Synopsis of Celebrated Artists -Black History Month 2023

Contemporary Art Gallery Online is Celebrating Black History Month

Below please find a synopsis of the Atists we are Celebrating this year.

Kara Walker (born November 26, 1969) Kara Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, "magic-lantern" projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious public exhibition with Creative Time called "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant" (2014). The black and white silhouettes confront the realities of history while also using the stereotypes from the era of slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns. Her exploration of American racism can be applied to other countries and cultures regarding relations between race and gender, and reminds us of the power of art to defy conventions.

She first came to the art world's attention in 1994 with her mural "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One YoungNegress and Her Heart." This cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting an Antebellum south filled with sex and slavery, was an instant hit. At the age of 28, she became the second youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, second only to renowned Mayanist David Stuart. In 2007, the Walker Art Center exhibition "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love" was the artist's first full-scale US museum survey.

Her influences include Andy Warhol, whose art Walker says she admired as a child, Adrian Piper, and Robert Colescott.

Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African-American women in particular. Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how enslaved African Americans were depicted during Antebellum South. The silhouette was typically a genteel tradition in American art history; it was often used for family portraits and book illustrations. Walker carried on this portrait tradition but used them to create characters in a nightmarish world, a world that reveals the brutality of American racism and inequality.

Walker incorporates ominous, sharp fragments of the South's landscape, such as Spanish moss trees and a giant moon obscured by dramatic clouds. These images surround the viewer and create a circular, claustrophobic space. This circular format paid homage to another art form, the 360-degree historical painting known as the cyclorama.

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Sam Gilliam (November 30, 1933 – June 25, 2022) Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on November 30, 1933, the seventh of eight children born to Sam and Estery Gilliam. The Gilliams moved to Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after he was born. His father worked on the railroad; his mother cared for the large family. At a young age, Gilliam wanted to be a cartoonist and spent most of his time drawing.] He attended Central High School in Louisville and graduated in 1951.

After high school, Gilliam attended the University of Louisville and received his B.A. degree in fine arts in 1955 as a member of the second admitted class of black undergraduate students. In the same year he held his first solo art exhibition at the University. From 1956 to 1958 Gilliam served in the United States Army. He returned to the University of Louisville in 1961 and, as a student of Charles Crodel, received his M.A. degree in painting. While attending college he befriended painter Kenneth Victor Young.

Gilliam listened to his college professor's advice to become a high school teacher and was able to teach art at Washington's McKinley High School. Gilliam was devoted to developing his painting during his weekdays reserved for the classroom. In 1962, Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C., after marrying Washington Post reporter Dorothy Butler who is also the first African American female reporter at the Washington Post. Later Gilliam lived in Washington, D.C., with his long-time partner, Annie Gawlak. They were married in 2018 after a 35-year partnership.

Career in the 1960s, early 1970s:

During the social upheaval of the 1960s in the United States, Gilliam began painting works that were abstract but still made bold, declarative statements, inspired by the specific conditions of the African-American experience. This was at a time that "abstract art was said by some to be irrelevant to black African life." Abstraction remained a critical issue for artists such as Gilliam. His early style developed from brooding figural abstractions into large paintings of flatly applied color, pushing Gilliam to eventually remove the easel by eliminating the stretcher. During this time period, Gilliam painted large color-stained canvases, which he draped and suspended from the walls and ceilings, comprising some of his best-known artwork.

Gilliam was influenced by German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee, and the American Bay Area Figurative School artist Nathan Oliveira. His early influences included Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. He said that he found many clues about how to go about his work from Vladimir Tatlin, Frank Stella, Hans Hofmann, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cézanne.

Career in the 1970s and 1980s

In 1975, Gilliam veered away from the draped canvases, and became influenced by jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He started producing dynamic geometric collages, which he called "Black Paintings" because they are painted in shades of black. Works like Rail (1977) typify this style, with thick layers of black paint and outlines of sharp geometric shapes.

In the 1980s Gilliam's style changed dramatically once more, transitioning to paintings reminiscent of African patchwork quilts from his childhood, using an improvisational approach. These works often included multiple canvases carved into geometric shapes and combined into a single form.] The transition between his "Black Paintings" and quilt-inspired paintings can be seen in his Wild Goose Chase series.

Later career

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Gilliam was largely overlooked by the institutional art world. He showed his work very infrequently outside of Washington, D.C., during this time, as a result of both his desire to work in his own community and a decline in interest from critics and museums in New York. Despite this isolation from a broader audience, he continued to produce paintings in new forms and developed new approaches to abstraction, including experimentation with metal forms and the use of washi paper to create sculptural works, and exhibited extensively in D.C. and across the Southeast. In 2019, journalist Greg Allen wrote about Gilliam's insulation from mainstream art spaces in Art in America, saying "if, at some periods in his extensive career, Gilliam seemed invisible, it’s simply because people refused to see him." Gilliam himself said in 1989 that "I’ve learned the difference between what is really good and real for me and what is something that I dreamed would be real and good for me. I’ve learned to — I don’t mean to say I’ve learned to love this — but I’ve learned to accept this, the matter of staying here."[

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Joshua Johnson (c. 1763—c. 1824) Joshua Johnson was an American painter from the Baltimore area of African and European ancestry. Johnson is known for his naïve paintings of prominent Maryland residents. It was not until 1939 that the identity of the painter of elite 19th-century Baltimoreans was discovered by art historian and genealogist J. Hall Pleasants, who believed that thirteen portraits were painted by one Joshua Johnson. Pleasants attempted to put the puzzle of Johnson's life together; however, questions on Johnson's race, life dates and even his last name (Johnson or Johnston) remained up until the mid-1990s, when the Maryland Historical Society released newly found manuscripts regarding Johnson's life.

Documents dated from July 25, 1782, state that Johnson was the "son of a white man and a black slave woman owned by a William Wheeler, Sr." His father, George Johnson (also spelled Johnston in some documents) purchased Joshua, age 19, from William Wheeler, a small Baltimore-based farmer, confirmed by a bill of sale dating from October 6, 1764.

Wheeler sold Johnson the young man for £25, half the average price of a male slave field hand at the time. The documents state little of Joshua's mother, not even her name, and she may have been owned by Wheeler, whose own records stated that he owned two female slaves, one of whom had two children.

A manumission was also released, in which George Johnson acknowledged Joshua as his son, also stating that he would agree to free Joshua under the conditions that he either completed an apprenticeship with Baltimore blacksmith William Forepaugh or turned 21, whichever came first. The manumission was signed and confirmed by justice of the peace Colonel John Moale who would, during 1798–1800, commission Joshua to paint a portrait of his wife and granddaughter, Mrs. John Moale and Her Granddaughter, Ellin North Moale.

