problem’ elsewhere in the city.”14
The first art collector in Chicago dated to Chicago’s first non–Native American settler: Jean Baptiste Point DuSable. In 1779, when the African American DuSable settled in Eschikagou (later renamed “Chicago”), DuSable became a wealthy landowner and trader, and his estate included a collection of twenty-three European paintings.15 Yet, not until the late nineteenth century did institutions emerge among black Chicagoans to sustain support for the arts.
Blacks in Chicago suffered from the 1871 fire, but a fire three years later actually had a greater deleterious impact. This fire consumed 47 acres of land, 812 buildings valued at roughly $2,820,000, and roughly 85 percent of black-owned property.16 Unlike the 1871 post-fire recovery, prominent white Chicagoans did not respond with philanthropic projects for these fringe areas of the city, but, nonetheless, black Chicago experienced a remarkable self-help recovery. By 1885, 200 black businesses existed in Chicago and would increase to 731 by the 1920s.17
In 1927, the Washington Intercollegiate Club of Chicago noted the paucity of black artists’ work in public but did list significant private collections of some of black Chicago’s most wealthy residents. “There is little record of the history of Negro artists in Chicago and vicinity,” the report concludes, “except a few signed examples of their work still in the possession of some of the older settlers.”18 A leading abolitionist and one of America’s wealthiest black men, John Jones, reportedly had a small but impressive collection of art, which included his portrait painted around 1865 by white portraitist Aaron E. Darling.19 More surprising, Jack Johnson, the outspoken and brash boxing champion from 1908 to 1915, was also a discerning art collector. Johnson’s palatial Cabaret de Champion, located on Chicago’s Near South Side, featured Rembrandt and van Rijn paintings installed in the cabaret’s foyer and a wall-size mural of Cleopatra depicted as a black woman in Johnson’s cabaret.20 The founder of Binga State Bank in 1908, Jesse Binga, commissioned a half-length portrait of himself by the South Carolina African American painter Edwin Harleston as well as interior murals painted by Chicago artist William Edouard Scott. During the early 1920s, Binga also established the Jesse Binga Popularity Prize to provide funding for the Chicago Art League, the earliest black self-help artist organization.
The homes of Chicago’s black elites became the principal location of early social life. As such, the homes of personages of their “element” necessitated at least a small library and collection of art. Harleston, who settled in Chicago for a brief period to study at the School of the Art Institute, remembered, “I played cards at one of the ‘palaces’ in which these [wealthy black] folks live. For miles the houses look like something in Vanity Fair or Vogue.” Jesse and Eudora Johnson Binga’s home, he continued, “is very nicely furnished, showing nice taste with a number of paintings, mostly landscapes.”21 (The Bingas’ collection also included Harleston’s painting The Bible Student, ca. 1924.) Writing on the homes of the black elite, the scholar Willard Gatewood similarly noted, “In the Chicago home of S. Laing and Fannie Barrier Williams ‘the choices of pictures and an ample library’ gave an air of refinement and culture.”22 And the achievement of “refinement” also included wealthy blacks who managed gambling establishments and policy wheels. The wives of these policy kings decorated their homes with art and would later become vital contributors to the 1930s black Chicago arts scene.23
Chicago’s black arts movement traversed the walls of private homes after the turn of the century with the advent of galleries within Chicago’s South Side institutions. Provident Hospital and Nursing School, Wabash YMCA, and the Arts and Letters Society provided space and early support of the visual arts. Established in 1891, Provident exhibited works by African American artists, including Lottie Wilson Moss’s works in Provident’s Esther Freer dormitory.24
Chicago’s formative years of African American art also coincided with the artistic antecedence of the city’s visual-arts renaissance. During an era when segregation became increasingly apparent in Chicago, this citywide arts movement included black participants. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago was one of America’s few art schools that admitted black students. The Art Institute became a powerful magnet that attracted African American students from the Midwest, south, and to a lesser extent the east. In addition to well-trained resident and itinerant artists, minimally trained and self-taught artists also made significant contributions to Chicago’s art scene during this early period. The next section of this chapter describes some of the achievements of this generation of African American artists in Chicago belonging to both categories.
Self-taught, James Bolivar Needham (1850–1931) was Chicago’s earliest-known painter of African descent. Born in Chatham, Canada, Needham worked on lumber vessels as a teenager on Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. In 1867, Needham settled in Chicago and shortly thereafter began his career as a painter. Reclusive, prolific, and self-critical, he reportedly discarded three of five paintings completed for not being of a high quality. In spite of his self-effacing manner, Needham produced so many paintings that they covered his apartment’s walls, filled up numerous boxes, and piled up three and four deep in the corners of his loft.25
Influenced by his work on schooners, Needham observed the interplay of light and the change of seasons upon the Midwest’s waterway. He executed some of his finest paintings on the activities along the Chicago River and its environs, such as Sailboat at Dusk (1895–1915) (see figure 10.1). In this work, he convincingly captured light and shadows on the river, boat, buildings, and shore. By juxtaposing broad brush strokes loaded with color, he created a heavily textured canvas surface that conveyed a sense of movement, space, and atmosphere. This painting typified Needham’s stylistic approach to painting.
In addition to his paintings of Chicago’s waterways and harbors, Needham was also an accomplished painter of urban scenes and landscapes. Footpath over Creek (1899) and River Bend-Summer (1904) are excellent examples of Needham’s facility as a landscapist.26 Sixty-seven years after his death, these and other works were included in the James Bolivar Needham posthumous exhibition opened at the Robert Henry Adams Fine Art gallery, the first ever exhibition of his paintings.
During the late nineteenth century, when she relocated to Chicago from Niles, Michigan, to study at the Art Institute, Lottie E. Wilson (née Moss, n.d.) became the school’s earliest-known African American student.27 An able painter, many of her works have become lost except a reproduction of Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth (n.d.) (see figure 10.2). This painting memorialized Lincoln and Truth’s October 29, 1864, meeting at the White House, an important event in African American history that connected the abolitionist efforts of escaped slaves like Truth to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation issued by Lincoln. Years later, William McKinley exhibited this portrait at the U.S. Executive Mansion in Washington. And in 1902, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt accepted the portrait for the White House’s permanent art collection, making Wilson the earliest-known African American painter to have a work exhibited and included in the White House’s collection.28
With the exception of her Lincoln and Truth painting and an exhibition of her work at Chicago’s Provident Hospital Esther Freer dormitory, the available information on Wilson’s life and career remains obscure. After leaving Chicago, Wilson returned to Michigan for a brief period. From there, she relocated to Europe for further study in art and apparently branched out into sculpture.
In 1969, cultural anthropologist Cedric Dover concluded that expatiate Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first and William A. Harper (1873–1910) the last of “the significant Negro painters of the nineteenth century and its cultural intrusion into the twentieth.”29 Born on a farm near Cayuga, Canada, the Harper family relocated to Petersburg, Illinois, in 1885, and finally settled on a farm in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1893. Shortly after earning his degree from Jacksonville’s Brown Business College, Harper attended the Art Institute from 1895 to 1901. After briefly teaching in Texas, he studied in Paris from 1903 to 1905 and again in 1907 to 1908.
Upon his return from France, Harper’s paintings The Hillside (ca. 1903), The Last Gleam (ca. 1903), The Gray Dawn (ca. 1903), and Landscape with Poplars (Afternoon at Montigny) (ca. 1905) were included in the Municipal Art League’s 1905 Museum of the Art Institute exhibition (see figure 10.3). The curators selected Landscape with Poplars as the most outstanding landscape in the exhibition.30 By emphasizing through the subtle tonal richness of warm and earth hues, Harper transformed this countryside location into a picturesque scene of atmospheric tranquility.
During his second period of study in Paris, Harper sought out the tutelage of Tanner. When Harper returned to Chicago and later settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico (to ease the effects of his tuberculosis), the impressionistic influence of Turner emerged in Harper’s painting in works like Patio (1908). By contrast with his earlier Barbizon-influenced works, this painting contains warm harmonious tones, a dense texture, and looser brush stokes that make the courtyard a colorful and bold scene.
Shortly after his death in Mexico, the Museum of the Art Institute installed the William A. Harper posthumous exhibition from July 26 to August 28, 1910. Alain Locke, Harvard University–educated philosopher and America’s first African American Rhodes Scholar, observed in 1940 that Harper’s “premature death was the major loss to Negro art in that generation, for critics judged him of great promise, and many thought him more creatively original than Tanner.”31 A generation later, James Porter, the painter and father of African American art history in the 1960s, wrote, “Harper’s work, although strong and worthy of note in any chronicle of American art, has been neglected.”32
Works left behind by several other painters in Chicago of African ancestry suggest a much-wider level of productivity despite their lack of historical records. Among these artists deserving of attention were Frederick Douglass Allen (1886–n.d.) and Augustus Dunbier (1888–n.d.). Allen migrated from Toledo, Ohio, to study at the Art Institute and was included in the 1916 exhibition there. Dunbier was born in Osceola, Nebraska, and later studied at the School of the Art Institute and the Royal Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany. A surviving portrait by Dunbier, Negro Woman (ca. 1934) indicates his adept style, but like that of Allen, few more biographical details have been discovered about him and other early Chicago black artists.33
Before the creation of an official black arts center in Chicago, residents of the South Side knew that the “Wabash Y” frequently served as the hub for its artists. Founded in 1913, the Wabash YMCA held regular art exhibitions and provided space for artists to meet, which included the 1923 formation there of the Chicago Art League (see figure 10.4). Led by Charles Dawson and William Farrow through the Wabash YMCA’s education department, the league formed because “art is fundamental to good citizenship.” Its members promoted citizenship by highlighting works created by black artists, recruiting young persons to study art as an avocation, encouraging more black Chicagoans to attend exhibitions and lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago, and applying art to social problems by aesthetically enhancing the city’s black communities.34 As a labor of love for the Wabash Y, William Scott painted its interior murals; the Y’s collection of art works included William Harper’s landscape An Autumn Day in France (n.d.) and other works displayed in the Art League’s annual “must attend” exhibition there.35
The Art League’s accomplishments by the 1920s made black art a fixture among a new generation of Chicagoans. Members assisted public schools in establishing collections of original art, executed murals to enhance the interior environment of buildings, secured positions for artists, offered public art lectures and demonstrations on various art techniques, and provided exhibition opportunities for artists.36 As an example of this art advocacy, league member Inez Brewer, head the art department at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana, organized exhibitions and maintained a permanent collection of black Chicagoans’ paintings as a “Negro Salon.” By 1935, works executed by Charles Dawson, Arthur Diggs, William Farrow, and William Scott were among the paintings included in the Negro Salon’s permanent art collection.37
While some early black artists left Chicago due to racial exclusion from the mainstream’s venues of art commerce and its slow growth as an art marketplace, by the 1920s many more artists had arrived here to study and establish themselves as professionals. One of the unanticipated outcomes of population growth (spawned by the labor shortages of World War I) was an enlarged pool of resident and itinerant artists. This group included Scott, who was Chicago’s earliest African American painter who attained international acclaim through his success in international juried exhibitions as early as 1914. Meanwhile, Chicago’s School of the Art Institute continued to be an important magnet that attracted talented black art students. Outside the Art Institute’s classrooms, the expansion of Chicago’s black self-help art organizations and programs provided a base of support for African American artists. But perhaps most important, a group of able and committed artists formed the early agglutinate (including Farrow, Motley, and Scott) who anchored Chicago’s visual arts community of the next decades.
The “Negro in Art Week,” November 18–25, 1927, sponsored by a host of black civic and fraternal organizations, showed the self-help and uplift efforts of African Americans. As part of a larger program to educate the masses, the Women’s Club indicated the “Negro in Art Week” would lead to “decreasing friction existing between white and colored people by placing before the public an exhibition of the best work produced by Negroes in Fine and Applied Arts, Music and Literature, in combination with an exhibition of primitive African sculpture.”38 Concurrent with this festival, the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition committee juried and accepted works for the national juried “Negro in Art Exhibition.” Out-of-town artists in this exhibition complemented and legitimized the Chicago artists. In his review of this exhibition, Frederic Robb wrote, “Outside of [Henry O.] Tanner the best of the artists are in the West, principally in Chicago and not in the East, as is erroneously believed by those who are not properly informed.”39
These artists seemed distinct because their work appeared to be largely unaffected by Europe’s modern art movement. According to art historian Susan Weininger, the stylistic approaches and thematic direction of Chicago’s artists found inspiration in the Midwest School of Painting of 1910–40. These artists, Weininger noted, “regarded the post-Renaissance European tradition as superficial and crassly materialistic; and they viewed the culture of Native Americans or of their own ethnic, racial or even regional groups as suitable catalysts for artistic creation.”40 Artists, according to Weininger, tolerated and even respected ethnic, racial, and gender distinctions and “were able to retain and celebrate their identities without separating themselves from the mainstream.41 Outside of these personal relationships among artists, African American artists had to contend with racism and increased discrimination in Chicago’s cultural marketplace. “As artists,” art historian Daniel Schulman wrote, “their works and aspirations were judged through a filter of conflicting expectations and agendas.” Thus, “black artists found training, opportunity, and an audience in Chicago” in spite of adversaries who sought to marginalize their expression and limit their opportunities.42
The most common misinformed interpretation of African American artists stemmed from long-standing theories on “black primitivism” and the unfitness of black people to appreciate or produce art. French statesman Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was the earliest theorist to write on these subjects. In 1853, de Gobineau held “blacks were imbued with a vegetative sensibility” that was “an inferior quality” and whites with the “Apollonian rationality,” which was “a superior quality.” The “absence of intellectual aptitudes,” he continued, “renders [blacks] completely unfit for the culture of the arts, even for the appreciation of what this noble application of the human intelligence can produce of significance.”43 Rather than reason and beauty, de Gobineau held, the creative expressions of black people were infused with “outbursts of fire, flames, sparks, vivacity, and spontaneity intrinsic to its soul.”44
From a different perspective yet similar in his conclusion, New York Marxist and Modern Quarterly (later, Modern Monthly) editor V. F. Calverton (aka George Goetz) observed in 1921 that blacks were better positioned than whites to create a unique American art. Blacks, according to Calverton, were not duty bound to the heritage of an ancient civilization. Free from the artistic encumbrances of a foreign land, Calverton concluded, though “simple,” “unsophisticated,” and “untutored,” Negroes’ “art is, as all art that springs from the people, an artless art, and in that sense is the most genuine art in the world.”45 Two decades later, the idea of black primitivism persisted. In his July 10, 1943, Daily News review, “Groping for a Real Negro Art,” the dean of Chicago art critics, Clarence Bulliet, expressed disappointment that black artists did not explore their “jungle” roots. Bulliet’s review of the Museum of the Art Institute’s Negro Artists of Chicago exhibition smacked of ignorance of the African diaspora: “Nothing is evident, as yet, in the creations of American Negro artists, that show any kinship with the impulses that developed and were perfected in the jungles along the Congo.”46
The earliest “new world” art movement that challenged this “accustomed” imagery took place in Haiti. Having begun shortly after Haiti’s independence in 1804, the striking feature of Haitian post-revolution art, according to scholar Veerle Poupeye, “was . . . for the first time in Caribbean art, black and coloured people were routinely represented with the dignity and decorum until then reserved for the white colonial elite, instead of as subordinates, curiosities or victims.”47 This movement prefigured Chicago’s paintings by Scott and Dawson during the early renaissance. These artists sought to gain proprietorship or the representation of the black image in art and popular visual culture. Especially during the renaissance’s second wave, black Chicago artists began to devote much of the oeuvre to depicting black people with dignity and decorum. Rather than simply a response to white-supremacist imagery of blackness, this movement centered on the reclamation, reconstruction, and reaffirmation of the rich history and culture of Africans and people of African descent.
