Douglas, Aaron (1899–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Tribal Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist and educator often referred to as the father of "Black Art." He was a leading figure of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas is best known for his work of the 1920s and 1930s, which featured abstracted silhouettes combined with African tribal art and ancient Egyptian profile heads. European artists like Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso had been influenced by African tribal art for decades, but Douglas was among the first African American artists to blend African art with modern abstraction. Douglas produced illustrations for such magazines as The Crisis, Survey Graphic and Opportunity along with co-founding the short-lived Fire!! A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. He also illustrated books by several well-known literary figures, including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He is recognized for several public murals, including the Birth o’ the Blues at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Evolution of Negro Dance at the Harlem YMCA, and Aspects of Negro Life at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. As a professor of fine art Douglas encouraged generations of African American artists to create their own modern Black aesthetic.

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
George Schuyler ◽  
Focus Point ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.

Atomic Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka's Compulsive Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Kristin George Bagdanov
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
The Cold War

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

Negotiating the Aims of African American Adult Education: Race and Liberalism in the Harlem Experiment, 1931–1935

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Amato Nocera
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Adult Education ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Experimental Program ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
African American Adult ◽  
American Adult ◽  
Liberal Citizenship

This paper examines an “experimental” program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)—who believed in the value of liberal adult education for democratic citizenship—and several prominent black reformers who led the program. I argue that the program represented a negotiation between these two groups over whether the black culture, politics, and protest that had developed in 1920s Harlem could be deradicalized and incorporated within the funder's “elite liberalism”—an approach to philanthropy that emphasized ideological neutrality, scholarly professionalism, and political gradualism. In his role as the official evaluator, African American philosopher Alain Locke insisted that it could, arguing that the program, and its occasionally Afrocentric curriculum, aligned with elite liberal ideals and demonstrated the capacity for a broader definition of (historically white) liberal citizenship. While the program was ultimately abandoned in the mid-1930s, the efforts of Locke and other black reformers helped pave the way for a future instantiation of racial incorporation: the intercultural education movement of the mid-twentieth century.

On the Blackness of Post-Blackness

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-60
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Art ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
African American Art ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Black Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

This chapter argues that Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbormirrors post-Black art’s emphasis on simultaneously rejecting and embracing the racial categorization of African American art. In doing so, Whitehead’s novel represents a qualified liberation for African American artists that optimistically imagines a freedom from racial categorizations that is still rooted in them. This chapter analyzes Whitehead’s novel in the context of the competing definitions of post-Blackness offered by Touré in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? as well as in the original formulation by Thelma Golden. Employing a framework of “racial individualism,” the chapter argues that a loosening sense of linked fate has led to the privileging of individual agency over Black identity. In doing so, post-Blackness serves to discursively liberate African American artists from any prescriptive ideal of what constitutes black art without implying either a desire or intent to not address issues of race.

From the Ground Up

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-108
Author(s):  
Marilisa Jiménez García
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
African American ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Public Library ◽  
York Public Library ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
History Of

This chapter centers on the education and role of “ethnic” librarians during the founding and professionalization of children’s literature and librarianship at the New York Public Library, tracing a legacy back to Afro-Boricua public pedagogies in Puerto Rico. This chapter also analyzes the centrality of Blackness and activism project of Latinx children’s literature as a US tradition grounded in the work of librarians of color, interweaving the stories of Pura Belpré and Arturo Schomburg, both key figures in the Harlem Renaissance and history of African American and AfroLatinx literature.

A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present.

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Barbara Chase-Riboud ◽  
Romare Bearden ◽  
Harry Henderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Scenes and Scenarios

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koritha Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Cultural Artifacts ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
Historical Moment

This chapter argues that blacks living during lynching's height accurately read the discourses and practices of their historical moment, and their cultural artifacts reflect their insights. Namely, the plays by black dramatists contain specific characterizations of the nature of lynching, and they inspire black community practices that enable African Americans to continue to interpret their surroundings accurately. In an environment where their extermination was said to make the nation safe, African Americans perceived the truth behind the façade—that lynching was really master/piece theater, designed to reinforce racial hierarchy. African American artists therefore offered scripts that encouraged their communities to continue to rehearse an understanding of themselves as full citizens.

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