Freedom

Johnson received his freedom in 1782 and began advertising, identifying himself as a portrait painter and limner as of 1796. He moved frequently, residing often where other artists, specifically chair-makers, lived, which suggests that he may have provided extra income for himself by painting chairs. His frequent moving also may suggest that he tended to work for clients near whom he lived. No records mention educational or creative training and it still has not been proven that he had any type of relationship with artists such as the Peale family, Ralph Earl, or Ralph Earl Jr.

Catholic Church records show that in 1785 he married his first wife, Sarah, with whom he had four children – two sons and two daughters, the latter of whom both died young. By 1803 he was married to a woman named Clara. According to the Baltimore city directory of 1817–1818 he was listed in the section "Free Householders of Colour"; in 1825 he had moved to Frederick County, Maryland, and two years later moved to Anne Arundel County, again, following the paths of those whose portraits he painted. Little is known of his life after this final move, and his death.[

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Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) Henry Tanner was an American artist and the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian and gained acclaim in French artistic circles. His painting Daniel in the Lions' Den (1895, location unknown) was accepted into the 1896 Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.Tanner's Resurrection of Lazarus (1896, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was purchased by the French government after winning the third-place medal at the 1897 Salon. In 1923, the French government elected Tanner chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

After pursuing art on his own as a young man, Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1879. The only black student, he became a favorite of the painter Thomas Eakins, who had recently started teaching there. Tanner made other connections among artists, including Robert Henri. In the late 1890s, art patron Rodman Wanamaker sponsored Tanner's trip to the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem after seeing the artist's paintings of biblical themes.

Tanner married Jessie Macauley Olssen on December 14, 1899, in London. Their son, Jesse Ossawa Tanner, was born in New York City on September 25, 1903. The family made France their permanent home, dividing time between Paris and a farm in Normandy.

Painting Style

Tanner painted landscapes, religious subjects, and scenes of daily life in a realistic style that echoed that of Eakins. While works like The Banjo Lesson depicted everyday scenes of African American life, Tanner later painted religious subjects. It is likely that Tanner's father, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a formative influence for him.

Tanner was not limited to one specific approach to painting and drawing. His works reflect at times meticulous attention to detail and loose, expressive brushstrokes in others. Often both methods are employed simultaneously. Tanner was also interested in the effects that color could have in a painting. Warmer compositions such as The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896) and The Annunciation (1898) express the intensity and fire of religious moments, and the elation of transcendence between the divine and humanity. Other paintings emphasize cool hues, which became dominant in his work after the mid-1890s. A palette of indigo and turquoise—referred to as the "Tanner blues"—characterizes works such as The Three Marys (1910), Gateway (1912) and The Arch (1919). Works such as The Good Shepherd (1903) and Return of the Holy Women (1904) evoke a feeling of somber religiosity and introspection.

Tanner often experimented with light in his works, which at times adds symbolic meaning. In The Annunciation (1898), for example, the archangel Gabriel is represented as a column of light that forms, together with the shelf in the upper left corner, a cross.

Later Years

During World War I, Tanner worked for the Red Cross Public Information Department, during which time he also painted images from the front lines of the war. His works featuring African-American troops were rare during the war. In 1923 the French state made him a knight of the Legion of Honour for his work as an artist.

Tanner met with fellow African-American artist Palmer Hayden in Paris circa 1927. They discussed artistic technique and he gave Hayden advice on interacting with French society.

Several of Tanner's paintings were purchased by Atlanta art collector J. J. Haverty, who founded Haverty Furniture Co. and was instrumental in establishing the High Museum of Art. Tanner's Étaples Fisher Folk is among several paintings from the Haverty collection now in the High Museum's permanent collection.

Tanner died peacefully at his home in Paris, France, on May 25, 1937. He is buried at Sceaux Cemetery in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, which is a suburb of Paris.

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Kehide Wiley  (born February 28, 1977) is a Nigerian American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of Black people, frequently referencing the work of Old Master paintings. He was commissioned in 2017 to paint a portrait of former President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which has portraits of all previous American presidents. The Columbus Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007, describes his work as follows: "Wiley has gained recent acclaim for his heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."

Wiley was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.

Residency and Inspiration

The beginnings of Wiley's now famous portraits can be traced back to his time in Harlem, New York, during his residency at the Studio Museum. It was at this time he came upon a crumpled mugshot released by the New York Police Department. On it was a photo of an African American man in his twenties with his basic personal information in order for the man to be identified. Wiley held onto this mugshot that would inspire some of his future work like Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence) as well as a recreation of this mugshot in Mugshot Study (2006, Plate 8). When later commenting on his fascination with the mugshot and its influence in his art, Wiley noted that when he found it on the street, it altered his view of what a portraiture could be as well as solidified his feelings about the portrayal of black men in the world. Wiley saw that there was something lacking. He then turned to his background in classical paintings and began to compare this new type of portraiture to the ones he studied from the eighteenth century. This would spark inspiration in Wiley and lead to him creating a combination of his new modern portraiture and the classic ones from history.

The World Stage

Although Wiley portraits were initially based on photographs of young men from the streets of Harlem, Wiley began to expand to an international view, including models found in urban backdrops from around the world – including Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro. This immense body of work became known as, "The World Stage." Models are dressed in their everyday clothing and asked to assume poses found in artwork from their location's history. It's a juxtaposition of "the 'old' inherited by the 'new' – who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak." Wiley says this instantly sparks a conversation that is equally emotional as it is intellectual.

Wiley chooses countries that he believes are on the "conversation block" in the 21st century to be a part of The World Stage. Wiley chose Brazil, Nigeria, India and China because they are all "points of anxiety and curiosity and production" to the world. As Wiley has traveled around the world, he has noticed that many people around the world interact with American culture the Black American expression. As he continues to paint models from streets around the world, he is increasingly painting them not based on Western painting anymore, but art from these countries that have a wealth of history.