Known as Chicago’s “dean of African American art,” William Edouard Scott (1884–1964) was the most prolific and celebrated African American painter of this period.48 Rather than being viewed as the bellwether painter of the city’s African Americanized art movement that situated blackness with dignity and decorum into American art, many critics opined that Scott had squandered his unique talent. For example, in the information provided by Beloit College’s Theodore Lyman Wright Art Center on its 1970 posthumous retrospective exhibition, William Edouard Scott: An Artist of the Negro Renaissance, it was noted, “With his skills, he could have been absorbed into the mainstream and might have built a personal reputation; he chose, however, to commit himself to the establishment of pride, dignity and self-realization for all Negroes.”49
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Scott had already attained some success as a painter there before moving to Chicago to attend the Art Institute from 1904 to 1907. After graduating, he continued to study at the Art Institute until 1909. Paris was the most preferred city to study art and to attain recognition as an artist, and Scott, like his cohorts, sought out an overseas education, eventually studying at the Academie Julian in 1909–11 and Academie Colarossi in 1912–13. Before completing the first year of study abroad, Scott nearly exhausted his funds, but Tanner came to the rescue and invited Scott to stay at his summer home at Trepied-par-Etaples. There he not only benefited from critiques of his works by Tanner but Scott also had an opportunity to observe this master painter at work. The influence of Tanner on Scott’s painting technique and palette is evident in Etaples, France (1911) (see figure 10.5). This painting showed his further development from his pre-Parisian paintings.
In 1912, Scott’s painting La Pauvre Voisine (The poor neighbor) was accepted by the Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais. For an artist to have a work accepted by a Paris salon was considered a major career boost. This achievement marked Scott as the second painter of African descent to have a work accepted by a Paris salon (in 1894, Tanner was the first).50 In addition to being reproduced on postcards, the painting received favorable comment in local newspapers. When La Pauvre Voisine was purchased by the Argentine Republic, Scott became the earliest known African American painter to have a work included in Argentina’s national art collection.
In 1913, paintings by Tanner and Scott were accepted by the Salon de la Societe Artistique de Picardie Le Touquet at Paris-Plage. This was the first occasion that two black artists had works accepted by a Paris salon. When awarded the salon’s Tanqueray Prize of 125 francs for his painting, La Misere (Poverty), Scott became Chicago’s earliest known African American painter so honored. In 1913, his painting Le Connoisseur was accepted by Paris’s salon at La Loque, and Silver Sun at Boulogne was included in London’s Royal Academy of Art’s juried exhibition. After returning to Chicago, Scott’s success with Paris salons continued: he had paintings accepted for the Autumn Salon de Paris and Salon la Tourquet in 1931 and Salon des Beaux-Arts, Toquet in 1935.51
Prior to being awarded the William Elmer Harmon Foundation’s special gold medal in 1928 for “high character” and “excellence” as an artist, Scott was well underway to becoming one of America’s most prolific muralists. Three of his earliest Chicago murals were Canterbury Pilgrims (1908) at Highland Park School, Landing of the Northmen (1909) at Felsenthal School, and Commerce (also known as Dock Scene) (1909) for Lane Technical High School. Installed at John Daniel Shoop Elementary School, DuSable Trading with Indians at Fort Dearborn (ca. 1920) provided a pictorial narrative that challenged the widely held belief of John Kinzie, a white man, having been Eschikagou’s (later known as Chicago) earliest non–Native American settler (see figure 10.6). (Kinzie settled in Eschikagou in 1804, five years after Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable.)52
In his mural, Scott employs spatial distancing to contrast the relationship between Native Americans and white settlers with that of DuSable and Native Americans. In the extreme right and left sections of the mural is a lack of direct interaction between Native and white Americans. This suggests a comity of coexistence without trust and interaction. However, in the mural’s center foreground, DuSable dressed in buckskin engages in conversation with the chief. Two Native Americans inspect items available for trade, while a mother and child are nearby. This center clustering of personages suggest a relationship of mutual respect and friendship.
Between the mid-1930s and 1950s, Scott painted thirty murals for the Chicago Park District and forty different churches.53 Of his religious murals, The Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, painted in Chicago’s historic Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1943, became some of his most famous.54 Yet, by World War II, Scott also increasingly gained national attention as a muralist. In 1942–43, a national competition was held to identify seven American artists to paint murals for the U.S. government’s Recorder of Deeds’ new building. Of the painters selected from over four hundred applicants, Scott was the only African American artist. Each artist was commissioned to paint a mural portraying an important event in African American history. In his mural Frederick Douglass Appeals to President Lincoln (1943), Scott portrayed Douglass meeting with President Lincoln and two cabinet members. In this meeting, Douglass petitioned Lincoln to permit more African Americans to fight in the Civil War, to enforce equal pay for black soldiers already in the Union forces, and to address the poor treatment of black soldiers. Federal employees selected Scott’s mural as their favorite, which resulted in his being commissioned to paint a scene of the new building’s opening ceremony.
As a genre painter, Scott was the earliest African American painter to devote a substantial portion of his oeuvre to depicting ordinary rural southern black people. He depicted these people with unrelenting dignity. For example, paintings such as It’s Going to Come (1916) and Traveling (Lead Kindly Light) (1918) typify his thematic interest in this subject matter and stylistic figurative (see figure 10.7).
His painting Traveling (Lead Kindly Light) may have been influenced by the experience of Scott’s grandparents; in 1847, they traveled with all their possessions in an oxen-drawn wagon from North Carolina to Indiana. The ambiance of this painting is somber. However, through subtle compositional devices, Scott evokes a sense of hope: the male and female figures form an earth-tone pyramidal conformation, which denotes strength and determination, while the wagon’s lantern that illuminates the path in the painting signifies divine guidance.
In 1931, Scott was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to study and paint in Haiti, where he would complete 144 paintings in a single year. Prior to his departure, he had a one-man exhibition. Of the works exhibited, Haiti’s President Stenio J. Vincent purchased twelve. For his contributions to Haitian art, in 1936 President Vincent conferred upon Scott the Honneur et Merite, which was the equivalent of the French Legion of Honor. He was the first American artist to be so honored by a Haitian president.55
10.1. James Bolivar Needham, Sailboat at Dusk (ca. 1895–1915), oil on board. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
10.2. Lottie E. Wilson (née Moss), Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth (n.d.), oil on canvas. Courtesy of Library of Congress Rights and Reproductions.
10.3. William A. Harper, Landscape with Poplars (Afternoon at Montigny) (ca. 1905), oil on canvas, 23" × 28". Courtesy of Howard University Gallery of Art.
10.4. The Art League of Chicago (ca. 1927), from the Charles Dawson Collection, courtesy of DuSable Museum of African American History. Pictured: Williams E. Scott (top row, center), Arthur Diggs (top row, far right), Ellis Wilson (second row, far right), Richmond Barthé (second row, second from left), and William McKnight Farrow (first row, second from right).
10.5. William E. Scott, Etaples, France (1911), oil on canvas, 32" × 26". Courtesy of the Collection of the Swope Art Museum.
10.6. Williams E. Scott, DuSable Trading with Indians at Fort Dearborn (1920), oil on canvas affixed to wall, 6' × 10'. Courtesy of Art for the People and the Chicago Conservation Center.
10.7. William E. Scott, Traveling (Lead Kindly Light) (1918), oil on canvas, 18⅛" × 22". Courtesy of Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington West Virginia, gift of Mrs. Virginia Van Zandt.
10.8. William E. Scott, Pope Pius XII and Two Bishops (ca. 1953), oil on canvas, 40" × 33". Courtesy of Lester and Nancy McKeever.
10.9. Charles C. Dawson, The Crisis (The Last Marble) (1933), watercolor on paper, 29¼" × 27¾". Courtesy of the DuSable Museum of African American History.
10.10. Charles C. Dawson, The Bill Posters (n.d.), watercolor on paper, 35" × 27". Courtesy of the DuSable Museum of African American History.
10.11. Walter Ellison, Leaving Macon Georgia (1937), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Collection of Hampton University Museum.
10.12. Archibald J. Motley Jr., Octoroon Girl (1925), oil on canvas, 36" × 30". Copyright Valerie Gerrard Browne, courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
10.13. Archibald J. Motley Jr., Jockey Club (1929), oil on canvas, 26" × 32". Copyright Valerie Gerrard Browne, courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
10.14. Archibald J. Motley Jr., Lawd, Mah Man’s Leavin’ (1940), oil on canvas, 30⅛" × 40⅛". Courtesy of St. Louis Art Museum, Gift of the Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration, 361:1943.
10.15. Archibald J. Motley Jr., The First One Hundred Years: He amongst You Who Is without Sin Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do (ca.1963–72), oil on canvas, 48½" × 40¾". Copyright Valerie Gerrard Browne, courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
10.16. William McKnight Farrow, Peace (1924), block print, 8.89 cm × 11.43 cm. Courtesy of William Farrow III/Clark Atlanta University Art Collection.
10.17. Richmond Barthé, Rugcutters (1930). Courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
10.18. Richmond Barthé, Blackberry Woman (modeled 1930, cast 1932), bronze, 35½" × 12¼" × 16¼". Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, New York.
10.19. Charles White, Five Great American Negroes (1939–40), oil on canvas, 5' × 12'. Courtesy of the Charles White Archives.
10.20. Charles White, There Were No Crops This Year (1940), graphite on paper, 22¾" × 19¾". Courtesy of the Charles White Archives.
10.21. Charles White, Wanted Poster Series #6 (1969), oil wash on illustration board, 58¾" × 26¾". Courtesy of the Charles White Archives.
10.22. Eldzier Cortor, Southern Gate (1942–43), oil on canvas, 46½" × 22". Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, New York.
10.23. Charles Sebree, Head of a Woman (1938). Courtesy of the Walter O. Evans Collection at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
10.24. Charles Sebree, Saltimbanque in Moonlight (ca. 1970). Courtesy of Eleanor W. Traylor.
10.25. Raymond “Ramon” Gabriel, Seated Boy (ca. 1940), watercolor on paper, 23¾" × 18¾". Courtesy of Patrick L. Albano, Aaron Galleries.
10.26. William Carter, The Card Game (1950), pen and ink and brush and black ink and pen and blue and purple inks on white gouache, with traces of charcoal on wood-pulp laminate board, 296 mm × 372 mm. Prints and Drawings Collection, 1995.25, the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the Mr. and Mrs. T. Stanton Armour Fund.
10.27. Charles V. Davis, Newsboy (1934), oil on canvas, 36" × 30". Courtesy of the Howard University Gallery of Art.
10.28. Sylvester Britton, Bondage (n.d.), oil on canvas, 33" × 26". Courtesy of the Daniel Texidor Parker Collection.
10.29. Sylvester Britton, Red Hat (1954), colored inks on paper, 36" × 24". Courtesy of the Daniel Texidor Parker Collection.
10.30. Irene Clark, Rolling Calf (n.d.), oil on canvas. Courtesy of African American Art and Artists by Samella S. Lewis. Copyright 1994 in the format Textbook via Copyright Clearance Center.
10.31. Margaret T. G. Burroughs, Face of Africa (ca. 1965), linocut, 11
" × 10". Courtesy of the St. Louis Art Museum, Museum of Minority Artists Purchase Fund.
10.32. Marion Perkins, Man of Sorrows (1950), marble, 17½" × 10" × 10". American Art Collection, 1951.129, the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the Pauline Palmer Prize Fund.
10.33. Marion Perkins, Dying Soldier (1952), marble, dimensions and present location unknown. C21064, the Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.
One of Chicago’s busiest portrait painters, in 1934 Scott executed fifteen commissioned portraits. Included among these works were portraits of Haiti’s President Vincent and Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Nineteen years later, Scott completed one of his most important portraits, Pope Pius XII and Two Bishops (ca. 1953), which memorialized the Pope’s consecration of the Catholic Church’s first two black bishops (see figure 10.8).
In 1955, Scott visited Mexico to study and paint. There he was diagnosed as having diabetes that would cost him his legs in the years that followed. Rather than being dispirited, he continued to paint until his death in 1964.
Having similar artistic convictions as Scott, Charles Clarence Dawson (1889–1981) stated, “Because my home town was comparatively liberal, I didn’t feel different until I saw my people and myself almost totally stereotyped in illustrations. There was nothing about our contributions to Eastern and Western civilization.”56 Born in Brunswick, Georgia, Dawson studied at Tuskegee Institute (currently, Tuskegee University), 1905–12; New York City’s Art Student League, 1907–12; and Chicago’s Art Institute, 1912–17. Influenced by the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who portrayed peasant laborers with unyielding dignity, Dawson stated, “I wanted to paint as Millet did of the French peasants . . . the Negro in everyday life. They weren’t running around as stereotypes, begging . . . or in patches.”57 This vision is evident in his large watercolor The Crisis (1933), which depicts black and white boys playing marbles (see figure 10.9).
Exhibited in the window of Chicago’s downtown Findley Galleries, the painting sparked considerable disfavor. Recalling this rebuke, Dawson held,
The painting depicts a group of Negro and white boys playing marbles—in fact, they’re down to the last one. That’s why I called it “The Crisis.” But the Negro boys aren’t real black, and they don’t look tough or have patches on their clothes. And they aren’t playing craps, but marbles. White people didn’t like that. They wanted to hold onto the stereotype as to what constitutes a Negro. I’ve decided in all my years to undo that stereotype, to try—like Ignacio Zuloaga, the great Spanish painter who showed the beauty of his people—to show the beauty and the wide variety of my people.58
Similar to Millet’s depiction of French peasants, Zuloaga’s paintings of ordinary Spanish people, and Scott’s of black people, Dawson’s The Bill Posters depicted two blue-collar workers placing a holiday advertisement on an outdoor billboard. He depicted these workers with a dignity that was not customary in art and popular culture in America (see figure 10.10).
