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Having never taken any formal art training, Edward Mitchell Bannister attributed his talents to God. He was raised by his mother, who was Canadian, and his father, who was Caribbean, in a small seacoast town in Eastern Canada. Edward Bannister lived from 1828 to 1901 through the years of Antebellum America. Shortly after his birth, the British abolished slavery in all of its provinces and he was able to live as a free black. Being of mixed race he was allowed into many high prestige circles. Sailing and yachting were among his favorite leisure activities. After losing his mother at the age of 17 (his father died when was 2) he and his brother became laborers employed by a farmer who allowed Bannister to use his library. This is where he was introduced to classical music and literature. In 1848 he and his brother moved to Boston where he learned a trade and became one of Boston’s black elite. He married Christina Carteaux, a successful businesswoman of mixed Native American race. This allowed Bannister to become a full time artist. (click to continue)
	Richmond Barthe was born January 28, 1901 and spent his early life in the towns of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, St. Martinsville and New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the first African-American artists able to support himself through his work, he began his career as a painter. He chose to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the expense of Reverend Jack Kane, a Catholic pastor, when he could not be accepted at any local schools because of his color. He later became a sculptor when encouraged to produce pieces for the Negro Art Week organized in Chicago in 1927. Barthe’s lineage including African, French and Native American blood. His father died when he was only a few months old. His mother, Marie Clementine Robateau, who was born a free black in St. Martinsville, Louisiana, sewed to support the family. She would later marry Barthe’s godfather, William Franklin who worked and played cornet in a band.
Though born in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 2, 1912, Romare Bearden grew up in Harlem. In 1925 he moved to Pittsburgh where he graduated from High School. After returning to New York, Bearden received his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from New York University. After developing an interest in art, he became controversial for his criticism of the Harmon Foundation. He, like others, questioned the aesthetic standards the Foundation used in selecting work for their shows. Early in his career Bearden was considered a social realist painter who, during the 1930’s and 1940’s documented American urban and rural life. In the 40’s and 50’s he produced small oil paintings based on literary themes and by the late 1950’s and early 1960’s he had embraced abstract expressionism. While working as a painter he joined the "306" group and continued to study European painting which would later be a major influence on his work. During the 1950’s Bearden suffered a mental breakdown due to the constant pressure he placed on himself to create something artistsic. In 1961 Bearden began to construct collages out of cutout photographs of African- American figures and other images. This work reveals a strong influence from Picasso, Braque, Matisse and other surrealists. He was able to personify the African-American figure using cubist principles of abstraction. Romare Bearden died in 1988 due to complications from cancer.
	Born in St. Rose Parish, Louisiana, Margaret Burroughs is an artist who works in the tradition of history painting, focusing on social themes and humanistic concerns. Her father worked as a farmer and laborer and her mother was a domestic. The Burroughs family moved to Chicago in 1920 becoming one of the many African-American families to join the great migration after World War I. Burroughs career began as a civic leader. She joined the youth chapter of the NAACP while in high school with her not-yet-famous friend Gwendolyn Brooks. She earned degrees from Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University) and Chicago Normal College. Her work, which expands over three generations, chronicles the many facets of the African-American experience. She was active as a curator and historian of African-American art and culture. She is the founder of several museums including the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago. Burroughs has also been instrumental in the advancement of African-American art, history, and culture via the National Negro Museum and Historical Foundation and the Negro History Hall of Fame. Her work offers insight into the role African heritage plays in the American experience. The influence of the Mexican muralists is also evident in her work. Burroughs’ also sought to express her ideas through literature. She is an accomplished poet and author of children’s books. She has taught at all levels - elementary, secondary, and post-secondary - including positions at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Kennedy-King College, and Elmhurst College.