Barack Obama presidential portrait

In October 2017, it was announced that Wiley had been chosen by Barack Obama to paint an official portrait of the former president to appear in Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery "America's Presidents" exhibition along with Amy Sherald who was chosen by Michelle Obama for the First Lady portrait on the same day. They were the first Black artists to paint an American President portrait and the First Lady portrait, respectively. The portrait took him over two years from the first conversation about the commission to the unveiling which took place on February 12, 2018 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, where past president portraits have been displayed outside the White House. Compared to past presidential portraits, which show their subjects in a more realistic representation of an office as a background to show their authority, Wiley depicted Obama seated casually on an antique chair, seemingly floating among foliage. Each flower points to a location which represents an event that happened in Obama's life, such as the chrysanthemum, the official flower of the city of Chicago (where he was elected as senator), African lilies, representing Kenya to show respect to Obama's father, who died when he was a child, and jasmine, representing Obama's childhood in Hawaii with his grandparents. The inspiration for Obama's pose came from the photography session to get photographs of Obama to use for the portrait. Wiley recalled a moment of repose in between shots when Obama was essentially as he is depicted in the portrait, a pose the artist felt was authentic to Obama. During the unveiling of Obama's portrait, Wiley stated in an interview that Obama wanted "a very relaxed, man-of-the-people representation" and Wiley created that image through small details: an open collar, the absence of a tie, and the perception that the President's body was physically moving towards the viewer instead of appearing aloof. Wiley mentioned that Obama and the foreground of the plants are having a battle of, "Who gets to be the star of the show, the story or the man who inhabits that story?", which Wiley wants to show that Obama is the one who claims the spotlight of the portrait and not just his story and experiences that helped contour his life. President Obama saw in Wiley's work that he is able to elevate an ordinary person to look like a royalty and to lift then up so that they belong as a part of American life, since Obama believed that politics should be about the country unfolding from the bottom up and not the other way around. Wiley also mentioned in the unveiling of Obama's portrait that he went to museums in Los Angeles and noticed that there weren't many artworks that display African Americans and he wanted to change that. He hoped that one day the artworks that he creates can inspire future African American generations who look up at the museum wall and see someone who looks like them being displayed at the museum, especially the portrait of the first Black American president. After the unveiling of Wiley's portrait of the President and Amy Sherald's portrait of the First Lady, the Smithsonian National museum saw an increase in the number of visitors from 1.1 to 2.1 million people.

Some conservative commentators criticized the selection of Wiley for the commission because he had earlier produced two painting variations of Judith Beheading Holofernes, in which he depicts African-American women holding the severed heads of white women.

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Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930 Faith Ringgold began her painting career in the 1950s after receiving her degree. Her early work is composed with flat figures and shapes. She was inspired by the writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, African art, Impressionism, and Cubism to create the works she made in the 1960s. Though she received a great deal of attention with these images, many of her early paintings focused on the underlying racism in everyday activities; which made sales difficult, and disquieted galleries and collectors.  These works were also politically based and reflected her experiences growing up during the Harlem Renaissance – themes which matured during the Civil Rights Movement and Women's movement.

Taking inspiration from artist Jacob Lawrence and writer James Baldwin, Ringgold painted her first political collection named the American People Series in 1963, which portrays the American lifestyle in relation to the Civil Rights Movement. American People Series illustrates these racial interactions from a female point of view, and calls basic racial issues in America into question.   In a 2019 article with Hyperallergic magazine, Ringgold explained that her choice for a political collection comes from the turbulent atmosphere around her: "( ... ) it was the 1960s and I could not act like everything was okay. I couldn't paint landscapes in the 1960s – there was too much going on. This is what inspired the American People Series." This revelation stemmed from her work being rejected by Ruth White, a gallery owner in New York. Oil paintings like For Members Only, Neighbors, Watching and Waiting, and The Civil Rights Triangle also embody these themes.

Quilts

Ringgold stated she switched from painting to fabric to get away from the association of painting with Western/European traditions. Similarly, the use of quilt allowed her advocation of the feminist movement as she could simply roll up her quilts to take to the gallery, therefore negating the need of any assistance from her husband.

In 1972, Ringgold travelled to Europe in the summer of 1972 with her daughter Michele. While Michele went to visit friends in Spain, Ringgold continued onto Germany and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, she visited the Rijksmuseum, which became one of the most influential experiences affecting her mature work, and subsequently, lead to the development of her quilt paintings. In the museum, Ringgold encountered a collection of 14th- and 15th-century Nepali paintings, which inspired her to produce fabric borders around her own work.

When she returned to the US, a new painting series was born: The Slave Rape Series. In these works, Ringgold took the perspective of an African woman captured and sold into slavery. Her mother, Willi Posey, collaborated with her on this project, as Posey was a popular Harlem clothing designer and seamstress during the 1950s and taught Ringgold how to quilt in the African-American tradition. This collaboration eventually led to their first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, in 1980. Ringgold was also taught the art of quilting in an African-American style by her grandmother, who had in turn learned it from her mother, Susie Shannon, who was a slave.

Sculpture

In 1973, Ringgold began experimenting with sculpture as a new medium to document her local community and national events. Her sculptures range from costumed masks to hanging and freestanding soft sculptures, representing both real and fictional characters from her past and present. She began making mixed-media costumed masks after hearing her students express their surprise that she did not already include masks in her artistic practice.   The masks were pieces of linen canvas that were painted, beaded and woven with raffia for hair, and rectangular pieces of cloth for dresses with painted gourds to represent breasts. She eventually made a series of eleven mask costumes, called the Witch Mask Series, in a second collaboration with her mother. These costumes could also be worn, but would lend the wearer female characteristics, such as breasts, bellies and hips. In her memoir We Flew Over the Bridge, Ringgold also notes that in traditional African rituals, the mask wearers would be men, despite the mask's feminine features. In this series, however, she wanted the masks to have both a "spiritual and sculptural identity",  The dual purpose was important to her: the masks could be worn, and were not solely decorative.

Performance art

As many of Ringgold's mask sculptures could also be worn as costumes, her transition from mask-making to performance art was a self-described "natural progression".  Though art performance pieces were abundant in the 1960s and '70s, Ringgold was instead inspired by the African tradition of combining storytelling, dance, music, costumes and masks into one production.   Her first piece involving these masks was The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro. The work was a response to the American Bicentennial celebrations of 1976; a narrative of the dynamics of racism and the oppression of drug addiction. She voices the opinion of many other African Americans – there was "no reason to celebrate two hundred years of American Independence…for almost half of that time we had been in slavery".   The piece was performed in mime with music and lasted thirty minutes, and incorporated many of her past paintings, sculptures and installations. She later moved on to produce many other performance pieces including a solo autobiographical performance piece called Being My Own Woman: An Autobiographical Masked Performance Piece, a masked story performance set during the Harlem Renaissance called The Bitter Nest (1985), and a piece to celebrate her weight loss called Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt (1986). Each of these pieces were multidisciplinary, involving masks, costumes, quilts, paintings, storytelling, song and dance. Many of these performances were also interactive, as Ringgold encouraged her audience to sing and dance with her. She describes in her autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge, that her performance pieces were not meant to shock, confuse or anger, but rather "simply another way to tell my story".

Publications

Ringgold has written and illustrated 17 children's books. Her first was Tar Beach, published by Crown in 1991, based on her quilt story of the same name. For that work she won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. She was also the runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, the premier American Library Association award for picture book illustration. In her picture books, Ringgold approaches complex issues of racism in straightforward and hopeful ways, combining fantasy and realism to create an uplifting message for children.

Later Life

n 1987, Ringgold accepted a teaching position in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. She continued to teach until 2002, when she retired.

In 1995, Ringgold published her first autobiography titled We Flew Over the Bridge. The book is a memoir detailing her journey as an artist and life events, from her childhood in Harlem and Sugar Hill, to her marriages and children, to her professional career and accomplishments as an artist. Two years later she received two honorary doctorates, one for Education from Wheelock College in Boston, and the second for Philosophy from Molloy College in New York.