Dawson was a self-taught maven of African and African American history. During the early 1930s, he wrote and illustrated A.B.C.’s of Great Negroes, a children’s book. The book consisted of twenty-six linoleum block prints of black leaders. The book, in alphabetical order by last name of each leader, comprised brief biographical sketches with portraits. The manuscript and illustrations were reviewed by three major white Chicago publishing houses. Rejected by two, the other offered to publish the book if Dawson removed illustrations depicting Akhenaton and Khufu as “Negroes,” as well as all references to them as “Negroes” because, the publisher insisted, the pharaohs were Caucasian.59 Rather than comply, Dawson founded the Dawson Publishing Company and published the book in 1933. Well received, the Tennessee Board of Education selected the publication as one of the best children’s books on the Negro.60
As a commercial artist, Dawson was Chicago’s earliest illustrator to introduce African motifs into his commissioned design projects. In the early 1920s, he introduced Egyptian motifs in design solutions for Madagasco, Noir-OI Hair and Skin Care Products, and O’Neall Chemical Company. Similarly, he incorporated Akan Adinkira symbols in his design solution for Chicago’s Overton Hygienic Company’s Aida Pomade. In 1940, Annie T. P. Malone, the founder and owner of PORO beauty school and products, retained Dawson as her marketing consultant and designer.61 His earliest PORO promotional projects were “Black Beauties in History” and “The Evolution of the Negro Hairdress: from Isis to Present.” In his Black Beauty illustrations, rather than Caucasianizing the facial features and hair, Dawson portrayed black women with facial features, skin coloration, and hair unique to Africans and African Americans. For the “Evolution of the Negro Hairdress,” he depicted contemporary coiffures having been influenced by traditional African hair styles.
For the 1940 American Negro Exposition, with the aid of his assistants, Dawson constructed ten dioramas. This was his most ambitious project. The dioramas provided a visual snapshot of seven thousand years of African and African diasporic history, beginning with “the first great builders” of Ethiopia and Egypt and concluding with the world’s four independent black nations. The dioramas included depictions of the discovery of iron and smelting in Central and West Africa, the slavery and reconstruction era, the history of black businesses in America, the first man to reach the North Pole in August 1909, and the heroism of black soldiers during World War I.62 “Long before the phrase ‘Black is beautiful’ was born,” journalist Barbara Parry observed in 1970, “artist Charles Clarence Dawson was proving this with his paintings. Admittedly obsessed with the black struggle for identity, he spent most of a lifetime mirroring the Negro in everyday life through paintings, sculptures and illustrations.”63
Recurring themes in the oeuvre of Walter Ellison (1889–1977) were the South’s race preference practices, the migration of blacks from the south to the north, and the urbanization of Chicago’s black newcomers. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Ellison settled in Chicago during the 1920s and studied briefly at the Art Institute in the 1930s. An able figurative painter, he adopted a naive stylistic, which gave the impression that he was a self-taught vernacular painter.
His paintings Train Station (1937) and Leaving Macon Georgia (1937) typify Ellison’s stylistic approach to painting and thematic concerns (see figure 10.11). During the early twentieth century, the south’s economy had been devastated by the boil weevil and floods. These plagues, combined with the south’s racial intolerance and job openings in northern urban industrial centers, provided black southerners with powerful incentives to relocate. In some instances, African Americans desirous of relocating did not have the financial resources to purchase a bus or train ticket. Dangerous but free, “riding the cars” (boxcars) provided a mode of transportation to the north.
Affixed to the white post in the painting’s background are directional signs to New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago. The two men ride atop an Illinois Central Railroad boxcar headed for Chicago. The man to the painting’s left has a letter in his back pocket. This letter recalls the practice of “testing.” Under this practice, a relative or friend having previously relocated to Chicago or another northern city provided an assessment of job availability, racial climate, living accommodations, and educational opportunities in the form of a letter. This letter assisted the recipients in determining whether or not to migrate, and between 1910 and 1920, favorable letters resulted in migrants coming to Chicago in droves.64
On May 27, 1933, Chicago’s Second World Fair, A Century of Progress (1933–34), opened. By contrast with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, this fair was not imitative of European culture; it celebrated America’s technological supremacy and commemorated the one-hundred-year anniversary of Chicago having been incorporated as a village. The fair included a national invitational art exhibition and a national juried photography exhibition. Chicago photographer King Daniel Ganaway was the only African American included in the photography exhibition. Installed at the Museum of the Art Institute, the art exhibition included only three black artists: Henry Tanner, Richmond Barthé, and Archibald J. Motley Jr.
One of Chicago’s most celebrated black painters, Archibald J. Motley Jr. (1891–1981), was born in New Orleans, but his family migrated to the north. Due to threats from white businessmen, his parents closed their general merchandise store and relocated, first to St. Louis and then to Buffalo, New York. By 1894, the Motleys settled in a predominately white neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side, but the family reconnected with their southern family by visiting New Orleans during the summers. Through these relatives, Motley became better acquainted with their African and Creole heritage. Later, these dual heritages influenced Motley’s thematic concerns.
Between 1914 and 1918, Motley studied painting and illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago. Thereafter, Motley tried to establish himself as a portrait painter. Although he was unsuccessful in attracting sufficient portrait commissions when starting out, Motley remained determined to earn a living as an artist. In 1921 when his Portrait of My Mother (1919) was included in the Art Institute’s annual juried exhibition, Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Motley’s career as a painter began to gain traction. For example, in 1925, he was awarded the Art Institute’s Frank G. Logan prize for his painting A Mulattress (1924) and the Joseph N. Eisendrath prize for Syncopation (1924); of the works included in the Newark Museum’s 1927 exhibition, Paintings and Water Colors by Living American Artists, Motley’s portrait Mending Socks (1924) was selected by the public as “the Best Liked Painting”; and in 1928, Motley was awarded the Harmon Foundation’s Gold Medal for his portrait Octoroon Girl (1925) (see figure 10.12).
Motley took great care in this portrait to convey the elite persona of the sitter. Seated on a sofa against a rich earth-toned background, the sitter is the quintessence of composure and the black genteel tradition. A green hat covers much of her conservative yet stylish hair. She has a demure but self-confident gaze. Her high forehead, skin tone, thin lips, and tapered nose with small nostrils invite comparisons with the “pure Caucasian.” Painted in muted tones, the Octoroon Girl’s necklace and engagement ring are tastefully executed and hardly noticeable. Motley employed this device to suggest a lady of the highest order. Her fashionably conservative velvet dress trimmed with a muted-red collar, cuffs, and cloth-covered sleeve buttons reflects this upper-class dignity. Her gloves held gently between long, tapered fingers are exquisitely rendered. The painting on the wall in the upper left corner, as well as the books and small statue on the cloth-covered table in the lower-right corner, convey the impression of a setting that caters to the elite, such as an exclusive private-membership club.
In 1929, at the request of Mary Beattie Brady, the director of the Harmon Foundation, Motley wrote “How I Solve My Painting Problems.” About his portrait Aline, an Octoroon (ca. 1927), Motley noted, “In some cases, it is difficult to determine precisely whether or not a person is pure Caucasian or octoroon. I have seen octoroons with skin as white as people from northern Europe such as the Baltic countries; with straight blond hair, blue eyes, sharp well-proportioned features, and extremely thin lips.” The octoroon’s “head,” he continued, “is normal and well-constructed and symmetrically balanced. The construction of the body—the elongation of the arms, a tendency toward a weak bone construction and large fat heels”—are “nonexistent” among octoroons; “[i]n fact,” Motley held, “a very light octoroon could be compared favorably with a Swedish or Norwegian person. In this painting I have tried to show that delicate one-eighth strain of Negro blood. Therefore, I would say that this painting was not only an artistic venture but also a scientific problem.”65
In 1928, when his one-man exhibit, Exhibition of Paintings by Archibald J. Motley Jr., opened at New York City’s New Gallery, Motley became the second black artist to have a solo exhibition in a private, white-owned New York City gallery (the first was Henry O. Tanner in 1908). The exhibition was reviewed favorably by art critics. For example, after devoting special attention to the African and voodoo-inspired paintings, art critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote in his New York Times review that Motley’s works added substance to the New Negro construct.66
In 1929, Motley was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to study and paint in Paris. Martinique Youth (ca. 1929–30) and Senegalese (ca. 1929–30) were among the noteworthy portraits that he executed in Paris. He also completed some of his better-known genre paintings, such as Blues (1929). Rather than the panoramic view in some of his earlier works like Black and Tan (1921), Syncopation (1924), and Stomp (1927), the close-up view of a jazz dance band and couples dancing in Blues provided a far more intimate relationship between the viewer and subject matter. This painting served as a template for some of Motley’s most successful post-Parisian paintings, such as The Picnic (1916) and, especially, Hot Rhythm (1961).
Executed in Paris, Jockey Club (1929) represents Motley’s masterpiece (see figure 10.13). This painting exemplifies his modernistic approach to painting; successful experimentation with the harmonization of natural and artificial lighting into a unique warm and cool palette; and the mastery of compositional design, ambiance, and narrative. The stylization of form and gestural articulation are masterfully executed and evoke dynamism and energy.
Through the doorman, Motley introduced the social narrative of black otherness. The doorman leans casually against the Jockey Club’s door frame with his legs crossed, and his tightly fitted red jacket with brass buttons and fitted neck collar draws attention to his face. The doorman’s dark skin hue and processed black hair accentuated his wide grin with exposed white teeth encircled by swollen ruby-red lips.
Similarly, in Lawd, Mah Man’s Leavin’ (1940), Motley depicted the little girl as a disheartened pickaninny with dark skin, nappy hair, and exaggerated thick, red lips (see figure 10.14). The mother takes the form of the fictive stereotypic mammy: very dark complexion, bandanna on her head, swollen red lips, and a rotund body with huge balloon-like breasts. This treatment of the “dark purer Negroes” became a mainstay in Motley’s genre paintings, which is at least traceable to his painting Tongues (Holy Rollers) (1929).
Writing on the iconography of such imagery, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton observed, “Kinky hair, thick lips, and dark skin become the esthetic antithesis of straight hair, small lips, white skin, and these physical traits are thought to be correlated with all of the unsavory characteristics” of blackness.67 Seamlessly interwoven into art and popular visual culture, these iconographic markers become visual value in the definitional process. It is through this process that value becomes ascribed to what is being defined. By defining straight hair, small lips, white skin, and other physical traits of Europeans and people of European descent as “preferential,” implicitly those persons not having these valued traits are automatically defined as “the other.”
With the exception of his Mexico-inspired paintings of 1952–53 and 1957–58, The First One Hundred Years: He amongst You Who Is without Sin Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them Father For They Know Not What They Do (ca. 1963–72) represents the most radical departure from Motley’s subject matter concerns (see figure 10.15).
In this densely layered montage, Motley offered a critique on race relations in America, from slavery through the 1960s civil rights movement. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln become ghost-like portraits. Kennedy’s portrait is in the upper left, King’s is in the center, and Lincoln’s is at the upper-right section of the mansion’s facade. Through Kennedy, King, and Lincoln, Motley explored the theme of assassination as the ultimate silencer of influential leaders who attempted to dismantle racial privilege and white supremacy across a century in America.
Arthur Diggs (1888–1967) was an able landscape and figure painter who also explored modernist stylistic approaches. While he did not attain national distinction, Diggs anchored Chicago’s black visual arts community. Having studied briefly at the Art Institute, by the late 1920s he began to attract attention as a promising landscapist. His mountainous scene painting Oaks and Alders (n.d.) suggests that Diggs was following in the tradition of nineteenth-century mountain panoramic painters. During the late 1930s, Diggs adopted an expressionistic style and explored subject matter bordering on black stereotypic imagery. This is discernible in de Lawd and Moses (n.d.), de Lawd and Noah (n.d.), and The Green Pastures (n.d.). This short-lived digression may have been influenced by the popularity and success attained by other artists of this style who had success in the marketplace.68
Having attended the School of the Art Institute, Leslie Rogers (1895–1935) attained national acclaim as a cartoonist and illustrator. In 1920, Rogers created the Chicago Defender’s comic strip Bungleton Green. Published regularly from 1920 until 1968, Bungleton Green became America’s longest-published comic strip created by a black artist. The Defender’s millions of readers referred to it as “Bung,” and the character’s popularity stemmed from Rogers’s synthesis of the popular trickster in black folklore and astute philosophical pragmatist of the modern age. Having an aversion to labor-intensive “heavy lifting” work and the eight-hour workday, Bung in top hat, bow tie, vest, tuxedo coat, and baggy pants lived by his wits. Rather than celebrating Bung’s ill-conceived schemes to satiate his day-to-day comforts and to avoid legal obligations, the comic strip emphasized the moral and legal consequences Bung had to ultimately face.
Quite similar to Rogers, during the late 1920s, Elmer Simms Campbell (1906–71) received acclaim as an illustrator. Campbell was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and his family settled in Chicago in 1920. During his one-year stay at the University of Chicago, Campbell was on the staff of Phoenix, a publication devoted solely to humor. Shortly after enrolling at the Art Institute, he and a few other students created College Comics, a short-lived magazine. Mostly under a pseudonym, Campbell produced many of this publication’s illustrations. After a stint at New York City’s Art Student League in 1932, Campbell found employment at Triad, a St. Louis, Missouri, advertising agency.
At the encouragement of the National Urban League’s (NUL) director of research and editor of Opportunity Charles Spurgeon Johnson and his assistant Ethel Nance, Campbell moved to New York City. There a friend and fellow Chicagoan Ed Graham assisted Campbell in obtaining freelance commissions and, later, a full-time advertising-agency position. Thereafter, he became the first African American to have his work appear regularly in white mainstream magazines, such as Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Judge, Playboy, Life, Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker. His creation Cuties was carried by over a hundred newspapers in America and Latin America; “Esky,” the pop-eyed mascot, was featured on the cover of each issue of Esquire magazine; and between 1933 and 1958, his work also appeared in nearly every monthly issue of Esquire. Most of Campbell’s fans never knew he was an African American “cross-over” artist over his forty-plus-year career. Similarly, few knew that Campbell was a prolific painter as well as an illustrator.
Ellis Wilson (1899–1977) and Robert Savon Pious (1908–83) trained and began their careers in Chicago but attained acclaim in New York City. Born in Mayfield, Kentucky, Wilson arrived in Chicago in 1919 to study at the Art Institute. After graduating, he remained in the city and worked as a commercial artist and assistant interior designer while also active with the Chicago Art League. Wilson concentrated on genre scenes, figure studies, and still life. Influenced by Alain Locke’s 1927 Chicago speech and the available information on Harlem’s New Negro Movement, Wilson moved to New York City in 1928, where he would attain recognition as a painter.
Similar to Wilson, Pious arrived in Chicago in 1921 from Meridian, Mississippi, to study at the Art Institute. After two years, he withdrew from classes to work full-time. An exceptionally talented draftsman and figure painter, Pious was awarded the 1931 Harmon Foundation’s Arthur B. Spingarn Prize for his drawing Portrait of Roland Hayes (ca. 1930).69 In addition to this prize, he accepted a scholarship to study at New York City’s National Academy of Design.70 Shortly thereafter, Pious became a highly regarded illustrator, portraitist, and figure painter.