Washington born Elizabeth Catlett is now a leading sculptor in Mexico, where she has lived since the mid 1950s, although she often visits the United States. Her ideas and vision of the role of the black artist and art itself have earned her a unique place in the history of American art. In her work adn her thinking she addresses the colored peoples of the world-- African, Asian, and Latin American countries--as well as all Americans. Catlett's sculpture, although stylized, is derived from the human figure. Aesthetically, it is characterized by massive volumes and a few simple shapes, whose flowing intersection powerfully expresses a physical vigor. But her art is no less shaped by her social viewpoints, and she often uses expressionistic concepts and distorting techniques to make her point. Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington D.C., on April 15, 1915. She attended Howard University where she majored in painting. Catlett earned her master's degree at the State University of Iowa while working under Grant Wood. Elizabeth also worked briefly on a pre-WPA project. (click to continue)
	One of the first African-American artists to make black women his major theme, Eldzier Cortor, would find his niche in printmaking. Calling himself a "group painter" because he felt his life experiences were those of any African- Americans he sought to reflect them in his paintings. He was born on January 10, 1916 to John and Ophelia Cortor. Economically secure, his family moved to Chicago when he was about a year old. After a few years they moved to the West Side where Archibald Motley’s family lived. Cortor’s earliest influence was in comic strips. His favorite was "Bungleton Green" created by Leslie Rogers. He would copy them and dream of creating his own. The Great Depression forced the Cortor family to move to the South Side, where he enrolled at Englewood High School. In the school’s poster shop he worked with fellow "soon-to-be" artists Charles Sebree and Charles White. His father shunned his interest in art and Cortor was forced to drop out of school to work. He continued to take evening drawing classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. (click to continue)
The premier artist of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, was one of the first to use the design elements of African art forms as the foundation for his work. Born in Kansas on May 26,1899 his parents insisted that he pursue an education. This paid off early in his life when at the age of 22 he was well aquatinted with W. E. B. Dubois and was a frequent reader of The Crisis. In 1922, Douglas received his BFA from the University of Kansas and taught at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri. He decided to move to New York in 1924 after graduating from the University of Nebraska. His goal was to continue teaching art. By now he had a secure income. Soon after his arrival in New York he met artist Reinhold Weiss. Weiss encouraged him to study African art traditions. Through Douglas' work, African-Americans could now explore a connection with Africa. This work caught the attention of many of the Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Dubois. Douglas was asked to illustrate their essays, stories, and poetry for publications. The Negro Speaks of Rivers was created for Hughes’ poem by the same name. (click to continue)
	Robert S. Duncanson was born in Seneca, New York to a Scots-Canadian father and freeborn African-American mother who had escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. The date of his birth is questionable but thought to be in the early 1820’s. His family earned a living as handymen and house painters. This background may have given Duncanson the opportunity to learn, informally, the craft and art of mixing pigments, working with brushes and paints and preparing and repairing surfaces. He is considered a self-taught artist. Duncanson decided early in his life that art would become his career and not just a hobby. In 1839, the Freedman’s Aid Society of Ohio raised money to send him to Glasgow, Scotland to study painting. Upon his return he went to live in Cincinnati where portrait and landscape painting were in demand. Through the Western Art Union Duncanson was exposed to the prominent Hudson River School. By 1842 he was ready to exhibit his work in public. His first exhibition was sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge and opened the door for Duncanson to increase his visibility. He accepted several portrait commissions of abolitionists and other prosperous Cincinnati citizens. (click to continue)
William A. Harper was born in Canada in 1873. At age 8 he moved to Illinois and settled on a farm where he would spend the remainder of his youth. This is where he would develop his love for nature and art. Harper attended a small college in Jacksonville, Illinois and later went to Chicago and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute. In 1900, he graduated with honors. After teaching in Houston for two years, Harper traveled to France and later went on to study with Henry Ossawa Tanner in Paris. He was highly influenced by the Barbizon School and Impressionistic style of painting. Harper died prematurely during a sketching trip to Mexico in 1910. (click to continue)
	Richard Hunt is one of the nations most sought-after sculptors. He has produced many large, abstract metal sculptures, most of which stand as public installations. Hunt studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago where he was introduced to and influenced by the work of Richmond Barthe’. His influence also stems from Spanish artist Julio Gonzalez who was among the first to devise welded-iron sculptures. Since 1967 Hunt has installed over fifty outdoor sculptures. Thirty-four of them are in his home state of Illinois.