She has now received over 80 awards and honors and 23 Honorary Doctorates.

She was interviewed for the film Women Art Revolution.

Ringgold resides with her second husband Burdette "Birdie" Ringgold, whom she married in 1962, in a home in Englewood, New Jersey, where she has lived and maintained a steady studio practice since 1992.

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Amy Sherald (born August 30, 1973) Amy Sherald is an American painter. She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings. Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.

In 2016, Sherald became the first woman as well as the first African American ever to win the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with her painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance). The next year, she and Kehinde Wiley were selected by former President Barack Obama (Wiley) and former First Lady Michelle Obama (Sherald) to paint their official portraits, becoming the first African Americans ever to receive presidential portrait commissions from the National Portrait Gallery. The portraits were unveiled together in 2018 and have significantly increased attendance at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

In December 2020, her piece The Bathers (2015) was sold at auction for $4,265,000, nearly 30 times the presale estimate. On November 17, 2021, Welfare Queen (2012), sold for $3.9M in a Phillips New York auction and brought to light the need for more governance around resale royalties for artists.

Outwin Boochever prize

Sherald came to prominence in 2016 when her painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), won the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition along with a $25,000 award. The competition noted that "Sherald creates innovative, dynamic portraits that, through color and form, confront the psychological effects of stereotypical imagery on African-American subjects". She was the first woman and first African American to win the competition. Sherald's Miss Everything was selected among 2,500 other entries.

As with other paintings, Sherald shot a long photography session to capture the image she wanted to paint from—only after an hour did the sitter relax into the pictured pose. Sherald said the painting was inspired by Alice in Wonderland, noting the dress and the teacup, and said her work often “starts in a place of fantasy”, here lending itself to the possibility of “being seen as more than the color of your skin”.

First Lady portrait

The year after Sherald won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, she was chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery. Obama recounted an immediate connection upon meeting Sherald, feeling "blown away by the boldness of her colors and the uniqueness of her subject matter" as well as Sherald's personal presence: "Within the first few minutes of our conversation, I knew she was the one for me."

Sherald's creative process began as soon as she learned she'd received the commission, looking up every image of Michelle Obama she could find on the internet. The Obama portrait was a departure for Sherald who had never taken a directed commission before, but in other respects her approach remained the same. She sought to avoid creating a painting that was similar to Obama's "public entity," and instead develop one that was more "private and intimate." Sherald set up photography sessions in D.C. and went through many dresses with Obama's stylist Meredith Koop, with a relatively casual, sleeveless maxi dress from Michelle Smith's Spring 2017 collection for American fashion line Milly as the final selection. For Sherald, the dress connected to the black history of quilting, like those of Gee's Bend.

Unveiled in 2018, Sherald's portrait and Kehinde Wiley's painting of Barack Obama made them the first African-American artists to make official presidential portraits at the National Portrait Gallery; notably they both were also artists who early on prioritized African-American portraiture. Holland Cotter noted in a review that they also both blend fact and fiction in their portraiture. The portraits drew high numbers of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery.

There was some criticism of the painting including that it was less formal as many had expected or "Why is she gray?'...It doesn't look like her." Sherald summarized her response: "Some people like their poetry to rhyme. Some people don't." Sherald used her signature grayscale to depict Obama's skin, feeling photorealism was a "dead end" and wanting to encourage the viewer to see Obama in her entirety as a person rather than solely as her racial identity. Writing about the painting, critic Doreen St. Félix said “lack of brown skin may at first feel like a loss, but soon becomes a real gain”. The choice prompts the viewer to see her in the way "women can relate to—no matter what shape, size, race, or color. . . ." The portrait reflects the shared sense that people could relate to the former First Lady, in its simplicity, while also referring to the way others looked up to her.

Asked about the pressure of this painting, Sherald said she was initially anxious because of the emotion invested in the Obama family globally, but realized there were millions of people she might not be able to please. Ultimately, she felt satisfied that Obama loved it.

Subsequent work

Since the Boochever prize and the Obama commission, Sherald has received considerable public acclaim. In 2018, she had her first museum solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and received a mural commission in Philadelphia. The same year, a mural version of her work Equilibrium was installed on the wall of the Parkway Theatre located in Baltimore. The project was funded through the 2014 Transformative Art Prize grant, an initiative that installs public artworks in underused public places in Baltimore. The original painting is in the permanent collection of the Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal.

Until that point based in Baltimore, in 2018 Sherald moved to New Jersey and began working from a studio in Jersey City at Mana Contemporary, a former tobacco factory converted into artist spaces.

Sherald was awarded the High Museum of Art's David C. Driskell Prize in 2018.

Sherald's solo exhibition, titled "the heart of the matter..." took place in fall 2019 at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City. The exhibition featured eight, large scale oil portraits. Writing about the show, Erin Christovale, an associate curator at the Hammer Museum, wrote: "There's something about the grayness that doesn't mute the paintings but allows you to really think about the various skin tones and cultures and spaces that the African diaspora exists in." Sherald's gallery, Hauser, described this effect produced by the grayscale as "requir[ing the viewer] to meet the artist's subjects actively and to "negotiate" their own conceived notions of Black American life."

Sherald also has a 2020 exhibition of five small-scale portraits of black women created over the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. With her characteristic use of grisaille and newer form of gouache, Sherald creates confident and calm black women in Womanist is to Feminist as Purple is to Lavender, an Alice Walker quote. These show black women focusing on different forms of leisure activities. One painting has a woman laying back in a vibrant orange chair; another has a barefoot woman sitting on her bicycle in a yellow polka-dot dress. Sherald approaches the same everyday activities seen in her previous work, but now focuses on a more relaxed mood. Sherald, who described her art classes as "a safe haven" growing up, told Creative Boom: "I always want the work to be a resting place, one where you can let your guard down among figures you understand."

Sherald's first major West Coast solo show opened in March 2021. The solo debuts a collection of new paintings in an exhibition titled "The Great American Fact" which "consists of five works produced in 2020 that encompass Sherald’s technical innovations and distinctive visual language to center Black Americans in scenes of leisure surrounded by stillness."

Breonna Taylor portrait

In 2020, Sherald painted Breonna Taylor's portrait on the September cover of Vanity Fair. After the 26-year-old medical worker was shot and killed by Louisville police officers in her apartment in March, her case received nationwide attention and fueled demonstrations throughout the world, along with the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Sherald created this image of Taylor with her signature gray-scale skin coloring, along with a free-flowing blue dress against an aqua background. Sherald told Vanity Fair: "[Taylor] sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong! I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice.

The painting was jointly acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY. It was featured in the Speed Art Museum's exhibit "Promise, Witness, Remembrance" honoring the life of Breonna Taylor in 2021.

