Edward Bannister

With his income secure, Bannister continued his art studies and learned to paint. He joined several groups promoting cultural activities and became an advocate of rights for the Union Black soldiers during the Civil War. His first commission was in 1854 and between 1863 to 1865 he studied art at the Lowell Institute where he also studied photography and had a successful business as a photo enlarger. In 1871 he and his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island where he became an established painter of land and seascapes. Bannister’s work was in demand at very high prices. He went on to become one of the founders of the Providence Art Club which has emerged into today’s Rhode Island School of Design. In 1876 he became the first African-American to win a national award, winning a medal at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, which also included the work of artist Edmonia Lewis.

Richmond Barthe'

Barthe’ never became very involved in the social movements and activism of the time. He focused his work on the personality of people, especially dancers. Known for sculpture that utilized African principles of design, he helped to establish the image of the “New Negro” with his regal, elongated body forms. He excelled at capturing motion in clay. Barthe’s work appeared in The Crisis and he was offered his first one-man show, an offer that he would decline. Barthe’ went on to study at the Arts Students League in New York. In 1930 he exhibited at the Women’s City Club and would later receive the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship (1929, 1930) and a Guggenheim award (1940, 1941). His first one- man show was in 1931. It was held in New York at the Caz-Delbo Gallery. The Harmon Gallery featured his work in their 1929, 1931, and 1933 exhibits. Barthe’ also exhibited at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair with Henry Ossawa Tanner and Archibald Motley, and he received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Xavier University in 1934. In 1946, he completed portraits of prominent African-Americans George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, which now hangs in the serpentine portico of the Hall of Fame in New York. Barthe’ also had a great attraction to dance. His Blackberry Dancer (1932) and African Dancer (1933) are among the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His first commissions were a bust of Henry Ossawa Tanner and Touissaint L’Overture, the latter now appears on Haitian coins. Although Barthe’ was one of the most publicized black artists in the nation, he was never financially secure. As aesthetic interest moved toward Abstract Expressionism, he found himself abandoned by current trends. Because he was not in the WPA and rarely visited Harlem he also found himself isolated from other African-American artists. He soon fell into a “crisis” because he no longer fit in. After living in Europe for a while Barthe’ found himself growing older and very alone. In 1977 he moved to Pasadena, California, where he met artist Charles White. Barthe’s life had become impoverished. He was denied social security because artists were not yet considered "employed." By their rules he had never worked. James Garner, an actor on the series "The Rockford Files" learned of Barthe’s problem through Nanette Turner, a writer who had previously interviewed him. Garner decided to meet Barthe’ and the two became friends. Garner paid Barthe’s rent and with the help of others got a street named "Barthe’ Drive". This effort would only slightly lift his morale. Thirty scholarships for the fine arts were also offered in his name. In appreciation, he created a portrait head of Garner. This is believed to be his last sculpture. Barthe’ died March 5, 1989. He willed his work to Garner who then turned it over to the Museum of African-American Art in Los Angeles and the Schomberg Center in New York.

Margaret Burroughs

She was a founder of the first African-American History and Culture Museum in the United States, the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago, the Chicago South Side Community Art Center, and the National Conference of Negro Artists. Burroughs emphasizes the role of African heritage in the American experience in her work. She has traveled to Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, Mexico City. While in Mexico she studied at the Esmerelda School of Art and Taller de Grafica under Leopoldo Mendez of the Diego Rivera circle. The Mexican muralists use of social commentary became a tool for her. Burroughs is also an accomplished poet and author of children’s books. She has taught at the elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels including a position at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Catlett

She considered black people imprisoned socially, economically, politically, and aesthetically. Her sculpture and prints are deliberately intended to awaken black people to their potential. "Art for me must develop from a necessity within my people. It must answer a question, or wake somebody up, or give a shove in the right direction-our liberation," she said.