Inspired by dreams and fantasies, there was a tendency to categorize the subject matter and stylistic approaches of self-taught intuitive painters as idiosyncratic or “childlike.” Samuel MacAlpine and Richard Milby Williams were among the self-taught artists in Chicago during the early renaissance. Born in Alabama in 1892, MacAlpine earned an undergraduate degree in a nonvisual arts area from Morris Brown in 1918. After relocating to Chicago during the 1920s, MacAlpine worked as a framer and developed an interest in painting. Examples of his works were included in the 1928 and 1933 Harmon Foundation’s annual exhibition and the 1933–34 Century of Progress Exposition’s art exhibition held in Chicago.71 A native Chicagoan, Williams had only a primary school education. He enjoyed the support of a small but loyal group of patrons, including Mrs. S. D. Cowles, who bought his portrait of Charles Lindbergh (that was part of Williams’s famous aviator series) to donate to Chicago’s Lakeview High School. Examples of Williams’s works were included in the 1931 Harmon Foundation’s annual exhibition.72
The Chicago Art League’s president William M. Farrow (1885–1967) was recognized as one of the “Negro Renaissance’s” leading personages. Through his Chicago Defender column, “Art for the Home,” Farrow expressed his unwavering support of African American artists. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Farrow studied at the Art Institute, 1908–17, where he also worked as an assistant to the curator. He later became the Art Institute’s first known African American instructor. Etchings such as Ringling House (n.d.) and The Messenger (n.d.) typify Farrow’s realistic approach and thematic interests. In 1933, the American Art Dealers Association selected Farrow’s lithograph Peace (1924) as one of America’s fifty best original prints (see figure 10.16).
Dox Thrash (1893–1965) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost American printmakers. Between 1911 and 1923, Thrash lived in Chicago, where he befriended Farrow and Scott (whom he would refer to later as a mentor). Working as an elevator operator at American Bank Note Engraving Company in Chicago, he enrolled in evening classes at the Art Institute beginning in 1914 until he was drafted into the military. Wounded and then discharged in 1919, he returned to Chicago to resume his studies at the Art Institute, where he became an exceptionally gifted painter and printmaker. The figures in his charcoal and graphite drawings tended to emerge from densely dark backgrounds. The tonal variations achieved in these works encouraged him to explore the possibilities of producing similar qualities in prints.
After leaving Chicago in 1923, he had brief stays in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York before settling in Philadelphia. There he headed the WPA Graphic Arts division and created the carborundum print process, which provided the printmaker with enormous ranges in tonal qualities from the darkest darks to intermediate tint variations.73 Because the subject matter in his prints emerged from the darkest darks, master printmaker and author Winston Kennedy characterized Thrash’s technique as “out of the shadows.”
Richmond Barthé (1901–89) from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, first showed his talent in the south. Barthé’s work caught the attention of Lyle Saxon of the New Orleans Times Picayune, who attempted to enroll him in the nearby White art school. In spite of Saxon’s influence, Barthé was not admitted because of his race. As an alternative, a priest at New Orleans’s Catholic Blessed Sacrament Church, Reverend Harry Kane, SSL, helped Barthé gain admittance to Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, where he studied from 1924 to 1928.
Barthé’s painting instructor, Charles Schroeder, recommended that Barthé enroll in a sculpture course to gain better command of rendering three-dimensional forms. A bust completed in his introductory sculpture class was included in the Art Institute’s 1927 The Negro in Art juried exhibition. This entry led to commissions for Barthé to complete busts of artist Henry O. Tanner and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture for Gary, Indiana’s Lake County Children’s Home. Exemplifying Barthé’s extraordinary talent during this period are his busts of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1928) and Booker T. Washington (1928).74
The 1927 Negro in Art Week in Chicago marked the turning point in Barthé’s career. Alain Locke spoke at the opening luncheon, and afterward he and Barthé met for the first time in what would become a long-standing friendship. In addition to playing a key role in convincing Barthé to move to New York City in 1931, Locke also became an effective promoter of his artwork.
Patrons also became interested in Barthé during the late 1920s. The Chicago Women’s Club commissioned two sculptures for their Michigan Avenue headquarters. After viewing these works, Chicago attorney Frank Breckinridge offered to defray the costs of a Barthé one-man exhibition and became his unofficial agent. And Julius Rosenwald, chairman of Sears and Roebuck department stores, encouraged Barthé to apply for a Rosenwald Fund fellowship, which he subsequently won and used to fund his trip to New York to take up residence with the Student Art League.
When he returned to Chicago from his studies in New York, Barthé had practically abandoned painting for sculpture. In his 1930 exhibition, financed by Breckinridge and sponsored by the Chicago Women’s Club, Barthé presented twenty-six sculptures, six paintings, and eight drawings, including The Breakaway: Dance Figurine.75 In 1931, Barthé left Chicago for a permanent stay in New York, where he would gain national acclaim (see figures 10.17 and 10.18).76
Despite the number of prolific and impressive artists in the first phase of Chicago’s Black Renaissance, mainstream Chicago institutions continued their policies of race exclusion. As exceptions to this color line, the Art Institute and the School of Design were the only professional art schools that admitted black students.77 For example, in 1937, Charles White was informed he was the winner of the Academy of Fine Arts and Mizer Academy of Art new-student scholarship competitions. When he arrived at the new-student scholarship recipient ceremony for each art school, White was informed that the jury had made a mistake in the selection process. Later, White obtained a copy of the catalog for each school and noticed the statement: “For Caucasians Only.”78
It is widely accepted that the South Side Community Art Center was the WPA’s gift to Chicago, and the artistic maturation of black artists came with its founding. Often overlooked, however, is the significant role played by the South Side Community Art Center Association (SSCACA). In 1939, the SSCACA conducted a successful fund-raising campaign and purchased a dilapidated, three-story mansion at 3831 South Michigan Avenue to serve as an art center.79 The SSCACA obtained WPA Community Art Center (CAC) funding to renovate the building and staff art center. The refurbished building included a ballroom, meeting rooms, studios, gallery, and in the rear a carriage-house workshop.
Prior to the SSCAC’s opening in late 1940, its board of directors issued a policy statement indicating that the art center would not practice or tolerate racial segregation. In keeping with this policy, the center’s first director, Peter Pollack, was white. In addition, the SSCAC’s board, staff, students, affiliated artists, and members were racially diverse. “In those days,” Bernard Goss and Margaret T. G. Burroughs recalled, the SSCAC “was one of the few places that brought the Negroes and whites together on a cultural basis. The center was for everyone; a true symbol for an interracial tolerance.”80
Nonetheless, and perhaps due to their long virtual exclusion from other venues, local black artists made up the SSCAC’s December 1940 inaugural exhibition. However, the SSCAC’s 1941 dedication exhibition, We Too Look at America, featured a racially diverse group of artists. Gertrude Abercrombie, Emil Armen, Margaret Brundage, and Sophie Wessel were among the local white artists included in this exhibition. In addition to the black artists included in the SSCAC’s inaugural exhibition, examples of works by John Carlis Jr., Eldzier Cortor, and Charles Sebree were also included in the dedication exhibition.81
These exhibits led critics in Chicago to take notice of the quality of work at the SSCAC. In her May 1941 review of the Art Club’s modern-art exhibition held at the Wrigley Building on Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile,” and the SSCAC’s dedication exhibition, the Chicago Sun’s art critic Dorothy Odenheimer observed that the quality of paintings by Negro artists in the SSCAC exhibition exceeded the works included in the Arts Club’s exhibition. After devoting special attention to works by Avery, Carter, Carlis, Cortor, Kersey, Sebree, and White, Odenheimer wrote, “After visiting this exhibition we felt that the socialites at the Arts Club could profit by a visit down the street at their neighbors’, the South Side Community Art Center.”82
The May 1941 SSCAC’s dedication address by America’s First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was aired live on radio. Later at the dedication dinner, the Chicago and African American artist Charles V. Davis presented Roosevelt with a portrait of her daughter, entitled Holiday (1941).83 Subsequent to the dedication, in her 1941 nationally syndicated column, “My Day,” the First Lady wrote, “Chicago has long been a center of Negro Art.”84 And in its May 19, 1941, edition, Newsweek magazine concurred, deeming the SSCAC a “Negro Temple of Art.”85
The SSCAC not only served as a hub for visual artists but also for a young group of writers, dancers, and musicians. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, singer and pianist Nat King Cole, poet and writer Frank Marshall Davis, dancer Katherine Dunham, novelists Willard Motley and Margaret Walker, and playwright Ted Ward were among the artists who congregated in the gallery, classrooms, and hallways of the center. Meanwhile, photographer Gordon Parks constructed a darkroom in the basement of the center, and other artists took up residence there, including William Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles Davis, Raymond “Ramon” Gabriel, Marion Perkins, David Ross, and Hughie Lee-Smith.
The centrality of the SSCAC after 1940 should not, however, excise other spaces that predated it. Some SSCAC artists, for example, continued to affiliate with the Abraham Lincoln Center (ALC). Founded in 1905 as a settlement house and put under the supervision of the All Souls Church after the stock-market crash of 1929, ALC evolved into the Near South Side’s interracial center of progressive political, social, and cultural thought during the Depression years. Among the white visual artists affiliated with the ALC, Edward Millman, Mitchell Siporin, and Morris Topchevsky were recognized as leaders in the progressive art movement. Having studied and painted with Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, Millman, Siporin, and Topchevsky developed an appreciation for New World artistic concerns of people of color. As such, they encouraged young black artists to draw upon the African American experience as a source of artistic inspiration, evidenced by its 1941 exhibition that included works by white artists like Siporin and Topchevsky but also their black allies and colleagues like Eldzier Cortor, Charles Davis, Bernard Goss, and Charles Sebree.
For some progressives, this exhibition exemplified “interracial cultural radicalism,” as espoused by leftist organizations, which led to charges of communist influence of these artists, and these kinds of cultural events caught the attention of conservative politicians. The U.S. House of Representatives Sub-Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities chairman Martin Dies (D, Texas) gathered examples of art works executed by WPA and Federal Art Project (FAP) artists to prove that the federal government’s arts programs had promoted communism. Dies led a movement that sought to terminate the WPA, and having aroused public disapprobation and unease within U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, Dies succeeded in having the WPA and its programs terminated in February 1943.
Actually, the loss of the WPA’s funding of the Illinois Art Project (IAP) proved less severe than imagined because the program’s administrators had discriminated against hiring black artists in Chicago. It was the IAP’s general practice to refer black artists seeking employment under its art projects to nonvisual arts–related WPA jobs.86 During its seven-year lifespan, IAP employed nearly 775 artists and administrators, but only “about five percent” (approximately 36 artists) were black.87 Moreover, between 1935 and 1939, Sebree was the only black artist employed under a IAP premier-art job classification;88 and prior to the SSCAC’s founding, the few black artists employed by IAP were assigned to its art and craft projects or other less-visible roles, such as assisting (white) muralists.89
William Carter’s story exemplified race discrimination in the IAP. Between 1935 and 1939, Carter regularly inquired about employment as an IAP artist but was informed no vacancies existed.90 Yet, the official FAP/IAP employment data for the periods of November 1, 1935, through August 31, 1939, disclosed that IAP did not fill its federally allotted weekly employment quota.91 In 1939, Carter was finally reassigned from his construction-laborer job to IAP’s easel/mural project at a monthly salary of $92.00, a thirty percent raise over other black WPA employees.92 Recalling his reassignment, Carter stated, “I guess I wore them out until they got tired of saying no.” Later, he noted, at the time of his reassignment, “Three or four other black (artists) also got on the WPA about then,” and together they gave the South Side “its first black artistic set” (emphasis added).93
The IAP appointment of “its first black artistic set” was influenced by the Chicago Artist Union’s (CAU) successful campaign to relieve IAP’s director Increase Robinson (Josephine Reichmann) of her duties for failing to fill federally allotted artist positions. IAP’s racial preferment practices became a rider on CAU’s written concerns. Robinson was succeeded by George Thorp, 1938–41, and he by Fred Biesel, 1941–43. Thorp and later Biesel addressed CAU’s concerns and quelled perceptions of racial discrimination. Notwithstanding their contributions to the IAP, the major factors in IAP attaining its employment spike of roughly thirty-five black artists were the opening the SSCAC and subsequent need for full-time staff members there.
Faced with the loss of federal funds and innuendoes of having been a haven of communist activities, several influential personages severed their ties with the SSCAC after World War II. However, a group of determined women that included Pauline Kigh Reed, Wilhelmina Blanks, Fern Gayden, and Grace Thompson Learning stepped forward to ensure that the SSCAC remained a vital institution. Reed organized the Committee of 100 Women for the purpose of improving SSCAC’s public image and to raise funds to defray the art center’s scaled-back operational and program costs. Of the 110 FAP/CAC art centers opened during the WPA era, the SSCAC is the only one that remains open.
In addition to the ALC and SSCAC, there were small informal gatherings at locations, such as Katherine Dunham’s apartment, Charles and Margaret Burroughs’s carriage house, and the home of Marion and Eva Perkins. These informal gatherings contributed to the cross-fertilization of artistic and intellectual ideas. Anthropologist, dancer, and choreographer Dunham introduced Caribbean and African dance to the concert stage; Burroughs was rapidly becoming one of the leading figures in the visual arts, human rights, and civil rights movements; and Perkins was at the forefront of Chicago’s African American modernist sculpture movement.
Two important exhibitions announced the emergence of the renaissance’s second wave of African American artists: the Chicago 1940 national juried exhibition, The Art of the American Negro: 1852–1940, and Howard University’s 1941 Exhibition of Negro Artists of Chicago. The national juried exhibition was an integral part of the American Negro Exposition that commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alain Locke chaired the art exhibition committee, and Alonzo Aden, cofounder of Howard University’s art gallery, acted as curator. The exposition opened on July 4, 1940, at the Chicago Coliseum in an area named the Henry O. Tanner Gallery.
In the spirit of Tanner, upon entering the Coliseum and exhibition hall, the transgenerational theme of Chicago’s renaissance became visible. The Coliseum’s main entryway had been transformed into “a Court of Honors” by Charles Dawson’s ten dioramas depicting highlights of seven thousand years of African and African American history. Entering the Coliseum’s exhibition hall, William Scott’s twenty-four murals depicting the accomplishments of African Americans over the seventy-five-year period were prominently displayed. With the exception of Elizabeth Catlett winning the first prize in sculpture, the other first-place award recipients were Chicagoans: William Carter in watercolor, Charles White in drawing, and White for There Were No Crops This Year and his mural A History of the Negro Press, as well as an honorable mention for his watercolor Fellow Worker, Won’t You March with Us. Evidently impressed by Chicago’s artists, Aden brought their works to Washington, D.C., for Howard University’s 1941 Exhibition of Negro Artists of Chicago. Washington was known as one of America’s centers of black society and Howard University as its intellectual center. This exhibit, following on the heels of the national one in Chicago, put black Chicago on the map as the center of the arts movement in America.