From the sale of the portrait, Sherald gave $1 million to the University of Louisville in 2022 to establish two grant programs in Breonna Taylor’s name.

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Romoire Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) Romoire Bearden was an American artist, author, and songwriter. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from New York University in 1935.

He began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he worked to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front. He returned to Paris in 1950 and studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Bearden's early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community. After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s. The New York Times described Bearden as "the nation's foremost collagist" in his 1988 obituary. Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the civil rights movement.

Bearden was the author or coauthor of several books. He also was a songwriter, known as co-writer of the jazz classic "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine, a former high school classmate at Peabody High School, and Dizzy Gillespie. He had long supported young, emerging artists, and he and his wife established the Bearden Foundation to continue this work, as well as to support young scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Semi-professional baseball career

As a child, Bearden played baseball in empty lots in his neighborhood. He enjoyed sports, throwing discus for his high school track team and trying out for football. After his mother became the New York editor for the Chicago Defender, he did some writing for the paper, including some stories about baseball. But once Bearden transferred from Lincoln University to Boston University, he became the starting fullback for the school football team (1931-32) and then began pitching - first for the freshman team and eventually for the school's varsity baseball team. He was awarded a certificate of merit for his pitching at BU, which he hung with pride in subsequent homes throughout his life.

While at Boston University he played for the Boston Tigers, a semi-professional, all Black team based in the neighborhood of Roxbury. He tended to play with them during the BU baseball off-season and had opportunities to play both iconic Negro League and white baseball teams. For example, he pitched against Satchel Paige while playing for the Pittsburgh Crawfords for a summer, and played exhibition games against teams such as the House of David and the Kansas City Monarchs. When Philadelphia Athletics catcher, Mickey Cochrane, brought a number of teammates to play a game against BU, Bearden gave up only one hit—impressing Athletics owner Connie Mack. Mack offered Bearden a place on the Athletics fifteen years before Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in major league baseball. Sources conflict about whether Mack thought Bearden was white or told Bearden he would have to pass for white. Despite the Athletics World Series in 1929 and 1930, and the American League pennant in 1931, Bearden decided he did not want to hide his identity and chose not to play for the Athletics. After two summers with the Boston Tigers, an injury made Bearden rethink the attention he was giving to baseball and he put greater focus into his art, instead.

Career as an artist

Bearden grew as an artist by exploring his life experiences. His early paintings were often of scenes in the American South, and his style was strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1935, Bearden became a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services. Throughout his career as an artist, Bearden worked as a case worker off and on to supplement his income. During World War II, Bearden joined the United States Army, serving from 1942 until 1945, largely in Europe.

After serving in the army, Bearden joined the Samuel Kootz Gallery, a commercial gallery in New York that featured avant-garde art. He produced paintings at this time in "an expressionistic, linear, semi-abstract style." He returned to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy with Gaston Bachelard and art history at the Sorbonne, under the auspices of the G.I. Bill. Bearden traveled throughout Europe, visiting Picasso and other artists.

Making major changes in his art, he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human, specifically scenes from the Passion of Jesus. He had evolved from what Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York Times, called a "debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns" to what became known as his stylistic approach, which participated in the post-war aims of avant-garde American art. His works were exhibited at the Samuel M. Kootz gallery until it was deemed not abstract enough.

Collage

Bearden had struggled with two artistic sides of himself: his background as "a student of literature and of artistic traditions, and being a black human being involves very real experiences, figurative and concrete," which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century "exploration of abstraction".] His frustration with abstraction won over, as he himself described his paintings' focus as coming to a plateau. Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country.

During the civil rights movement, Bearden started to experiment again, this time with forms of collage. After helping to found an artists group in support of civil rights, Bearden expressed representational and more overtly socially conscious aspects in his work. He used clippings from magazines, which in and of itself was a new medium, as glossy magazines were fairly new. He used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how African-American rights were moving forward, and so was his socially conscious art. In 1964, he held an exhibition he called Projections, where he introduced his new collage style. These works were very well received and are generally considered to be his best work.

Bearden had numerous museum shows of his work since then, including a 1971 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Prevalence of Ritual, an exhibition of his prints, entitled A Graphic Odyssey showing the work of the last fifteen years of his life; and the 2005 National Gallery of Art retrospective entitled The Art of Romare Bearden. In 2011, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibited its second show of the artist's work, Romare Bearden (1911–1988): Collage, A Centennial Celebration, an intimate grouping of 21 collages produced between 1964 and 1983.

Music

In addition to painting, collage, and athletics, Bearden enjoyed music and even composed a number of songs.

In 1960, Loften Mitchell released the three act play, Star of the Morning, for which he wrote the script and music, and Bearden and Clyde Fox wrote the lyrics.

A selection of them can be heard on the 2003 album Romare Bearden Revealed, created by the Branford Marsalis Quartet

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Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) Kerry Marshall is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world, He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois.

A retrospective exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2016.

Career

Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. He was a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the School of Art and Design from 1993 until 2006. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama, one of seven new appointees chosen.

Hank Willis Thomas has claimed that Marshall was a big influence on him and his practice.

Work influence, social views and themes

Untitled (Studio) (2014) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022

Marshall's childhood time spent in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, where the Black Power and Civil Rights movements happened, had a significant impact on his paintings. Strongly influenced by his experiences as a young man, he developed a signature style during his early years as an artist that involved the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African Americans, specifically black men with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s and still appears in his most recent works.

Marshall is known for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and other objects that take African-American life and history as their subject matter. In a 1998 interview with Bomb Magazine, Marshall observed,

"Black people occupy a space, even mundane spaces, in the most fascinating ways. Style is such an integral part of what black people do that just walking is not a simple thing. You've got to walk with style. You've got to talk with a certain rhythm; you've got to do things with some flair. And so in the paintings I try to enact that same tendency toward the theatrical that seems to be so integral a part of the black cultural body."

Marshall believes that the gears of historical and institutional power in Western art resided primarily in painting. When he studied at Otis, he was fascinated by the work of Bill Traylor, the self-taught artist who was born into slavery in Alabama, which inspired him to create more artwork relating to old-timey, grinning racial trope.

Marshall is one of the members of the contemporary artists of color such as Howardena Pindell, Charlene Teters, and Fred Wilson, who often incorporated the issue of race into their work. Marshall's work is steeped in black history and black popular culture embracing blackness as a signifier of difference to critically address the marginalization of blacks in the visual sphere, utilizing a wide range of styles. His artworks are identity-based; specifically, he made black aesthetics visible and brought the black aesthetic into the fold of the grand narrative of art. In his own words, he uses blackness to amplify the difference as an oppositional force, both aesthetically and philosophically. One such "black" issue Marshall takes up is that of beauty. He stated that since most figures in advertising are white, he wanted to produce images of black bodies to "offset the impression that beauty is synonymous with whiteness" "Black is beautiful" was one of the Black Arts movement's slogans to counter the prevailing view that blackness was inherently unattractive. Marshall directly appropriates the slogan in some of his works by utilizing language. Along with "Black is beautiful", he wanted to create an epic narrative in his paintings in the "grand manner". His focus was to create new works of art that were not a part of the western art-historical tradition.