Eldzier Cortor

In 1935, having saved up tuition money, he enrolled as a full-time student. His art history teacher, Kathleen Blackshear, had the biggest influence on his life. One day she led the class to the Field Museum on Michigan Avenue and introduced the students to African Art. This changed his focus in cartoons and began his career as a painter. Blackshear also helped him secure a scholarship for another year and qualify for employment with the WPA Arts project. On the WPA project he met George Neal, who organized a group of young African-Americans including himself, Charles White and Charles Sebree and urged them to go into the streets of Chicago's South Side and paint the daily activities of life in a documentary way. During this time Cortor's met many artists from all facets of the fine arts. Dancer, Katherine Dunham, inspired him to focus his paintings on the beauty and grace of dance. He also studied the Black Sea Islanders off the Carolina & Georgia coast that spoke a dialect called "Gullah". He was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship in 1940, which enabled him to visit the islands and focus his study and paintings. After returning to the United States, he decided to move to New York to gain greater technical knowledge of his craft. Here he was introduced to printmaking. In this period, he began to work on studies of tall, nude black women. In these works you could see his exposure of African sculpture, elongating the figure and working in cylindrical forms. Their faces celebrated African characteristics. In 1946, LIFE Magazine published one of his full-length seminude female figures. This won him a Guggenheim Fellowship. He used the fellowship to visit Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti. Of the three he favored Haiti and spent the most time there. He learned patois and taught drawing at the Haitian Centre' d'Art in Port-au-Prince. When Cortor returned to New York his worked was undermined when the WPA project went under fire. Senator Joseph McCarthy made accusations of several groups being communists. Because of this the WPA project suffered severely. Cortor moved to Mexico and strengthened his lithography work. After the rise and fall of the Abstract Expressionists milieu he came back to the U. S. His focus was on becoming a "complete artist" and he continued to strive for technical excellence. He continued his work with African-American women as subject matter and helped to redefine black femininity and beauty.

Aaron Douglas

During the 1920’s the Harlem Renaissance was at its peak. Images of positive and mobile African-Americans were vital. Marie Frazier, part of the Evans show, is an example of Douglas’ portrayal of black life in the middle class. Images like this were critical to the foundation of the New Negro Movement. Douglas’ work satisfied the need for racially representative images. He portrayed African dance, postures, and consciousness. His work avoided the stereotypical images and offered a face to go along with the voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas’ cover for Fire!, a radical black journal of the 1920’s that only produced one scandalous issue, is considered one of his best. Some distinguished Harlem artists, including Douglas created the journal, to fight back against the limits placed on artistic freedom. Douglas established the Department of Art at Fisk University in 1931. His mural in Cravath Hall at Fisk represents a panorama of the history of black people in the new world. He became known as a storyteller who painted the common people. He painted the likes of Mary Macleod Bethune, Charles S. Johnson, and John W. Work and completed many murals chronicling African- American history. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 1944. Aaron Douglas died of natural causes in his home on February 2, 1979. He was 79 years old.

Robert S. Duncanson

William Sonntag, a landscape painter, became Duncanson’s mentor, teaching him painterly techniques and the philosophy of transcendentalism. Duncanson then went into business as a photographer, a skill he learned from James P. Ball, the African-American pioneer of the daguerreotype. Painting continued to be Duncanson’s first love and the most admired of his work may be the murals he painted for the Longworth family mansion, now the Taft Museum in Ohio. Under the sponsorship of the Anti-Slavery League, Duncanson traveled to the art centers of Italy, France, Scotland (his father’s homeland), and England and continued his work in landscape painting. By the 1860’s he had received royal patronage from the Queen of England & the King of Sweden, becoming the first African-American landscape painter to gain national and international praise.

William Harper



Clementine Hunter

Hunter married Charlie Dupree and gave birth to two children. Dupree died in 1914. Ten years after his death Hunter married Emanuel Hunter. She bore him five more children. She never learned to read and write and spent a lot of time working the fields picking cotton. She also took home washing and ironing that she would have to bring back the next morning in addition to taking care of her invalid husband. In 1938, she met Francois Mignon, Miss Cammie’s literary assistant. He would become her lifelong friend and supporter. At age 54, Hunter told Mignon she could "mark" a picture if she "sat her mind to it". He gave her some paint and she began to do what would be defined as American folk art. She continued to get paints from visiting artists and started to sell her work. She would get twenty-five cents for her early pieces, a price she thought too high. In the 1940’s she met writer and artist James Register who would help her receive a grant in 1945. In 1945 she also exhibited in the New Orleans Arts & Crafts Show. She would continue to receive many honors and awards including being made an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts by Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Her name is represented on the famous Walk of Stars in Natchitoches. Clementine Hunter died at the age of 100 on January 1, 1988. Her body rests near Melrose Plantation beside her friend Francois Mignon.