Rather than being committed to a particular stylistic approach, second-wave painters worked with adeptness in two or three styles simultaneously. While the majority of these painters settled on a particular stylistic approach, others worked in styles ranging from naturalism to abstraction for much of their professional careers. Three painters in particular—Stan Williamson, William Carter, and Walter Sanford—embraced this range of styles and influences. Williamson (1911–n.d.), possibly influenced by the nineteenth-century French painter Paul Cezanne in his painting Old Dwellings (1958), explored the reduction of subject matter into geometric components painted in broad patches of color that delineated and defined the form of buildings. By contrast, his urban residential street scene House in Chicago (1959) exemplified his facility as a realistic painter.94 Because of his tendency to work in various styles, Cedric Dover held, when Williamson settled on a particular style, “America will have another great painter.”95 Similarly, Carter’s murals ranged from the cubist-influenced Last Supper (n.d.) at Reverend Johnnie Coleman’s Christ Universal Temple Church to the expressionist Cleopatra and Her Court for a nightclub on the Near South Side to other realist portraits.96 And while he was a proficient realistic and expressionistic painter, Sanford was clearly influenced by Pablo Picasso in his paintings Susan and Friend (n.d.), Sun Ritual (1958), and Seated Nude (1959).
Second-wave renaissance artists also extended beyond European and American traditions by taking inspiration from the Caribbean, Latin America, and, to a lesser extent, Africa. Short- to long-term study residencies in the Caribbean or Mexico were self-funded or sponsored by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation or the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Among the artists who studied and produced art in the Caribbean and for Mexico were Sylvester Britton, Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, William Harper, Frederick Jones, Lawrence Jones, Archibald Motley Jr., William Scott, and Charles White.
The artistic titans of the second period were Cortor, Sebree, and White. However, to delimit this period to these painters fails to explain how and why this period represented a further elaboration of Chicago’s early renaissance and how it gained momentum when this trio of artists relocated to other cities. The pillars that provided stability and spurred this artistic momentum were artists such as Henry Avery, Margaret Burroughs, William Carter, Fitzhugh Dinkins, Bernard Goss, Frederick Jones, William McBride, and Leroy Winbush.
Born in Chicago, George E. Neal (1906–38) studied at the Art Institute. Works such as The Hat (1937), The Red House (n.d.), and Still Life (n.d.) reveal Neal to have been an able figurative painter. Although he did not attain national or regional acclaim as a painter, Neal’s influence in shaping the renaissance’s second wave was incalculable. Having died at the early age of thirty-two, Neal’s imprint on art in black Chicago remained alive through the accomplishments of his students. Among his former students, Neal was revered as a master instructor and leader in Chicago’s black self-help art movement.
Beginning with his South Side Settlement House’s Saturday art classes, Neal taught some of Chicago’s most important young artists during their fledging stages of artistic development. Among Neal’s students were Henry Avery, Margaret Taylor (née Goss Burroughs), Eldzier Cortor, Charles Davis, Joseph Kersey, Mary Jackson McGee, and Charles White. Shortly after leaving the Settlement House, Neal offered classes and exhibitions at his carriage-house apartment-studio, known as Paragon Studio.97
In addition to the majority of his Settlement House students, Katherine Bell, William Carter, Bernard Goss, William McBride, and Charles Sebree took informal classes with Neal. The instruction offered and demands placed on his students were quite similar to those of a postsecondary professional art school. In addition to in-house instruction, Neal’s students worked outdoors as well as visited galleries and museums. His open-door policy not only permitted community residents to view bimonthly student exhibitions but also to visit and observe classes. Neal encouraged these residents to ask questions of the students, and later these interactions influenced the thematic direction of Neal’s students as well as fostered close relationships between professional artists and community residents.
In 1936, Paragon Studios caught fire and burned to the ground. Not deterred by this fire, Neal organized the Arts Craft Guild. In addition to many of his former students, the guild’s members also included Fred Hollingsworth, Frank Phillips, Dan Terry Reed, David Ross, and Elsworth Terrance. Led by its president, William McGill, the guild met on Sunday afternoons to critique works, sketch, and offer mutual support. In 1939, when plans were underway to establish the SSCAC, its members dissolved the guild to become the SSCAC’s Artist Committee.98
Native Chicagoan Charles Wilbert White (1918–79) was one of Neal’s students who attained international acclaim. White studied at the School of the Art Institute in 1937–38. Despite working three part-time jobs, he completed the Art Institute’s two-year certificate program in one year. In 1939, White was employed by IAP’s easel/mural project and assigned to assist white muralists Edward Millman and Mitchell Siporin, and he took the opportunity to study how the compositional and technical demands of transitioning from small-easel to large-scale mural painting. Independent of his WPA job, White executed three important murals between 1939 and 1943: Five Great American Negroes (1939–40), A History of the Negro Press (1940), and Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America (1943). Installed at the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public library at 4801 South Michigan Avenue, White’s Five Great American Negroes mural accentuated the contributions of Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, and teachers of the black youth (see figure 10.19).
Shortly after the installation of this mural at the Cleveland Branch Library, White was commissioned by the Associated Negro Press (ANP) to execute a mural for its American Negro Exposition’s exhibit. In his mural A History of the Negro Press, White depicted the three pioneering figures in America’s black newspaper industry: John B. Russwurm, Frederick Douglass, and Timothy Thomas Fortune. In 1827, Russwurm founded America’s earliest black newspaper, Freedom Journal, which was circulated in eleven states, Washington, D.C., Canada, Europe, and Haiti. Douglass founded the North Star newspaper in 1847, and Fortune the New York Freedman in 1884. In 1887, Fortune changed the newspaper’s name to the New York Age. The other figures in this mural are black linotype workers, pressman, staff reporter, cameraman, copy editor, and typesetter. Highly stylized, White’s figures appeared to have been chiseled from large blocks of black jade, which conveyed a sense of monumentality, augustness, and figural power.
In 1942, while studying at New York City’s Art Student League with instructor Harry Steinberg, White was encouraged to individualize through modeling his stylization of figures. Working in black-and-white media, he followed Steinberg’s suggestion. At the same, time, he never abandoned the fundamental geometric construction of figures in his works. This was evinced in his 1943 Contribution of the American Negro to Democracy mural, which was installed at Hampton University’s Wainwright Auditorium. The central personages in this mural are George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Peter Still, Sojourner Truth, and Booker T. Washington.
Regarding the narrative elements in his work, White stated, “I use the Black image to make a very personal statement about how I view the world . . . my hopes, aspirations, and dreams about all people, And I say [to] the world, ‘if you cannot relate to this Black image, that’s your problem.’ Black humanity has been thrust into history, has been catapulted into history as a universal thing about survival, a survival with dignity.”99 The black presence as universal archetypes permeates White’s oeuvre from the 1930s until White’s death in 1979.
For example, in There Were No Crops This Year (1940), White dramatically captured pathos of a farmer and his wife confronted by a season without a bountiful crop, and what this portends (see figure 10.20). Irrespective of race or ethnicity, through this black couple White evoked a universal response to a barren season, particularly among small farmers and sharecroppers. Hence, blackness was the filtering lens to illuminate the universal rather than the accustomed narrow lens of whiteness.
During the early 1940s, White’s personal and professional life took him away from Chicago, though his influence on African American art in Chicago would continue to grow. White met fellow-artist Elizabeth Catlett and married her in 1941, and they lived for a short time together in Chicago. Later that year, Catlett became the head of Dillard College’s art department, and White was awarded a $2,000 Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to study and produce art in the Deep South. After leaving Dillard in 1942, the Whites studied in New York City. The next year, Catlett accepted a teaching position at Hampton University, where White painted Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, which the New York Times characterized as “a vigorous expression of protest against antidemocratic forces.”100
Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army drafted White to fight against those antidemocratic forces overseas. His engineering regiment was dispatched to sandbag dikes to avert further flood damage from the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Having become seriously ill from exposure to the weather (White had a preexisting acute respiratory condition), White was diagnosed with severe pleurisy. This resulted in a three-year stay at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Beacon, New York. Never cured, he was plagued with this illness for the remainder of his life. For example, in 1945 White accepted an artist-in-residence position at Howard University but became ill again and had to be hospitalized. The toxicities of materials used in oil painting necessitated that White limit or abandon painting in oils. Accordingly, after being discharged from the hospital, White worked with much less toxic mediums, such as charcoal, conte crayon, prints, and pen and ink.
In 1947 Catlett and White traveled to Mexico and studied at Mexico City’s Escuela de Pintura y Escultura de la Secretaria de Educación Pública (school of sculpture and painting) and the Talleres Gráficos de la Nación. Living with acclaimed muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Whites met and worked with some of Mexico’s leading artists, such as Pablo O’Higgins, Jose Clemente Orozco, Leopoldo Mendes, and Diego Rivera. Influenced by the social consciousness of Mexican artists and themes of Mexicaness in their murals, paintings, and prints, White indicated this period of study was a “milestone” that clarified his artistic direction.101 He also acknowledged his indebtedness to fellow Arts Craft Guild member Lawrence Jones for having initially introduced him to the Mexican school of painting.102
After he and Catlett divorced, White married Frances Barrett and vacationed in Europe in 1950. Not only were Europeans familiar with his artistic output, White was received in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, France, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, and West Germany as a distinguished artist of international eminence. When the newlyweds returned to America, there was a dramatic increase among major art institutions in collecting and exhibiting White’s works. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included a work by White in its 1952 exhibition; in 1953, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired for its permanent collection White’s drawing Preacher (1952); the American Academy of Arts and Letters offered him a one-man exhibition; and he was the recipient of a John Jay Whitney Fellowship in 1956.
Socially conscious, White was enormously affected by the 1960s civil rights movement. Spurred by America’s history of disregard of black life and rights, he executed some of his most powerful and penetrating works, such as Wanted Poster Series (1969). Influenced by slavery-era runaway reward posters for the return of runaway slaves, White created a wanted-poster series. The narrative element of this series explored the short distance between the treatment of slaves and the current state of black people in America. In the upper register of Wanted Poster Series #6 (1969), the Confederate “stars and bars” form the background. The foreground is dominated by the image of a nude runaway black woman. The reward for her and a boy’s return of $30,000.00 is stenciled behind the woman’s head. A painted finger on each side of the female’s shoulder suggests the reward for her body. Stenciled across the woman’s abdominal area is “Article IV Section 2” of U.S. Constitution, which reads, “A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.” A muted-toned American flag forms the lower register’s background. In the foreground, an emaciated nude boy is seated on the ground. The seated position of the boy recalls the cramped conditions aboard the slave ships. The boy is also a symbol of abject poverty in late-twentieth-century America. Stenciled above and overlapping a portion of the boy’s head and behind his back are portions of the September 18, 1859, Fugitive Slave Act. On a curvature under the seated boy’s feet in capital letters is the word VALUABLE (see figure 10.21).
White’s career—spanning the Depression years through the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s—left a significant legacy on the history of American art and the importance of the Chicago movement. In his lifetime, White had more than fifty major one-man exhibitions, and his works are in the collections of over fifty museums in America, Mexico, and Europe. 103 In spite of his accomplishments, however, it is rare that White is mentioned in histories of American art.
In his 1947 novel Kingblood Royal, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize recipient Sinclair Lewis introduced his readers to Eldzier Cortor (born 1916). The novel’s main character Neil Kingblood ruminates on what would distinguish the homes of middle-class Negroes from those of America’s white middle class. Perhaps, the distinguishing factors, Neil conjectured, might be “signed photographs of Haile Selassie, Walter White and Pushkin?” Or, Neil continued, “an Eldzier Cortor painting.”104
Corter was born in Richmond, Virginia. When he was about a year old, his family relocated to Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute from 1936 to 1941, where instructor Kathleen Blackshear had a profound and lasting influence on him. In her art history and composition classes, Blackshear acquainted students with Western and non-Western art, particularly Oceanic and African. Inspired by Blackshear’s course and the Field Museum of Natural History’s collection of African sculpture, Cortor’s drawings, prints, and paintings began to introduce elongated female figures reminiscent of Senufo sculpture.
Through Horace Cayton, director of Chicago’s Good Shepherd Community Center (renamed, Parkway Community House), Cortor was introduced to the Africanisms among South Carolina’s Sea Island Gullah people, and when awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940, Cortor used the funding to travel south and paint in the Sea Islands. Recalling this period of study, he stated, “As a Negro artist, I felt a special interest in painting Negroes whose cultural tradition had only been slightly influenced by whites. This series of pictures reflects the particular physical and racial characteristics of the Gullahs. I hope the assimilation of their background and mode of living has added not only to the authenticity of the paintings but also to their intrinsic value.”105
In his Gullah-inspired paintings, Cortor explored the interplay of natural and artificial light on the dark skin of women. By elongating the face, neck, limbs, and torso, his paintings and prints evoke the serene, unspoiled, sensual, and natural beauty of black women.106 This is evinced in his most widely known and reproduced work Southern Gate (ca. 1942–43) (see figure 10.22). His treatment of the semi-nude woman in the painting’s foreground typifies Cortor’s approach in portraying the augustness of black women. This work is densely layered with symbols of decline, reclamation, and self-renewal. For example, in the lexicon of symbolism, the prime and secondary meanings of the sky, water, small bird, necklace, flowing garment, and nudity are rebirth, renewal, or regeneration. The small body of water in this work appears to be of minor significance. Yet, when the symbolic meaning of water is considered within the context of the significance Cortor ascribed to black women, it takes on increased importance. Symbolically, water represents “The Great Mother,” the woman as “the carrier of water,” which is the life force, and the woman represents a messenger to the water spirits. “The Black woman,” Cortor held, “represents the Black race. She is the Black Spirit; she conveys a feeling of eternity and the continuance of life.”107
Cortor was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 to produce works of art and to research Africanism in Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti. Of these islands, he found Haiti to be the richest in Africanism (Haitians had developed the Caribbean’s earliest indigenous art movement). Living among ordinary people, Cortor learned to speak patois, became acquainted with indigenous art forms and symbolism, sketched local scenes, and taught classes at Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. This experience expanded his awareness on New World Africanisms and provided confirmation of his artistic direction.108
Upon his return to Chicago in 1948, Cortor experienced the lingering residue of the WPA’s and World War II’s domestic surveillance programs. Under the hysteria created by “the Red Scare,” Cortor recalled, WPA artists were labeled communist. Artists producing social-realist works influenced by civil rights or other problems confronting the masses were now characterized as “troublemakers,” and the market for works having themes on blackness had been practically eliminated. “To survive,” he recalled, “many artists eliminated black subject matter” in their work.109
In 1950, when Life magazine identified America’s top “19 Young American Artists” under thirty-six years of age, the editors selected Cortor as the only African American. In addition to its lengthy featured article on the artists, Life magazine sponsored an exhibition at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that featured selected works from its permanent art collection combined with works executed by the nineteen young artists.110 In spite of having been selected as one of America’s top young artists, art dealers continued to shy away from his works. This was one of the important factors that contributed to Cortor’s decision to relocate to New York City. Shortly after settling in New York, he was awarded a second Guggenheim Fellowship to study printmaking in Mexico. After returning to New York for a short period, Cortor resettled in Chicago but again felt stifled by the Chicago’s mainstream art market there. After a brief stay, he once again moved to New York City.