Exhibitions

Marshall has staged several solo shows and exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States and internationally. His solo shows include Kerry James Marshall, Telling Stories: Selected Paintings (1994-1995), originating at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art; Kerry James Marshall: Mementos (1998-2000), originating at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Along the Way (2005-2006), originating at Camden Arts Centre, London; Kerry James Marshall: In the Tower (2013), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016-2017), originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

His work has also been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including documenta X (1997), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), documenta 12 (2007), and Afro-Atlantic Histories (2022).

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Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) Carrie Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

She once said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in the country." More recently however, she expressed that "Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point." She continues to produce art that provides social commentary on the experiences of people of color, especially black women, in America.

She was named Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography. In 2005, she was awarded the Distinguished Photographer's Award in recognition of her significant contributions to the world of photography. Her talents have also been recognized by numerous colleges, including Harvard University and Wellesley College, with fellowships, artist-in-residence and visiting professor positions. She taught photography at Hampshire College in the late 1980s and shot the “Kitchen Table” series in her home in Western Massachusetts . She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2013. In 2015 Weems was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow. In September 2015, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research presented her with the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal. Weems is one of six artist-curators who made selections for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019/20.

Weems is Artist in residence at Syracuse University.[9] She lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn[ and Syracuse, New York with her husband Jeffrey Hoone.

1980–2000

First panel from Untitled (1996, printed 2020), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

In 1983, Weems completed her first collection of photographs, text and spoken word, called Family Pictures and Stories. The images told the story of her family, and she has said that in this project she was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North, using her family as a model for the larger theme. Her next series, called Ain't Jokin', was completed in 1988. It focused on racial jokes and internalized racism. Another series called American Icons, completed in 1989, also focused on racism. Weems has said that throughout the 1980s she was turning away from the documentary photography genre, instead "creating representations that appeared to be documents but were in fact staged" and also "incorporating text, using multiples images, diptychs and triptychs, and constructing narratives." Sexism was the next focal point for her. It was the topic of one of her most well known collections called The Kitchen Table series which was completed over a two-year period (1989 to 1990), and has Weems cast as the central character in the photographs. About Kitchen Table and Family Pictures and Stories, Weems has said: "I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves." She has expressed disbelief and concern about the exclusion of images of the black community, particularly black women, from the popular media, and she aims to represent these excluded subjects and speak to their experience through her work. These photographs created space for other black female artists to further create art. Weems has also reflected on the themes and inspirations of her work as a whole, saying,

... from the very beginning, I've been interested in the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made and articulated through power. Another thing that's interesting about the early work is that even though I've been engaged in the idea of autobiography, other ideas have been more important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the role of memory have all been more central to my thinking than autobiography.

2000–present

The Armstrong Triptych (from The Hampton Project) (2000) at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC in 2022.

Weems remains active in the art world with her recent photographic project such as Louisiana Project (2003), Roaming (2006), Museums (2006), Constructing History (2008), African Jewels (2009), Mandingo (2010), Slow Fade to Black (2010), Equivalents (2012), Blue Notes (2014-2015) and the expanded bodies of works including installation, mixed media, and video project. Her recent project, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, is a multimedia performance that explores "the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy." Her recent work Slow Fade to Black (2010) explores the lost image and memory of African American female entertainers, including singers, dancers, and actresses, in the twentieth century by playing on the idea of cinematic fade. The freeze frame of a camera lens makes it impossible for us to tell whether or not those images are fading in or fading outs. The series of photos features a number of prominent female African American artist from the last century such as Marian Anderson and Billie Holiday that faded out of our collective memory. The blurred images of the artists serves as metaphor of the on-going struggle for African American entertainers to remain visible and relevant. For the season 2020/2021 at the Vienna State Opera Weems designed the large-scale picture (176 sqm) Queen B (Mary J. Blige) as part of the exhibition series Safety Curtain, conceived by museum in progress.

Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008

Exhibitions

The first comprehensive retrospective of her work opened in September 2012 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, as a part of the center's exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Curated by Katie Delmez, the exhibition ran until January 13, 2013, and later traveled to Portland Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts. The 30-year retrospective exhibition opened in January 2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This was the first time an "African-American woman [was] ever given a solo exhibition" at the Guggenheim. Weems' work returned to the Frist in October 2013 as a part of the center's 30 Americans gallery, alongside black artists ranging from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Kehinde Wiley. In 2021, Weems presented "The Shape of Things" exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory.

Her first solo exhibition in Germany, shown in 2022 at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, is titled The Evidence of Things Not Seen.

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Charles W Wright Jr. (April 2, 1918 – October 3, 1979) Charles Wright was an American artist known for his chronicling of African American related subjects in paintings, drawings, lithographs, and murals. White's lifelong commitment to chronicling the triumphs and struggles of his African American community in representational from, cemented him as one of the most well-known artists in African American art history. Following his death in 1979, White's work has been included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Newark Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. White's best known work is The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, a mural at Hampton University. In 2018, the centenary year of his birth, the first major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art.

Career

In 1940, White stated in an interview, "I am interested in the social, even the propagandistic angle of painting that will say what I have to say. Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent." In 1938, White was hired by the Illinois Art Project, a state affiliate of the Works Progress Administration. His work received an extended showing at the Chicago Coliseum during the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro, which was part of the American Negro Exposition commemorating the 75th anniversary of Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery. An important figure in what became known as the Chicago Black Renaissance, White taught art classes at the Southside Community Art Center. Following his first show at Paragon Studios in Cincinnati in 1938, White's work was exhibited widely throughout the United States, including, among many others, exhibitions at the Roko Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1939 he produced his WPA mural Five Great American Negroes, now at Howard University Gallery of Art. White also showed at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw and the Pushkin Museum. In 1976 his work was featured in Two Centuries of Black American Art, LACMA's first exhibition devoted exclusively to African-American Artists.

White moved to New Orleans in 1941 to teach at Dillard University. Beginning in that year, he was married briefly to famed sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, who also taught at Dillard. He served in the US Army during WWII, but was discharged when he contracted tuberculosis (TB). White and Catlett moved to New York City and also studied together at an arts collective in Mexico City. While in New York City White learned lithography and etching techniques at the Arts Student League, taking direction from renowned artist Harry Sternberg who encouraged him to move beyond “stylization to individuation in his figures”. It was here where White honed his technical skills and developed a more deepened vision of black society. White along with Catlett met a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany named Viktor Lowenfeld who taught at Hampton Institute in Virginia. Lowenfeld invited the couple to teach at Hampton. Taking Sternberg advice to heart, White would go on to paint one of his most famous works, ''The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy" at Hampton Institute.