Sargent Johnson

While at Sisters of Charity Orphanage in Boston he attended public school and worked in the school’s hospital. He began painting while recovering from a long illness. The events that follow in Johnson’s life are sketchy and largely undocumented. He reportedly left Boston and went to Chicago to live with relatives. Later, he moved to San Francisco, California. Johnson began studies at A. W. Best School of Art in drawing and painting. In 1915, at age 28, he married Pearl Lawson, a woman of African- American, English, and Creole descent. Johnson decided that he could now totally devote himself to sculpture. At age 32, he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts with two of the best known sculptors on the West Coast, Ralph Stackpole, whom he worked with for two years, and Beniamino Bufano, whom he worked with for one year. In San Francisco his influences differed from East Coast artists. While East Coast artists work reflected European aesthetics, West Coast artists were exposed to the arts Asia, Northwest Coast Native Americans, Aztec and Mayan cultures in Mexico, and Central America. West Coast sculpture was more decorative, simple and static, highly polished and worked over. Johnson and Bufano also adopted the practice of coloring their sculpture. Johnson had become aware of his African-American heritage through discussions about Alain Locke’s book The New Negro and the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. He was fascinated by new techniques and was always experimenting with new ideas. The birth of his daughter, Pearl Adele, in 1923, redirected Johnson’s work. He became fascinated with children and this was reflected in his work. In 1925, his study Pearl received a medal at the San Francisco Art Exhibition. In the 1928 and 1929 Harmon shows he won the Otto H. Kahn prize and a bronze medal, respectively. He was elected to the San Francisco Art Association in 1932 and went on to be elected to its Council Board. In 1935, he created what is considered his greatest work, Forever Free. This piece won the 1935 San Francisco Art Association medal for sculpture. Johnson was one of the first artists hired for the Works Progress Administration in California in 1936. He began as senior sculptor and advanced to unit supervisor. The Abraham Rosenburg Scholarship in 1944 and 1949 allowed Johnson to make extended trips to Mexico. In 1958 he visited Shinto shrines in Japan and studied Japanese art. He remained a very productive and successful artist until his death. On October 10, 1967, at the age of eighty, Johnson died of a heart attack. His impact in the art world remained strong and he was given his first one-man show in 1971.

Jacob Lawrence

He dropped out of school due to frustrations and found odd jobs to earn himself some money. He began drawing at a local community center. Lawrence never really received any formal training, but instead was allowed to follow his natural instinct. It was these instinct that led him to fame. Lawrence sums up his feelings by saying this, "My pictures express my life and experience. I paint the things I know about, the things I have experiences. The things I have experienced extend into my national, racial, and class group. So I paint the American scene."

Hughie Lee-Smith



Edmonia Lewis

One of Edmonia’s biggest challenges was the completion of a bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the leader of the all black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regimen of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, after his death. She was able to complete the bust, which was executed in marble, using her memory and his photograph. With the consent of the Shaw family, she was allowed to sell plaster reproductions of the bust. She used the money to help raise funds for the underpaid black Union soldiers. Politics continued to move her. Forever Free which is considered he best known work was inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, Edmonia moved to Italy to study and work with sculptors and artists that were interested in the reproduction of neoclassical art forms. She settled in Rome and was able to meet many prominent American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Edmonia’s greatest fear was that people would say she did not create her work and to prevent this she allowed observers into her studio and did all the physical work herself. She continued to gain international acclaim for her work. Her last known exhibitions were the US Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia of 1876 and Chicago of 1878. In Philadelphia she caused much of the excitement with her piece The Death of Cleopatra (1875). Edmonia Lewis was reported as still living in Rome as of 1911 but the date and location of her death remain uncertain.

Archibald Motley

In 1924, Edith Granzo, a woman of German descent who lived across the street from Motley, became his wife. Soon after, he enrolled into the Art Institute of Chicago. He completed his four years by working odd jobs and earning twenty-five cents a day from his father. Of his teachers, he felt he learned the most from George Walcott who taught him “composition with color”. Under his tutelage Motley learned to compose by gridding his canvas and coloring a large area. Then he would select and color small and intermediate spaces to intensify his color values. In the summer of 1917 he became a porter on the trains that his father worked. He was able to sketch the different landscapes of major cities and their social conditions. During this period Motley began to paint. He would use old laundry bags as canvases. He graduated from the Art Institute in 1918 and was unable to find work in the art field. In 1921, artist Joseph Tonanek convinced him to submit a recently completed portrait of his mother to an exhibition. Motley was afraid of failure, and was not confident with this decision but the show’s good response gave him the assurance he needed. In 1923 he began to show more of his pieces. His work attracted the attention of Count Chabrier, a French critic, and in 1925 he published two articles about Motley in Revue du Vrai et du Beau, a Paris art magazine. Motley was gaining the success he had hoped for. He was the first African-American to be elected Director of the Chicao No-Jury Society of Art. Robert B. Harsche, the Art Institute Director, helped him get Mending Socks, which is painted on a laundry bag, into the 1927 exhibition “Paintings and Watercolors by Living American Artists” at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. He was awarded the “most popular” prize. Harsche also helped him get into the Harmon Exhibition in 1928 where his Black Belt won the gold medal. The New York Times published an article on Motley and his work entitled “A Negro Artists Plumbs the Negro Soul”. As a result of the article he sold 22 of the 26 paintings in his first one-man show earning between $6000 and $7000 dollars. At 37, he was now able to devote his life to his work. He taught a Sunday drawing class for young artists. One his students was sculptor Richmond Barthe’. After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929, Motley went to study in Europe. He isolated himself from other black artists and never made an effort to contact Tanner. He returned to the United States after the onslaught of the Great Depression and was eventually made a supervisor on the Works Progress Administration.
In 1945, Motley suffered a great depression of his own and was unable to paint after his wife died. Their only child, Archie, was only fourteen years old. His nephew, Willard Motley, having become a prominent novelist, urged Motley to visit him in Mexico. Here, he found himself renewed. He would return to his Chicago neighborhood to find conditions of life unacceptable. After moving he continued to be a successful painter. Motley died on January 16, 1981. President Jimmy Carter honored Motley the year after and his work was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. His work continues to be highly respected today.