Inducted in the U.S. Navy, Hughie Lee-Smith (1915–99) was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Station, located in the northern suburban area of Chicago. Although the naval station was a tinder box of racial tension, the navy permitted Lee-Smith to paint a mural at the base, The History of the Negro in the U.S. Navy (ca. 1947). Until the completion of his mural, the contributions of black sailors were largely unknown. The proximity of the naval station to Chicago permitted Lee-Smith to frequently visit the SSCAC. During these visits, he and Cortor became close friends. Their friendship and similar artistic interests proved mutually beneficial.
Prior to being inducted into the U.S. Navy, Lee-Smith explored themes of dislocation and displacement. This is evinced in his lithographs Artists Life: No.2 (1938) and Dislocation (1938). Cortor was also exploring similar themes in works, such as Loneliness (1940) and Skin Deep (1947). Mutual interest in exploring these aspects of the human condition resulted in the cross-fertilization of ideas and hastened their resolution in depicting such subject matter. After completing his navy tour of duty, Lee-Smith planned to settle in Chicago. Unable to gain full-time employment to support his family, the Lee-Smith family relocated to Detroit and later to New York City. There he later attained national acclaim.
The early works of Frederick D. Jones (1914–2004) were often mistaken for or compared with Cortor’s. Like Cortor, Jones was among the few African American artists who treated semi-nude and nude black women as subject matter. For example, Lady Godiva (1950) and The Violinist (ca. 1952) are two of Jones’s important works where the central figure is a black nude female. A modernist painting, the striking features in The Violinist are the simplicity of forms, design mastery, and highly sophisticated painterly technique.
Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Jones studied at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia, and later at Chicago’s Art Institute (1941–43). Without much notice, he established a reputation as being one of Chicago’s important artists, one of the important anchors of Chicago’s African American visual-arts community, and a highly regarded mentor to young artists who blossomed during the 1960s. A modernist figure painter, his works are included in collections such as the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, IBM, U.S. Library of Congress, American embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Belgium embassy in Washington, D.C.
Prior to becoming the Museum of the Art Institute’s first curator of modern painting and sculpture in 1954, Katherine Kuh owned a gallery under her name from 1935 to 1942. A modern art maven, Kuh exhibited works by leading European artists, such as Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro.111 Of the few American artists that she represented, Charles Sebree (1914–85) was the only African American. In her 1936, 1939, and 1940 group exhibitions, Kuh included examples of Sebree’s work. Each of these exhibitions was important; however, the 1940 exhibition was the most significant. It included works by leading modernists, such as Leger, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Carlos Merida, Amedeo Modigliani, and Diego Rivera. For Sebree to have had works in this exhibition suggests that Kuh considered Sebree to be an important young modernist painter.
Born in White City near Madisonville, Kentucky, Sebree studied briefly at the Art Institute and School of Design. Among his influences were Byzantine art, African art, Picasso, and the French painter Georges Rouault. Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1905) provides a clue to Sebree’s early treatment of the face, particularly the gaze of his jesters. This is discernible in Sebree’s Boy in Blue Jacket (1938). Whether he patterned his life after Picasso is impossible to determine with certainty. However, there were similarities: Picasso was a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and stage designer with an affinity for circus performers. Sebree was a painter, dancer, set designer, and playwright with a predilection for jesters.
Rouault’s influence was evident in Sebree’s early paintings, such as Seated Woman (1940) and Pink Turban (1939). Similar to Picasso, Rouault also had an affinity for clowns. This is evinced in Rouault’s Self-Portrait (1925–26). Having apprenticed in stain glass, the strips of lead holding pieces of stained glass in place influenced Rouault’s use of very dark, heavily painted outlines to accentuate the figure(s) in his paintings and at times to break up space within a figure’s clothing to form smaller patterns of color. This is discernible in Rouault’s The Old King (1916–37) painting. Similar to Rouault, Sebree experimented with stained glass and later mosaics. Rather than heavy, dark outlines, in his painting Head of a Woman (1938), the central figure is framed by burnt umber (see figure 10.23). The various brown tones in the background and the figure soften the heavy umber framing. While Rouault was influenced by the Fauves’ intense impasto painting technique and warm colors, Sebree’s palette more freely applied cool, translucent colors, which evolved a somber or mystic quality.
In spite of these discernible influences, Sebree was not imitative. Such influences represented points of departure paintings. He synthesized only these elements that were germane to his particular artistic concerns. Through this process, he developed his unique artistic voice. The jester, a recurring figure in his works, may have been a metaphor for Sebree’s lifestyle, which was largely improvisational, economically and socially. Outwardly, the jester represents the unregenerate lower being without a past or future. Yet, having the abilities to anticipate and respond to the expectations of his audience, the jester controls the ritual of discourse to attain his desired ends.
Although he had developed a recognizable signature style, Sebree was engaged in an unrelenting and continuous program of experimentation with mediums and surface treatments to construct pictorial ambiance. As evidence in Saltimbanque in Moonlight (ca.1970) (see figure 10.24), the portrait is far more simplified than those in his early works; the use of beeswax provides the illusion of loosely woven fabric; and the figure’s huge, penetrating eyes peering out at the viewer differs dramatically from his early works. In his stylistic approach to this work, here is almost a complete absence of clues linking it to Sebree.
Artists of entirely different temperaments, Sebree and Raymond “Ramon” Gabriel (1911–n.d.) had adjoining studios on the second floor of the Colored Lutheran Church on East Forty-Ninth Street. Born in the Virgin Islands, Gabriel was a talented painter as well as an accomplished violinist. He studied at the Art Institute and Hull House. Markedly different from his realistic tropical scenes, Pool Room (1937) and Seated Boy (ca. 1940) provide examples of Gabriel’s modernist sensibilities (see figure 10.25). In August 1941, Gabriel was recognized in American Magazine of Art as “[o]ne of the lively and original groups of American artists anywhere to be found.”112
Similar to Gabriel, native Chicagoan John Carlis Jr. (1917–2003 ) studied at the Art Institute and worked in a realistic and modernistic style simultaneously. Early in his career, Carlis demonstrated promise as a modernist painter, as evinced in Two Women (1940). In spite of being one of Chicago’s talented young painters, he is probably best remembered for his greeting-card illustrations and book How to Make Your Own Greeting Cards (1968), published by Watson-Guptil, one of America’s largest publishers of art instruction books.
Unless bedridden, after retiring as a Chicago public schoolteacher, William Carter (1909–96) painted from the early evening until dawn. His greeting to a fellow artist was, “Have you painted today?” Until his death at eighty-seven years of age, Carter maintained that he was “too young to have a (painting) style.” As such, he was adept and equally comfortable working in a realistic or pure abstract style.
From at least the Great Depression era until his death, Carter produced many works priced to sell quickly. He referred to these works as his “breadwinners” to pay rent and purchase food. Over the years, these and other “breadwinner” works such as Tete-a-Tete (1938), Study in Gray (1939), and Katherine Dunham (n.d.) have unfortunately been used as yardsticks for measuring Carter’s significance as a painter. One of Carter’s early non–“breadwinner” paintings, Ballerina (1939), provides evidence of his adeptness as a figure painter.113 A later work is The Card Game (1950) (see figure 10.26).
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Carter studied at the Art Institute, 1930–31, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1935–36. Carter recalled that at the University of Illinois, “[t]here wasn’t any place on campus for Negroes to live.”114 Failing to find off-campus housing, Carter discovered that a janitor rented out cots to black students in the basement of one of the buildings where “ten of us lived . . . that year next to the coal and underneath the white boys.”115 Years later, he returned to the university and earned his degree in 1958.
Similar to Carter, Henry Avery (1906–82) was an able realist, abstract, and expressionist painter. Although he explored pure and figurative abstraction, his most accomplished works as a modernist were his expressionist paintings like his Still Life (1938). In this painting, Avery transformed a straightforward interior scene into a highly contemplative and dynamic painting.
Born in Margatan, North Carolina, Avery studied at the South Side Settlement House. During the late 1930s and 1940s, examples of his works were included in exhibitions, such as the forty-eighth annual Art Institute of Chicago exhibition American Painters and Sculptors Annual Show in 1939, Institute of Modern Art, Boston, Massachusetts, Library of Congress in 1940, and the American Negro Exposition’s national juried exhibition in 1940.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, Charles V. Davis (1912–67) studied at the South Side Settlement House, Paragon Studio, and briefly at the Art Institute. Known for figurative works such as Perhaps Tomorrow (n.d.) and Newsboy (The Negro Boy) (1939), he was also an able modernist painter (see figure 10.27). In his cubistic painting Tycoon Toys (1938), he depicted a desolate industrial site in simplified geometric shapes.
This work may have been influenced by the controversial 1937 South Chicago Republic Steel strike. On May 30, 1937, approximately two hundred men, women, and a few children were having a picnic in the field in front of the steel plant when the police, hearing a shot fired, opened fire on the marchers. Ten marchers were killed, and roughly sixty injured or wounded. Forty policemen were injured. The title of this painting may have been a metaphor for the acrimonious relationship between management and workers that made Chicago’s “Memorial Day Massacre” national news and led to greater sympathy for the union movement.
Native Chicagoan Sylvester Britton (1926–2009) studied at the Art Institute, Mexico’s School of Painting and Sculpture, and Paris’s Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. He attained success as both a designer and painter. Britton was one of the anchors, important mentors, and leading artist during the 1950s. His painting Bondage (n.d.) and drawing Red Hat (1954) provide examples of Britton’s varied artistic concerns.
A powerful work, Bondage evokes helplessness and outrage. To be stripped of one’s clothing is a source of humiliation and indignation. To be restrained with arms behind one’s back adds to this indignation. On his knees, the nude man’s head is bowed as he struggles to loosen the restraints holding his arms behind his back. This work recalls the treatment of some black men from the slavery era to present-day tactics employed to restrain “uncooperative” incarcerated prisoners (see figure 10.28).
Britton’s Red Hat is a marked contrast with Bondage. Through his simplicity of form and sparing use of color in Red Hat, Britton infused the sitter in Red Hat with a sense of dignity and unrehearsed stateliness (see figure 10.29).
Designer, painter, printmaker, and art collector William McBride (1913–2000) was born in Algiers, Louisiana. At the age of ten, McBride and his family relocated to Chicago. While he studied briefly at the Art Institute, McBride’s stylistic direction was influenced by studying privately with painters and designers such as Ivan Albright and Leroy Winbush. McBride was highly regarded and a successful designer as well as an abstract and expressionistic painter, but he has become better known for his foresight to collect art and memorabilia. With over one thousand paintings, prints, and sculptures in his collection, McBride had one of the largest and most extensive collections of African and African American art; he also held the largest private collection of WPAera works. Indeed, more than fifty percent of works by Chicago artists included in the 1978 New York/Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist exhibition came from McBride’s collection.116
Born in Sedalia, Missouri, Bernard Goss (1913–66) graduated from the University of Iowa in 1935. After relocating to Chicago, he studied with George Neal and at the Art Institute. Goss was one of the most gifted painters of this period. An expressionist painter, in spite of having executed some exceptional works, he never realized the full extent of his talent. A watercolor, Musicians (1939), was one of Goss’s early paintings. Through his treatment of form and use of color in this painting, Goss attempted to capture the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic flow of a jazz quartet in a cabaret setting.117
In paintings such as Always the Dirty Work (n.d.), Slave Revolt, Slave Rebellion (n.d.), Seven Generations (n.d.), and Oscar dePriest: Powerful Politician (n.d.), Goss offered powerful sociopolitical comments on race particularism and black resistance to oppression in America.118 Towards the end of his life, Goss produced some excellent prints, such as Ethiopian Leader (Haile Selassie) (ca. 1960s), Sojourner Truth (ca. 1960s), and African Warrior (ca. 1960s).
Designer, gallery director, and painter Irene Clark (1927–84) was born in Washington, D.C. She studied at the Art Institute Chicago’s 414 Workshop and San Francisco Art Institute. An accomplished realistic painter, Clark adopted an expressionistic and later naive approach to painting. Her narrative influences evoke folklore heard and read as a child; her later works do the same for African and diasporic folklore. Writing on the African influence, Clark noted, “Generation after generation of Africans have told stories among themselves, and whenever they moved they took their stories.”119
Clark’s painting Rolling Calf (n.d.) represents a Jamaican folktale about a restless spirit that reappears in the form of a sheep and undergoes four transfigurations (see figure 10.30). In this work, with the exception of the front-lower human foot, the spirit has been transfigured in the form of a sheep. The heads and portions of the bodies of the horse, dog, and cat are recognizable. However, the other parts of these animals’ bodies remain in a transfiguring stage: the horse appears to be emerging from the sheep, the dog from the sheep, the cat from the dog, and the pig from the cat.120
Working in various printmaking techniques of wood-block, dry point, etching, lithographic, and silkscreen, several young painters became adept printmakers, including Margaret Taylor Goss-Burroughs (1917–2010), the only female artist to attain distinction.
Born in Rose, Louisiana, in 1917, she and her family relocated to Chicago in 1920. A poet, author, painter, printmaker, sculptor, musician, and art instructor, Burroughs was also the cofounder of the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art, later known as the DuSable Museum of African American History.121 In response to the pervasiveness of race exclusionary practices in the visual arts, Burroughs was a leader in developing opportunities for black artists to display their art. She was one of the cofounders of the SSCAC and National Conference of Negro Art Teachers in 1956 (currently known as the National Conference of Artists); in 1957, with the cooperation of the Lake Meadows’ apartment management and shopping-mall merchants, Burroughs cofounded the Lake Meadows Outdoor Art Fair, which became one of Chicago’s Near South Side’s largest outdoor exhibitions. Skilled and effective at developing programs, institution building, fund-raising, teaching, and shepherding the careers of artists, Burroughs became a key link and generator of the 1960s black arts movement in Chicago that linked the 1930s and 1940s Black Renaissance to the next generation. Given this credit, however, Burroughs’s artistic accomplishments have been often overlooked or minimized.
Working in different mediums, Burroughs prefers to be recognized as a printmaker, including her fine Face of Africa (1965) and Warsaw (1965). The most striking features of her linocut print Warsaw are her sense of design, surface textural treatment, and the use of positive and negative space to animate and define spatial relationships between these buildings. By contrast with her modernist representational approach of buildings in Warsaw, Burroughs’s Face of Africa wood-cut print is naturalistic (see figure 10.31). Her mastery of technique gives the impression of this print being a drawing. The subject matter is a powerful statement on the augustness of black women. This is evident in Burroughs’s treatment of the female figure’s almond-shaped eyes, broad nose, thick lips, dark skin, short, kinky hair, and facial expression.
Because of her independence, conviction, and activities in support of human, civil, and women’s rights, as well as her opposition to American and European imperialism, Burroughs was considered to be a threat to “national security.” Among her alleged un-American activities was Burroughs’s unwavering support of Paul Robeson. After the U.S. government declared Robeson unpatriotic, Burroughs raised funds to have him speak and perform in Chicago. This and other activities contributed to her being declared a communist sympathizer, but unlike many African Americans having been alleged to be unpatriotic during this period, Burroughs stood fast and defended herself against these allegations and blacklisting efforts.