Clementine Hunter was the first black artist to have a solo show at what is now the New Orleans Museum of Art, a show she was not allowed to attend. Born into the aftermath of the slave South she would have to be taken by her own friend through the back door to view her show, after its closing. Hunter was born in 1887 on Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana, a place that it is said to be the inspiration to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When she was 5 her family moved to the Cane River area and again at age 14 or 15 her family moved once more to Melrose Plantation, the place she called home and the inspiration for her work. Melrose Plantation was created by Marie Therese Coincoin and was an "agricultural empire" that diminished through the years. By 1898, its ownership belonged to John Hampton and Carmelita Garrett Henry affectionately known as "Miss Cammie". After massive renovations to the house and the grounds it became home to many artists and writers. It was during this time that Clementine Hunter called Melrose Plantation home. (click to continue)
	Considered to be one of America’s most versatile black artists, Sargent Johnson, represents another facet of African-American art. Johnson was born on October 7, 1887. He was the third of six children. His father, Anderson Johnson, was of Swedish descent and his mother, Lizzie Jackson Johnson, was of African- American and Cherokee descent. Both would suffer from the trials of interracial marriage and serious illness. His father died when he was 10 and his mother was ill with tuberculosis. After his father’s death, Johnson and his siblings were sent to his mother’s brother, Sherman William Jackson, a high school principal, whose wife, May Howard Jackson, a recognized sculptor, introduced him to clay modeling. The children were then sent to their mother’s parents in Alexandria, Virginia where he continued to model clay. In 1902, Johnson’s mother died and the children were separated because their grandparents could no longer care for them. The boys and the girls were separated. This would be the last time he would see his sisters. (click to continue)
Jacob Lawrence was born September 7. 1917 in Virginia. He was hardly more than a youth when, in 1941, he was recognized as one of the most original artistic talents to develop in America. Almost from the beginning of his career his works have been sought by museums and major collectors. Unlike many artists whose styles pass through many phases, Lawrence's work has remained essentially the same, although becoming more sophisticated in composition and color. No matter what winds have blown through the art world Lawrence has held to his vision. His subject matter, his stylizing of figures, his method of painting, his indifference to the academic rules of drawing and perspective that trapped many American artists before him, his ignoring of artistic fashions and fads--all these have set him apart from the artistic conventions of the last fifty years. It was Lawrence's rage that fueled the wonderful collections that he created throughout the years. His feeling of hopelessness, anger tover the degradation forced on black Americans, and his frustrations about events in his own life acted as a catalyst. (click to continue)
	Hughie Lee Smith was born in Eustis, a small midland Florida town, on September 20, 1915, to Luther and Alice Williams Smith. Later he changed his last name to Lee-Smith after he and his art school classmates decided Smith was too ordinary a name for a distinguished painter. Lee-Smith began drawing at a very early age. "I drew all of the time, and it became a natural thing. I breathed it. I dreamed it. Art was my whole being and I knew at an early age that it was my mission." Hughie Lee-Smith, whose work has brought him many honors and awards, expresses a haunting sense of loneliness and alienation in his paintings of the American scene. Mysteriously, they convey the feeling that something good is missing-and yet somehow about to happen. His vast skies, desolate scenes, and distanced people, his blowing ribbons and colorful balloons, mix realism and fantasy in surrealistic juxtapositions that reflect the contradiction and paradoxes of American life. Lee-Smith's career, in its own way, constitutes one such paradox.(click to continue)
Edmonia Lewis was born on July 14,1845. Her father was a free African- American and her mother was part Native American from the Mississanga Tribe of the Chippewa nation. After losing both her parents at an early age, Edmonia was raised by a Mississanga Indian woman who taught her Chippewa culture and values. Her Chippewa name was Wildfire. In 1858, she went to Oberlin College in Ohio. She enjoyed her experience there but was forced to leave when she was falsely accused of poisoning two of her white female schoolmasters. In spite of all her hard work she was not allowed to graduate. She moved to Boston and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison introduced her to sculptor Edward Brackett who would become her mentor. This is where she got her first lesson in modeling clay. Soon after she was determined to make her name as a sculptor. (click to continue)
	Archibald J. Motley, Jr. emerged as a prominent artist when Henry Ossawa Tanner was the only widely recognized African-American artist. As one of the first to establish the social life of African-Americans in inner cities as "memorable subject matter" he portrayed the spirit of urban black neighborhoods usually in twilight or an evening atmosphere. He used the life that he knew best as subject matter, African-Americans as a dynamic people. The figures in Motley’s work were always hurrying, gesturing or going someplace. Motley was born to Archibald Motley, Sr. and Mary Huff on October 7, 1981 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His family moved to Chicago, where his father worked as a Pullman Porter, and settled into a quiet neighborhood on the West Side. In his home he would listen to his father and A. Phillip Randolph discuss the organization of the Pullman Porter’s Union. Here, he also watched his nephew, Williard Motley, struggle to write. The hard work and ambition that he witnessed as a child would carry him through his artistic career. (click to continue)