Charles Ethan Porter



Henry Ossawa Tanner

After realizing that he could not sell his work, Tanner moved to Atlanta in 1888 and opened a small photo shop, which would eventually fail. For a brief time he taught at Clark College and in the summer of 1988 he moved to Highland, North Carolina but returned to Atlanta that fall. As the state of the south began to wear on him, Tanner decided to move to Europe in search of refuge from bigotry and injustice. With the help of the Hartzell family who bought his entire collection in 1890, Tanner found himself in Paris where he could be judged on his artistic merit and not by his race. Tanner enrolled in the Academie Julien, a popular private art school, where he acquired the skill and expertise of French Academic painting. In 1893, after a visit to Philadelphia, Tanner was convinced he could not fight racial prejudice and he returned to Paris. He began to paint primarily landscape and religious paintings. Finding the place he would call home, Tanner would go on to win an honorable mention at the Paris Salon in 1895, be entered into the collection at the Louvre, and win a silver medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. As he gained critical and international acclaim Tanner would return to the United States in 1908 to have his first one man show. An exhibition of his religious paintings was held in New York at the American Art Galleries. Tanner was known for his use of true subjects and self expression. His history became evident in his work. Bible stories and scenes were his subjects and his work brought out their spiritual meanings. He made numerous trips to the Middle East to study the actual people and places of the Bible. In 1918, Tanner worked for the American Red Cross Department of Public Information in France during World War II. He was given permission to sketch in the Military Advanced Zone. His work was primarily of African-Americans. Tanner had become a leader of the Expatriate American Art Community. Henry Ossawa Tanner would go on to accomplish many things. In 1925, he was featured alongside W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglass, and Samuel Taylor-Coleridge as a model of African-American genius in the historic African- American journal The Crisis. In 1923, he was made honorary Chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor and he became a full Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1927. In May of 1937, Tanner died in his home in Paris.

Alma Thomas

By 1964 Thomas could construct an image almost entirely through small dabs of paint spread completely across the painting surface. Her name and work became synonymous with the Washington Watercolor Painters of the 1970's. Thomas' greatest accomplishment may have been becoming the First African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, six years before her death.

James Wells

He was a master of the fine white-line woodcut, heightening the effects of this delicate, difficult technique with his strong sense of design and ability to express emotion. His expressionistic use of brilliant color has increased the impact of his woodcuts and lithographs, producing effects related to stained glass yet very different because of his intense style. In contrast to the looseness and abstract quality of much work since the 1950s, Wells uses strong color, tight design, and a focus on human dilemmas. During the 1950s, when Wells won major prizes for paintings and prints on biblical themes, many people believed that was his only subject matter. Actually, there are few subjects concerning the African American experience that he has not dealt with poignantly. James Wells died on January 20, 1993, at Howard University Hospital in Washington D.C. In the field of printmaking he was a legend, both as an artist and as a teacher.

Charles White

One of the finest draftsmen in contemporary America, White was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1972, the second African-American to be so recognized since the 1927 election of Henry O. Tanner. White discovered at an early age that he could draw. After received an oil paint set from his mother that he did not know how to use, White began going to the park after school to learn from the local art students. White went on to attend the Art Institute later after winning a one year scholarship. After graduation, he began working for the WPA painting murals. It was here that he also learned that he really wanted his art to mean something, to send out a message. At this time, he turned from murals and colorful mediums, to black and white which was really his first love. A spririted but frail man whose output was limited by severe respiratory insufficiency, White died on October 3, 1979, at the age of sixty one.