With the introduction of new materials and techniques during the World War II era, sculpture became free from its naturalistic tradition. Sheet metal and advanced welding techniques encouraged experimentation and ushered in the modern period of sculpture, although many Americans continued to prefer naturalism as the appropriate sculptural form to memorialize significant historical events and highly accomplished personages. Largely unaffected by the modern abstract movement in sculpture, Marion Perkins (1908–61), Joseph Kersey (1908–), and Clarence Lawson (1909–88) emerged as Chicago’s leading African American sculptors during the WPA and World War II periods.
Lawson was born in Beaumont, Texas, and Kersey in Chicago. Both studied at the Art Institute and became able sculptors. The striking feature of Lawson’s naturalistic bronze bust Head of a Negro Girl (1932) is his sensitive treatment of the sitter’s unique facial features, which evokes a charmful youthfulness. In addition to being a sculptor, Lawson also produced lyrical paintings such as Malayan Village, which recalls the Caribbean inspired scenes of Elmer Simms Campbell and Raymond Gabriel. Kersey’s noncommissioned works tended to be more expressionistic, such as St. Francis and the Bird (n.d.) and Anna (1940); these works evoke a meditative calmness. By contrast, his marble-dust bust Ellen (1936) provides an example of Kersey’s naturalistic stylistic approach.
Born in Charme, Arkansas, in 1916, Perkins left for Chicago after the death of his parents to be raised by his aunt Doris Padrone. Prior to studying with Si Gordon at the Wabash YMCA, Perkins had attained local acclaim as a self-taught sculptor. In 1940, he received his first major commission from Maurice and Bella Steuben, owners of Michigan’s South Haven Biltmore Hotel, to create outdoor sculptures of Dutch children for the hotel’s grounds. Perkins depicted the children with subtle African facial features.122 His treatment of these children was informed by the early African presence in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Bronze Age engravings and artifacts provide evidence of this presence, which include Africoid imagery of the sky deity Tyr, fertility figurines, and dancer-acrobat figurines.
By the late 1940s, Perkins’s work had become highly stylized and reflected a mature figural modernist sensibility. In his bust Man of Sorrows (1950), Perkins depicts Christ with an elongated face framed by stylized long woolly hair, sideburns, and beard (see figure 10.32). Christ’s crown consisted of adjoined stylized birds, which is symbolic of “mind of the divine healer.” According to Perkins, “This is a piece that says what I want it to say. It shows the Negro peoples’ conception of Christ as a Negro—which is as it should be.”123
Perkins was deeply committed to the equal rights, human rights, and antiwar movements. As a U.S. Postal Service employee, it was alleged his involvement in these movements violated the 1947 Federal Employees Loyalty/Security Provision of Executive Order 9835. He was terminated as a postal employee in 1948. Executive Order 9835 and other government practices to silence dissent influenced Perkins’s Dying Soldier (1952), a subtle but powerful antiwar statement (see figure 10.33).
The prone, stylized, nude male figure is reminiscent of small, pre-Columbian sculptural forms. With his head tilted backward, the figure appears to be in a deep sleep. Perkins’s treatment of the highly textured hair of the figure’s head conveys the impression of a stylized helmet. Starkly simplified, Dying Soldier is a haunting response to efforts undertaken to silence nonviolent protest against America’s jingoism.
The achievements of black artists in the early twentieth century in Chicago led to the renaissance during the 1930s and 1940s, a second wave of national prominence from 1941 to 1960, and finally, the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement, the Black Cultural Nationalist Movement, or “the African American renaissance.” As the authors of the “Chicago Documentation Project” of the 1980s conclude, “Although African American artists have been a vital part of the art scene in Chicago for many years, the achievements of these artists and the activities of their organizations are relatively unknown to even informed audiences and are rarely documented in archival collections.”124 This chapter represents the shaking of trees to gather information that might stimulate further inquiries in reconstructing Chicago’s history of African American art.
1. Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005) 26.
2. Elaine D. Woodall, “Looking Backward, Archibald J. Motley and The Art Institute of Chicago: 1914–1930,” Chicago History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 55.
3. Samuel Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music (New york: Oxford University Press, 1995), 131.
4. Jonathan Liss, “Historical Notes,” in African American Art by Modern Masters, ed. Sandra Michels Adams (Chicago: Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 2005), 31.
5. William F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” Opportunity 28, no. 1 (January 1940): 19.
6. Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 14.
7. Valencia H. Coar, A Century of Black Photographers: 1840–1960 (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1968), 11.
8. White J. Luther Pollard, a black man, was the public voice and representative of Ebony Motion Picture Company; all other aspects of the company were controlled by white persons. Although film scholars questioned this, in most books and articles on America’s early history of black independent film, Ebony continues to be considered.
9. Archibald J. Motley Jr. offered classes at his home for talented young artists and promising students at $3.00 per lesson. Richmond Barthé was one of Motley’s students.
10. These adjoined periods also fueled Chicago’s 1960s art movement, known by some as the Black Arts Movement and Chicago’s African American Cultural Renaissance.
11. Perry R. Duis, “Where Is Athens Now? The Fine Arts Building, 1898 to 1918,” Chicago History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 68–69.
12. Ibid., 69–71. Included among the art organizations that contributed to Chicago’s artistic transformation were the Chicago Art Union, Chicago Art Guild, U. H. Cosby’s Opera House, Chicago Art League, Swedish-American Art Association, Palette and Chisel Club, Bohemian Art Club, Illinois Art Association, Western Art Association, Central Art Association, Chicago Society of Artists, and the Cosmopolitan Club.
13. Jeff Lyon, “State of the Art: For 70 Years the Arts Club of Chicago Has Kept the City on the Cutting Edge of Culture,” Sunday, the Chicago Tribune Magazine, October 12, 1986, 10–18.
14. Louise deKoven Bowen, “The Colored People of Chicago,” in 100 Years at Hull-House, ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1990), 133.
15. Eric Bennett, “DuSable, Jean Baptiste Pointe,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, ed. Kwame A. Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 643.
16. Dempsey J. Travis, An Autobiography of Black Chicago (Chicago: Urban Research Institute, 1983), 10.
17. Juliet Walker, The History of Black Business in America (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1998), 176; Walter Williams, “A ‘Usable’ History Emphasizes Successes,” Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, August 22, 2001, A11; W. E. B. DuBois, ed., The Negro Artisan (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1902), 124.
18. Frederic H. Robb, The Negro in Chicago, 1779–1929 (Chicago: Intercollegiate Washington Club of Chicago, 1929), 83.
19. See reproduction of this portrait in Allan R. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 46a.
20. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 199.
21. Edward Ball, The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 242.
22. Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 195.
23. Some of these entrepreneurs and their wives were also among the SSCAC’s earliest supporters, such as Mrs. Edward Jones (unknown if she was the mother of the Jones brothers or the wife of Edward Jones) and Gonzella Motts (the wife of policy king Leon Motts, who was also the earliest black theater owner in Chicago). Policy kings Mack Jones, Ily Kelley, J. Levirt “St. Louis” Kelley, and Leon Motts, as well as some of their close associates were also early SSCAC supporters. See Nathan Thompson, Kings: The True Story of Chicago’s Policy Kings and Number Racketeers, An Informal History (Chicago: Bronzeville, 2003), 148.
24. The permanent collection included works by William Harper and William Scott. See Robb, Negro in Chicago, 83.
25. Jerome Beam, “This Man Loved Chicago: Portrait of a Dreamer,” in James Bolivar Needham, ed. Richard Norton (Chicago: Robert Henry Adams Fine Art Gallery, 1999), 3.
26. Ibid., 1. Remarkably, the first exhibition of his work occurred sixty-seven years after Needham’s death. Had Chicago’s Robert Henry Adams Fine Art Gallery not held the “James Bolivar Needham” posthumous exhibition in 1998, it is highly likely that Needham would have remained among many undiscovered Chicago African American painters. Well received, the works in this exhibition resulted in Needham being recognized as an important figure in Chicago’s early history of painting.
27. Robb, Negro in Chicago, 83.
28. “Along the Color Line,” Crisis 10, no. 5, September 1915, 215. Evidently forgotten, in 1996 when Hillary Clinton and U.S. President William Clinton unveiled Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (1885) by expatriate painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, it was reported that this new acquisition marked the first painting by a black artist to be included in the White House’s permanent art collection. Thirteen years after President Theodore Roosevelt accepted the portrait, it was reported in the September 1915 issue of Crisis, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) monthly publication: “We learn that the picture of Lincoln and So-journer [sic] Truth, reproduced on the cover of the August Crisis, is it reproduction of a painting by Lottie E. Wilson of Niles, Michigan, presented by her to President (Theodore) Roosevelt and now hanging in the permanent collection in the White House. Mrs. Moss is a colored woman.” Crisis 10, no. 5, September 1915, 215.
29. Cedric Dover, American Negro Art (Little, Brown, 1960; repr., New York: New York Graphic Society, 1969), 29.
30. Guy C. McElroy, “The Foundations for Change, 1880–1920,” in African-American Artists, 1880–1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1989), 32. Landscape with Poplars has been dated 1898 by some and 1905 by others. Perhaps, Harper executed a series on this particular scene, a practice not unusual for painters. If not, the accurate dating of this painting becomes an enormous source of confusion in documenting Harper’s artistic progression. In addition, Benjamin Brawley indicated Harper’s landscape Tile Avenue of Poplars, ca. 1903–5 was included in the Art Institute’s 1905 exhibition. According to Brawley, this work was awarded the prize of $100.00. A painting by this title is not mentioned in the literature as having been included in the 1905 exhibition. It may have been one of the two Harper paintings included in the O’Brien Galleries’ 1905 exhibition. However, since commercial galleries rarely awarded prizes, a collector may have purchased this painting at O’Brien Galleries for $100.00. Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Arts in the United States (New York: Duffield, 1930), 139.
31. Alain L. Locke, The Negro in Art (Washington, D.C.: Associate in Negro Folk Education, 1940), 132.
32. James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 89.
33. This painting is reproduced in The Barnett-Aden Collection, ed. John R. Kinard (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974), 74.
34. Renee Newman and Nancy Yousef, “Chicago Art League,” in Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, ed. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, vol. 1 (New York: Thomson Gale, 1996), 533. This Chicago Art League should not be mistaken with the defunct Chicago Art League, which was a white organization that existed from 1880 to 1885. The founding members of the former organization were nine artists, five Chicago public school teachers, an architecture instructor, a Chicago Public Library employee, and a lawyer. William Scott served as the league’s first president.
35. Before 1900, the downtown YMCA was integrated. Black men defeated a plan to segregate the YMCA, but by 1910 the plan was initiated with the understanding that wealthy white persons would donate a large share of the funding to build the Wabash YMCA. This YMCA, which opened in 1913, was considered as a symbol of “separate but equal” and became the preferred location for black society’s meetings and social events.
36. By 1927, the league’s members included Richmond Barthé, Mollie Brackett, Inez Brewster, Pauline Callis, Arthur Diggs, Elise Evans, Geraldine Glover, Claude Guess, Gas Ivory, Oscar Jordon, Nora Lee, Emma Lewis, J. D. Mayo, Mrs. John Patterson, F. W. Spann, William Webb, Carrie Williamson, Ellis Wilson, and Lawrence Wilson.
37. The Harmon Foundation, Negro Artists, an Illustrated Review of Their Achievements (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1935), 40.
38. Margaret Rose Vendryes, in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 48.
39. This exhibition included works of Edward Bannister (deceased), Aaron Douglas, John Hardrick, Edwin A. Harleston, Palmer Hayden, May Howard Jackson, Edmonia Lewis, Richard Reid, Augusta Savage, Albert Smith, Henry Tanner, Meta Warrick, and Hale Woodruff. Works by Chicago residents and itinerant artists in this exhibition were Richmond Barthé, Arthur Diggs, Elmer Simms Campbell, Charles Dawson, William Farrow, King Daniel Ganaway (photographer), William Harper (deceased), Archibald Motley, Leslie Rogers, and William Scott. See Robb, Negro in Chicago, 83, 233.
40. Susan Weininger, Thinking Modern Painting in Chicago: 1910–1940 (Chicago: Block Gallery, 1992), 3.
41. Ibid., 3.
42. Daniel Schulman, “White City” and “Black Metropolis,” in Chicago Modern 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, ed. Elizabeth Kennedy (Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004), 39.
43. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, in Civilization or Barbarism, an Authentic Anthropology, ed. Cheikh Anta Diop (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 216–17.
44. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, in The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, by Leon Poliakov (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 234–35.
45. V. F. Calverton, “The Growth of Negro Literature,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1910), 79.
46. C. J. Bulliet, cited in Daniel Schulman, “Marion Perkins: A Chicago Sculptor Rediscovered,” Selections from the Art Institute of Chicago, African American in Art 24, no.2 (1999): 269.
47. Veerle Poupeye, Caribbean Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 35–36.
48. Margaret T. G. Burroughs, “The Four Artists,” in Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans, ed. William E. Taylor and Harriet G. Warkel (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1996), 13.
49. Ibid., 166.
50. In the literature, most writers on Scott indicate the Salon d’Automne accepted this work. However, the most authoritative scholar on Scott’s career, William B. Taylor, indicated the Salon de La Societe des Artistes Francais in Paris accepted the work.
51. See Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 160–66.
52. Ironically, a white man, John Kinzie, purchased and settled on land previously owned by Frenchman Jean Lalime. Paradoxically, Lalime purchased the property from DuSable in 1800.
53. Harriet G. Warkel, “Image and Identity: The Art of William E. Scott, John W. Hardrick and Hal Woodruff,” in Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 37.
54. These murals remained as originally painted until a 2006 fire destroyed the church. Prior to this fire, the murals served as the touchstone for religious mural painting.
55. Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 165.
56. Charles Dawson, quoted in Roberta Toas Blasenstein, “I’ve Decided to Undo the Stereotype,” Christian Science Monitor, December 10, 1969, 29.
57. Barbara Parry, “Painter Charles C. Dawson Has Been Finding Beauty in Black Subjects for 81 Years,” Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, July 19, 1970, 8.
58. Charles Dawson, quoted in Blasenstein, “I’ve Decided,” 29.
59. Charles C. Dawson, Touching The Fringes of Greatness, an Autobiography, unpublished manuscript, n.d., Archives of American Art, Charles C. Dawson Collection, DuSable Museum, Chicago, Illinois, 369–71.
60. Ibid., 377.
61. After developing a successful line of beauty products for African Americans, Annie T. Malone opened Poro College in St. Louis in 1917. In 1930, Malone relocated Poro to Chicago. She was one of the first black female millionaires. The name PORO was derived from that of a secret African society in Sierra Leone. Among black Americans, PORO was one of America’s most popular hair-care products. In his 1997 book, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, Richard J. Powell is one of the earliest known art historians who mentioned Dawson’s having introduced African symbols in his commissioned works. 63.