Printmaking enabled White to reach a wider public more directly and allowed him to bring together his social commitment and artistic practice. Although he had long been aware of art’s social utility, with his lithographs and linocuts he was finally able to communicate with a large, cross-national community of black workers and socialist artists, as opposed to his paintings, which were generally tied to individual purchasers. He started providing political cartoons for the Daily Worker and, in 1953, he published in association with Masses and Mainstream a portfolio of six reproductions of his ink-and-charcoal drawings, entitled 'Charles White: Six Drawings'. Priced at only $3, this portfolio aimed at getting art to the people, a main concern for progressive artists of the period. In this respect it was a great success, and White himself acknowledged this as he learned that a group of workers in Alabama combined their savings to buy a portfolio and shared the pictures among themselves.

In 1956, due to continued breathing problems (perhaps arising from the earlier case of TB), White moved to Los Angeles for its drier, more mild climate. From 1965 to his death in 1979, White taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. On faculty at Otis, he was a beacon for African American artists who came to study with him. Among those he taught were Alonzo Davis, David Hammons, and Kerry James Marshall. An elementary school was named after him and is located on the former Otis College campus. Later in life White moved to Altadena, California where he remained until his death of congestive heart failure in 1979.

White's best known work is the mural The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy at Hampton University. Measuring around 12 feet by seven feet, the mural depicts a number of notable African-Americans including Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Peter Salem, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Marian Anderson. White was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1972.

Legacy

White gained inspiration from many of his contemporaries including his first wife Elizabeth Catlett, Horace Pippin, Gordon Parks, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Cliff Joseph, John Wilson, John Biggers, and others. White helped inspire the next generation of conscious black artists including the likes of Benny Andrews, Faith Ringgold, Dana Chandler, David Hammons, Elliot Pinkney, Alonzo Adams, Kyle Olani Adams and scores of others. White's works are in the collections of a number of institutions, including Atlanta University, the Barnett Aden Gallery, the Deutsche Academie der Kunste, the Dresden Museum of Art, Howard University, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Oakland Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Syracuse University and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The CEJJES Institute of Pomona, New York, owns a number of White's works and has established a dedicated Charles W. White Gallery. In 2015, Drs. Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon of Pomona, New York donated their collection of works by Charles White to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin.

White's popularity faded after his death both because he was a person of color in an industry that unfairly favored white artists and preferred more abstract and conceptual styles in direct opposition to White's style of figurative art. However White's popularity and legacy lives on in Altadena, California where he spent a great deal of his later years. Shortly after his death a park was re-named after him and it remains today the only park to be named after an American born artist. The Charles White Park hosted an annual event “Charles White Memorial Arts Festival” which brought African American and local artists into the community until its discontinuation in the 1990s. Currently members of the Altadena Arts council are working with local community and other stake holders to bring the event back to the community.

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Barkley L. Hendricks (April 16, 1945 – April 18, 2017) Barkley Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career (from photography to landscape painting), Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.

Career

Hendricks was Professor of Studio Art at Connecticut College, where he taught drawing, illustration, oil and watercolor painting, and photography, from 1972 until his retirement in 2010, when he became Professor Emeritus. In the mid-1960s while touring Europe, he fell in love with the portrait style of artists like van Dyck and Velázquez. In his visits to the museums and churches of Britain, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, he found his own race was absent from Western art, leaving a void that troubled him. As the Black Power movement gained momentum, Hendricks set about to change what he saw in Europe by correcting the balance, in life-size portraits of friends, relatives and strangers, encountered on the street, that communicated a new assertiveness and pride among Black Americans. In these portraits, he attempted to imbue a proud, dignified presence upon his subjects. He frequently painted Black Americans against monochrome interpretations of urban northeastern American backdrops. Hendricks' work is considered unique in its marriage of American realism and post-modernism. Although Hendricks did not pose his subjects as celebrities, victims, or protesters, the subjects depicted in his works were often the voices of under-represented Black people of the 1960s and 1970s. Hendricks even stood alongside his subjects and featured himself in works. In 1969, he painted one of his first portraits, Lawdy Mama, which depicts a young woman (his second cousin) in the style of a Byzantine icon with gold leaf surrounding her modernly-dressed figure and Angela Davis style afro on an arched canvas. Hendricks said the portraits were about people he knew, and were only political because of the culture of the time.

In the 1970s, he produced a series of portraits of young black men, usually placed against monochromatic backdrops, that captured their self-assurance and confident sense of style. In 1974, Hendricks painted What’s Going On, one of his best-known portraits, named after Marvin Gaye's single What's Going On. In 1977, Hendricks' work appeared in the exhibition, “Four Young Realists,” at ACA Gallery in New York City. The show received critical acclaim, including the response of the prominent art critic, Hilton Kramer, whose review focused largely on Hendricks' work. Kramer praised Hendricks, but referred to his style using racist terms such as "slick," and called him "brilliantly endowed." Hendricks painted two self portraits in response: the first was Brilliantly Endowed (Self portrait), 1977, a full-frontal nude self-portrait in which he is wearing only sports socks and sneakers, some jewelry, glasses and a white leather applejack hat. In the second, Slick, 1977, also a frontal view, Hendricks depicts himself wearing a kufi cap, a symbol of his African American identity, and wearing a white suit.

Hendricks' work is included in a number of major museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He stopped painting portraits from 1984 to 2002 to concentrate on other practices like landscape painting and photography, including portraits of jazz musicians, such as Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon. In 1995, his work was the primary revelation in the Whitney Museum of American Art's traveling exhibition, Black Male, which focused on the concept of black masculinity, and also launched the career of Kehinde Wiley. Anna Arabindan-Kesson of the Tate Modern has offered a critical evaluation of Wiley's debt to Hendricks].

Hendricks' paintings Icon for My Man Superman, 1969, and Brilliantly Endowed (Self portrait), 1977, have been especially influential works. Both have inspired tributes from prominent artists. Fahamu Pecou's Nunna My Heros: After Barkley Hendricks’ 'Icon for My Man Superman,' 1969, 2011, explicitly pays homage to Hendricks, whom he has notably credited as an inspiration: "It was truly one of the first experiences where I saw myself reflected, not just culturally, but in terms of my own visual aesthetics and approach to art." Similarly, Rashid Johnson's Self-Portrait in Homage to Barkley Hendricks, 2005, reenacted Brilliantly Endowed for the camera, almost 30 years later.