Still life painter, Charles Ethan Portor’s life was a prime example of solid artistic achievement, but would nonetheless end in poverty and obscurity. A native of Connecticut, Porter, who was born ca. 1947, came from a very large family. At age 15 he began taking art lessons at the National Academy of Design in New York City. Upon completion of the Academy, Porter became the first African-American artist to graduate from a four-year school of art. In 1881, armed with a letter of introduction from Samuel Clemens, known more commonly to the world as Mark Twain, Porter sailed to France looking to study with master artists and possibly exhibit at the Paris Salon. After studying with watercolorist J. O. Eaton, Porter became a very skilled colorist able to render hue and shading. Fruit compositions and cut flowers were the subjects his career was primarily based upon although he never gained enough critical attention and acclaim to support himself solely on his work. While spending time in the Adirondack Mountains in New York, Porter became friends with painter Frederick E. Church who was a faithful patron of his work. Porter’s preference was to depict quiet New England pastoral scenes enhanced by his full color palette and knowledge of nature. In 1893, he was mentioned alongside Edward Bannister, Edmonia Lewis, and Henry Ossawa Tanner in an essay by Frederick Douglass noting him as one of four black artists unfairly excluded from the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago. With his career in decline, Porter would die "unnoticed" in 1923. (click to continue)
	Henry Ossawa Tanner is not only considered the greatest of the 19th century African-American painters but was also one of the first artists to challenge the stereotype of the American Negro. Born June 21, 1859, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania he was the oldest of nine children. His father, Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a minister and bishop of the AME church was one of the most highly regarded African-American men of his day. Tanner’s mother, Mrs. Sarah Tanner, was a well-educated woman escaped to the north via the Underground Railroad. She operated a local school. It would be fair to say that the richness of Tanner’s past and promise of his future were a precursor to what would become his life’s work. Tanner was a frail child who was named for the martyred white abolitionist John Brown Ossawa from Osawatomie, Kansas. At age 13, after seeing a painter at work at a local park near his home, he decided that he wanted to be a painter. In 1880, the 21-year-old Tanner enrolled in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he would study with the great artist Thomas Eakins, who would become his lifelong friend. This is where he learned to draw and paint from life and use a camera. (click to continue)
Born Born in Columbus, Georgia, Alma Woodsey Thomas moved to Washington, DC with her family at the age of 17. It would be the place she would call home for the rest of her life. While in high school she dreamed of being an architect and building bridges. Instead of pursuing her dreams, Thomas instead worked toward a teaching career while in college. She attended Miner Teachers Normal School and later went on to attend Howard University. In 1924, she became the first graduate of the Howard University Fine Arts Department. Thomas later earned her MA in art education at Columbia University Teachers College. She began teaching at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, DC in 1925 and would remain there until her retirement in 1960. While teaching junior high school she enrolled at American University in 1950 to study painting and art history. Her early work was representational but by the mid 1950’s, under the influence of her teachers at American University she moved into abstract art. (click to continue)
	James Van Der Zee was the most important documentary photographer of the Harlem Renaissance. Migrating to Harlem in 1906, he began as a pianist. In 1917 he opened a portrait studio on 135th Street in New York City where he earned a good living. Approaching photography as an art, Van Der Zee used atmospheric effects, soft-focus techniques and elaborate backdrops to capture the dignity of his subjects who were from all walks of life, from the working class to the educational and financial elite.
James Wells was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 2, 1902. Almost at the start of his art education, Wells was carried past the traditionalist viewpoint into the related concepts of African sculpture, Cubism, and the expressionistic use of color. He was helped by his teachers to perceive prints as a major art form, not just a secondary one. A vigorous participant in the development of African-American artists in the late 1920s and 1930s, James Wells taught graphic design at Howard University. In addition to teaching, he was an excellent painter and printmaker in his own right. His study of African art and German Expressionism in the early 1920s led him to bypass the traditionalist realism then dominating American art. In 1931 his modern, expressionistic Flight into Egypt, won the Harmon exhibition gold medal. Museums began to buy his work. An American pioneer in the use of color in prints, Wells made a decision to specialize in printmaking at a time when prints were virtually ignored, because he felt they were something African-Americans could own. (click to continue)
	The work of Charles White, one of America's best-known African-American artists, was largely limited to graphics, often on a scale considerably larger that usually used in drawing. White believed that working primarily in black and white or sepia and white, which required an extraordinary and perfectionistic skill in draftmanship, would sharpen the impact of his work and, through economical reproduction, make it available to millions. His meticulously rendered drawings and paintings, affirming the humanity and beauty of black people, moved many who had never previously recognized the aesthetic qualities of black figures and faces. In portraying black Americans, often in bitter circumstances, White sought to make a univeral statement about the heroic efforts of humankind to be free of oppression. Although White won many national awards, he was ignored by leading critics because of his single-minded traditional style and focus on black working people. (click to continue)

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