62. The dioramas were conceived and designed by Dawson. However, the execution of the design was under the supervision of diorama specialist and architect Erick Lundgren. WPA Illinois Art Project artists assisted in the actual construction of the dioramas. Deemed to be a significant work, the federal government donated the dioramas to Tuskegee Institute (currently, Tuskegee University). Damaged en route to Tuskegee, in 1944 Dawson was contracted to restore and supervise the installation of the repaired dioramas on Tuskegee’s campus. He was also contracted to establish Tuskegee’s Museum of Negro Art and Culture. At this time, Tuskegee had the Blondiau art collection, which consisted of African, African American, and Mayan art.
63. Parry, “Painter Charles C. Dawson,” 8.
64. While labor recruiters were a factor in stimulating the pre–World War I inflow of southern black Americans into Chicago, the most critical factors according to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton were “testing” and migrants letters to “folks back home about the wonderful North.” St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 58.
65. Archibald J. Motley, quoted in Jontyle Theresa Robinson, “The Art of Archibald J. Motley Jr.,” in The Art of Archibald J. Motley, ed. Robinson and Wendy Greenhouse (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1991), 9.
66. Edward Alden Jewell, “A Negro Artist Plumbs the Negro Soul,” New York Times Magazine, March 25, 1928, sec. H, 8.
67. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 267.
68. Panoramic painters who may have influenced him include Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Edwin Church, and Chicago’s Henry Arthur Elkins. The artists who had commercial success include Paul Colin, Miguel Covarrubias, and Winold Reiss.
69. Hayes and Pious were from the south and experienced extremely harsh conditions. Although Hayes had attained international acclaim as a tenor, Pious admired his uncompromising integrity and courage in challenging segregationist practices. These challenges could have easily ended Hayes’s successful career. For example, in 1926 he was contracted to perform in concert at Baltimore’s Lyric Theater. Because of the Lyric’s segregated policy, Hayes refused to perform. Rather than canceling the concert, the Lyric’s management suspended its seating policy for this sold-out concert.
70. While in New York, Pious illustrated publications by Charles Christopher Seifert, an African and African American historian who was known as “Professor.” One of his illustrations for Seifert was The Hall of Karnak, n.d., in which Pious Africanized all the figures on the columns. These works recall those completed by Dawson.
71. Harmon Foundation, Negro Artists, 52.
72. Ibid., 58.
73. A trade product, Carborundum, is a rough granular product of carbon and silicone and is used for grinding and polishing. Thrash used the crystals to resurface used lithographic stones. Through the use of various grades of these crystals, a range of tints and tonal variations is possible to create a print. See Leslie King Hammond, “Black Printmakers and the WPA,” in Alone in a Crowd: Prints of the 1930s–40s by African American Artists, ed. M. Stephen Doherty (New York: American Federation of Art, 1993), 13.
74. Later, his depiction of the L’Ouverture was used by the Haitian government as the frontispiece for a new book. In 2006, Barthé’s busts of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1928) and Booker T. Washington (1928) were discovered in a storage box in a Richmond, Virginia, high school.
75. Due either to an oversight or by the time The Breakaway: Dance Figurine (1929) was added to the works to be exhibited, the four-page exhibition catalog had gone to press. As a result, this work was not listed as having been included in the exhibition. However, the work was mentioned in the Associated Negro Press’s June 11, 1930, release.
76. In 1931 and 1933, the first and second one-man exhibitions at New York City’s Caz-Delbo Gallery received rave reviews from New York’s art critics; for the period of 1933 to 1945, his works were included in four annual Whitney Museum of American Arts group exhibitions; and in 1940–41, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Prior to being awarded these fellowships, Barthé had become the first African American artist to be represented in the Whitney Museum collection; between 1933 and 1936, the museum purchased three Barthé works: Blackberry Woman, Comedian, and African Dancer. Thereafter, his works were included in the permanent collections of other museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Museum of Art; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For a brief period during World War II, Barthé was America’s best-known sculptor. The U.S. government enlisted Barthé and other highly recognizable black American artists to counter Germany’s and Japan’s campaigns focusing on America’s segregationist practices to dissuade black Americans from supporting the war effort. By profiling selected black Americans, the U.S. government attempted to convey the impression of America having made “dramatic progress” toward constructing a society without race preferment. As a part of this campaign, the U.S. Office of War Information produced a film on Barthé that was shown throughout this country and abroad. As a result, printed material was in great demand, as well as requests for numerous guest appearances.
77. The Academy of Fine Arts and Frederick Mizer Academy of Art continued to have admission policies that forbade the enrollment of black students. Not as aggressively as labor recruiters attempting to attract black southerners to relocate to Chicago where employment was plentiful, when the new Bauhaus school was founded in 1937, Hungarian-born Bauhaus theorist and practitioner Laszlo Moholy-Nagy sought to attract African American students. Founded in Weimer in 1919 and relocated to Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus sought to apply cubism aesthetic concerns to architecture, interior design, and art. Under Adolph Hitler, the Bauhaus school was closed in 1933. Initially, Chicago’s new Bauhaus school had a short life. Not dissuaded, Moholy-Nagy founded the School of Design in 1939. Reorganized, the school was incorporated in 1952 as the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Prior to this reorganization and name change, Eldzier Cotor, Charles Sebree, and Charles White were among the earliest black students who studied at the School of Design.
78. Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 407.
79. On October 25, 1938, the first formal committee to establish a center on Chicago’s near South Side was held at the Chicago Urban League. Chaired by businessman Golden B. Darby, the committee developed a fund-raising plan to acquire a building to serve as an art center. The fund-raising plan included corporate solicitations, concerts, lectures, card parties, exhibitions, and “A Mile of Dimes,” which involved soliciting the general public for a ten-cent donation. In 1939, the committee held its first Annual Artists and Models Ball at the Savoy Ballroom. The event netted $5,000, which was used as the down payment to acquire the Charles Comiskey family’s mansion at 3831 South Michigan Avenue.
80. Bernard Goss and Margaret T. G. Burroughs, quoted in George J. Mavigliano and Richard A. Lawson, The Federal Art Project in Illinois, 1935–1943 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 67.
81. Anna M. Tyler, “Planting and Maintaining a ‘Perennial Garden’ Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 4 (1994): 35.
82. Dorothy Odenheimer, “Art News from Chicago,” Chicago Sun, May 1942.
83. “Negro Temple of Art,” Newsweek, May 19, 1941, 67.
84. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in Margaret T. G. Burroughs, “Saga of Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center (1938–1943),” in The South Side Community Art Center 50th Anniversary, 1941–1991, ed. Burroughs (Chicago: South Side Community Art Center, 1991), 10.
85. “Negro Temple of Art,” Newsweek, May 19, 1941, 67.
86. Ibid., 68.
87. Ibid., 7 and 110. This writer’s inspection of the official WPA/FAP final employment list revealed only twenty-three black artists were employed by IAP.
88. Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Project in Illinois, 68.
89. Ibid., 68.
90. William Carter, quoted in Ron Grossman, “A Black Artist’s Roots Recalling the ‘Renaissance’ of the Depression,” Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, April 2, 1986, sec. 5, 3.
91. Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Project in Illinois, 199–201.
92. Ibid., 68. Under the job classification of professional and technical artist, the average monthly salary was $94.00 with a maximum of $103.40 to produce art unsupervised. The average monthly and maximum salaries for skilled artists were $85.00 and $93.50 respectively. Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Project in Illinois, 203. For comparative purposes, the average monthly salary earned by black Chicagoans employed under WPA’s non-arts work projects was $55.00.
93. Carter, quoted in Grossman, “Black Artist’s Roots,” sec. 5, 3.
94. Black and white reproductions of both paintings are in Dover, American Negro Art, 177, plate 45.
95. Ibid., 52.
96. Ibid., 1.
97. Located near Thirty-Fourth and Wabash Avenue, the Settlement House was opened in 1919 by Ada S. McKinley as a reentry, readjustment, and skills-training center for returning World War I black soldiers. Later, the Settlement House expanded its community outreach services as a response to many unmet social and cultural needs. Paragon Studio was located at Thirty-Third and South Michigan Avenue. Under George Neal’s leadership, it operated quite similar to an art academy.
98. Margaret T. G. Burroughs, “He Will Always Be a Chicago Artist to Me,” Freedomways 20, no.3 (1980): 151; Tyler, “Planting and Maintaining,” 31.
99. Charles White quoted in Mary Hewitt, “A Tribute to Charles White,” Black Arts, an International Quarterly 4, no.1 (1980): 36.
100. Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 410.
101. Charles White, cited in ibid.
102. Lizzette LeFalle-Coliins, “African-American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School,” in In the Spirit of Resistance African-American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School, ed. LeFalle-Collins and Shifra M. Goldman (New York: American Federation of Art, 1996), 55.
103. Information on his life and works are included in over 224 books, portfolios, catalogs, and films; and the illustrated feature article in the 1962 silver anniversary American Artists issue was “The Remarkable Draughtsmanship of Charles White.” Between 1960 and 1965, Syracuse University established the Charles White Collection; at the Leipzig, Germany, International Graphic Exhibition, he was awarded the Gold Medal recipient; Ebony magazine’s August 1966 issue established a precedent by reproducing White’s drawing J’accuse! No. 10 on its cover rather than a full-color photographic image, which had been the magazine’s tradition; New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased White’s available etchings; and the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired Sarah and Maternity from White’s Wanted Poster Series.
104. Sinclair Lewis, Kingsblood Royal (New York: Random House, 1947), 107; also cited in Elton C. Fax, 17 Black Artists (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 94.
105. Ralph Pearson, Critical Appreciation Courses II: The Renaissance in the USA (Nyack, N.Y.: Ralph Pearson’s Design Workshop, 1950), 147–48.
106. Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 275–77.
107. Eldzier Cortor, quoted in “Eldzier Cortor: The Long Consistent Road,” in Three Masters: Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee Smith, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., ed. Corrine L. Jennings (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1995), 15.
108. There Cortor became aware of Haitians’ resentment of the occupying American forces. Reportedly, the invasion and occupation were necessary because Haiti posed a significant threat to America as a potential staging ground for a foreign power, such as Germany to invade America. In addition, anti-American sentiments among Haitians posed a potential danger of them disrupting the day-to-day operations of the newly opened Panama Canal.
109. Eldzier Cortor, quoted in Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 277.
110. “19 Young American Artists,” Life, March 29, 1950, 82.
111. Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator, ed. and completed by Avis Berman (New York: Arcade, 2006), xxi.
112. Ruth A. Stewart, WPA and the Black Artist (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978), 6. A black and white reproduction of Pool Room is on page 16.
113. Aside from Ballerina, another fine example of his abstract paintings is Musicians (n.d). Unfortunately, the whereabouts of this painting is unknown. However, it can be viewed on the Visioncast video “William Carter Art.”
114. William Carter quoted in Grossman, “Black Artist’s Roots,” 3.
115. Ibid., 3.
116. Because of the quality of his collection, museum curators and discerning private collectors, such as Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones, often consulted with and purchased works from McBride’s collection. His entrepreneurial spirit possibly began with a verbal agreement between Al Capone and McBride. Capone offered to pay twenty-five cents for each empty glass bottle McBride could collect and deliver undamaged. McBride enlisted the help of friends at a per-bottle rate of a penny. Courtney Challos, “William McBride, Artist, Collector, Force for WPA,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 2000, n.p.
117. A black and white reproduction of this work is in Locke, Negro in Art, 171.
118. Known among Black Chicagoans as a “Race Man,” in 1914 dePriest became Chicago’s earliest black city council alderman, and in 1928 he was the first elected African American from the north to the U.S. Congress. Rather than as an obsequious and powerless politician appealing to the conscious of white colleagues, Goss portrayed the congressman vigorously making a point. Through his facial features and with arm raised to pound the podium to accentuate a particular point, dePriest appears to be a politician of unshakeable resolve in representing Chicago’s first and second predominantly black wards.
119. Irene V. Clark, cited in African Art, the Diaspora and Beyond (Chicago: Daniel Texidor Parker, 2004), 72.
120. Samella Lewis, Art: African American (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 162.
121. In 1903, John Griffin, a successful white contractor, built the Griffin family mansion and carriage house at 3806 South Michigan Avenue. During the 1930s, black Pullman porters acquired this property, and the mansion became the Quincy Club. While this private club provided lodging for black Pullman porters, it was also known for its social events and dances. The club’s rear carriage house became the home of Charles and Margaret Burroughs. When the Quincy Club closed, the property was acquired by the Burroughs. In 1961, the mansion’s first floor became the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art. Because too many people presumed the museum was affiliated with Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony magazine, the Burroughs agreed to change the name of the museum. The new name is DuSable Museum of African American History and Art, America’s oldest museum devoted to African American history and culture.
The SSCAC was located diagonally across the street from the museum. The SSCAC’s board of directors was of the opinion that by including “art” in the museum’s name, it posed a conflict with the SSCAC’s mission, objectives, and goals. The board requested and the Burroughs agreed to remove “art” from the museum’s name. This notwithstanding, over the years, the Burroughs acquired a collection of art that provides a snapshot of the richness of black visual culture.
122. See examples in Daniel Schulman, “Marion Perkins: A Chicago Sculptor Rediscovered,” Selections from the Art Institute of Chicago, African American Art 24, no. 2 (1999): 226–27.
123. Marion Perkins, quoted in ibid., 103.
124. In 1985, the Archives of American Art initiated the “Chicago Documentation Project.” The purpose of this project was to gather information from original archival collections on Chicago’s pre–World War II history of art. It was anticipated by renaissance adherents that the archives’ research project would provide confirmation that Chicago had indeed experienced a pre–World War II renaissance. Presented in 1987 at “The Coming of Modernism to Chicago Symposium; the Archives,” its findings revealed that Chicago had a rich but little known pre–World War II history of art. With the exception of a panel that included Margaret T. G. Burroughs, the symposium presentations conveyed the impression that African American artists were inconsequential in the formulation of Chicago’s rich early history of art. Unconvinced by the archives’ findings, Burroughs, Anna M. Tyler, and Sophie Wessel met with the Chicago Documentation Project coordinator Betty Blum. These meetings and other factors contributed to the archives initiating the “African American Artists in Chicago Interviews, 1988–1989” oral-history project. The aim of this project was to gather information on Chicago’s black artists and their organizations by interviewing six personages: painter, printmaker, and cofounder of the DuSable Museum of African American History Burroughs; painter William Carter; artist and Ebony magazine art director Fitzhugh Dinkins; painter Frederick Jones; painter and collector of art and memorabilia William McBride; and designer, design-firm owner, and first black president of the Art Directors Club of Chicago Leroy Winbush. In their 1989 “Midwest” report, Blum and the Archives’ Midwest regional director Judith Gustafson wrote, “The Chicago Documentation Project, which began in 1985, has begun gathering information on this [Chicago’s pre–World War II history of African American art] through a series of six oral history interviews” (emphasis added).
The verb has begun suggests the Chicago Documentation Project’s inquiry was not as exacting as previously purported; the term also added credence to the concerns of Burroughs, Tyler, and Wessel. See Judith A. Gustafson and Betty Blum, “Midwest,” Archives of American Art Journal 29, nos. 3 and 4 (1989): 71.