In 1984, Hendricks turned away from painted portraiture during a period he referred to as the "Ronaissance," during the years of the Ronald Reagan presidency.[5] For the next 18 years, he concentrated primarily on landscape painting and photography, but returned to painting portraits for the last 15 years of his life. His return to portraiture came with his painting of Nigerian Afrobeat legend, Fela Kuti, which he painted for the "Black President" exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003. Hendricks' first career painting retrospective, titled Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, with works dating from 1964 to 2008, was organized by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in spring 2008, then traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Hendricks's work was featured on the cover of the April 2009 issue of Artforum Magazine, with an extensive review of Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool. Hendricks' work was included in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum. His work, New Orleans Niggah, 1973, hung in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, when it opened in 2016. In 2017 Hendricks’s portraits were included in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, installed in the Great Hall of the New Orleans Museum of Art. It was the largest and most significant presentation of his portraits since Birth of the Cool, with works ranging from 1970 to 2016. In early 2018, MassArt's Bakalar & Paine Galleries mounted the exhibition, “Legacy of the Cool: A Tribute to Barkley L. Hendricks,” which featured 24 artists who had been inspired by Hendricks. "Legacy of the Cool" included work by such notable artists as Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Hank Willis Thomas, Thomashi Jackson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Delphine Diallo, and Nona Faustine.Hendricks was represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.

In May 2019, Sotheby's Auction House sold Hendricks' Yocks, 1975, for $3.72 million, nearly triple the amount it had sold for in May 2017, at $942,500, then a record for the artist.
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Bisa Butler (born Mailissa Yamba Butler in 1973) Bisa Butler is an American fiber artist who has created a new genre of quilting that has transformed the medium. Although quilting has long been considered a craft, her interdisciplinary methods -- which create quilts that look like paintings -- have catapulted quilting into the field of fine art. She is known for her vibrant, quilted portraits celebrating Black life, portraying both everyday people and notable historical figures. Her works now count among the permanent collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Art Institute of Chicago, and about a dozen other art museums nationwide. She has also exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Epcot Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and many other venues. In 2020, she was commissioned to quilt cover images for Time magazine, including the "Person of the Year" issue and its "100 Women of the Year" issue. With a multi-year wait list for private commissions, one of Butler's quilts sold at auction in 2021 for $75,000 USD.

Artistry

Through her quilts, Butler aims to “tell stories that may have been forgotten over time.” Butler often uses kente cloth and African wax printed fabrics in her quilts, so her subjects are "adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ancestor."

Butler's quilts both heavily incorporate African textiles a well as expand on a rich African American quilting tradition. She explains in her artist statement: "African Americans have been quilting since we were brought to this country and needed to keep warm. Enslaved people were not given large pieces of fabric and had to make do with the scraps of cloth that were left after clothing wore out. From these scraps the African American quilt aesthetic came into being....My own pieces are reminiscent of this tradition, but I use African fabrics from my father’s homeland of Ghana, batiks from Nigeria, and prints from South Africa." She has also been inspired by the figurative textile works of Faith Ringgold.

Butler typically works in bright jewel tones rather than representational colors to depict skin tone. Color serves to convey the emotions of the individuals in her quilts rather than their actual complexions. While at Howard, Butler was mentored by members of AfriCOBRA. The artist collective's bright, colorful aesthetic and aim to create positive representations of Black Americans can be found in Butler's body of work, as well.

Her quilts often feature portraits of famous figures in Black history, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass, and Josephine Baker. Butler uses a variety of patterned fabrics, which she carefully selects to reflect the subject's life, sometimes using clothing worn by the subject. Her portrait of Nina Simone, for example, is made of cotton, silk, velvet, and netting, whereas her portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat is made of leather, cotton, and vintage denim.

Along with her portraits of notable figures, Butler also creates pieces featuring everyday, unknown African American subjects that she bases on found photographs. She describes her fascination for her nameless subjects' unknown stories: "I feel these people; I know these stories because I have grown up with them my whole life." She strives "to bring as many of these unnamed peoples photos to the forefront" so "people will see these ordinary folks as deserving of a spotlight too."

Her pieces are done in life scale in order "to invite the viewer to engage in dialogue--most figures look the viewers directly in their eyes."

Her work, Harlem Hellfighters, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign.

Popular appearances

By 2019, Butler already had a waiting list for commissioned pieces that she estimated to be several years long. This was before her first solo museum exhibit and media attention catapulted her to celebrity among the general public. Three of Butler's quilts sold at auction in 2021, for between $37,500 USD and $75,000 USD. The $75,000 sale price for Nandi and Natalie (Friends) (2007) was almost eight times the anticipated value. At least one personal collector has loaned pieces by Butler to museums for limited-time exhibits.

She has also worked on commission to create a number of magazine covers, including the Fall 2020 cover of Juxtapoz, the March 2020 cover of Time Magazine honoring Wangari Maathai, the 2020 Time magazine "Person of the Year" image of Porche Bennett-Bey and the May/June 2021 edition of Essence magazine. Tarana Burke's memoir sports a cover image quilted by Butler. Additionally, Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN)’s featured Butler's work in its “Juneteenth Artist Showcase.”

Exhibitions

She has exhibited widely. In 2018 she exhibited at EXPO Chicago and was praised in Newcity and the Chicago Reader. In February 2019 her work was included along with that of Romare Bearden in The Art of Jazz, a Black History Month exhibition in Morristown, New Jersey. Butler's quilts are featured in art books such as Journey of Hope: Quilts Inspired by President Barack Obama (2010) and Collaborations: Two Decades of African American Art : Hearne Fine Art 1988-2008 and on websites such as Blavity and Colossal. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Museum of Art and Design's Burke Prize. Butler's first solo museum exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits was co-organized between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Katonah Museum of Art. It was scheduled to first open at the Katonah Museum of Art from March 15 to June 14, 2020; however, after temporarily closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition was extended to October 4, 2020.

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Mary Lovelace O’Neal (born February 10, 1942) Mary Lovelace O'Neal is an American artist and arts educator. Her work is focused on abstracted mixed-media (primarily painting and printmaking) and minimalism. She is a Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley and retired from teaching in 2006. O'Neal's art has been exhibited widely throughout North America and internationally, with group and solo shows in Italy, France, Chile, Senegal and Nigeria. She lives and works in Oakland, California, and maintains a studio in Chile.

Career

Mary Lovelace O'Neal's paintings have progressed through different phases over her long career, beginning with loose forms and evolving to more precise patterns. O'Neal has received numerous awards and exhibited in many national and international exhibitions throughout her career.[2] She was invited as resident artist to participate in the international arts festival in Asilah, Morocco, in 1983. O'Neal curated an exhibition for the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, "17 Artistas Latino y Afro Americanos en USA" in 1991. Two years later, she received the Artist En France Award sponsored by the French government and Moet & Chandon. In 2005, she was selected to represent Mississippi in the Committees Exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

O'Neal started teaching full-time at University of California, Berkeley in 1978. In 1985 she became the first African American artist to receive tenure in the department of art and then appointed in 1999 as the Chair of the Department of Art Practice until her retirement in 2006. She has taught at several institutions in the U.S. including the University of Texas at Austin, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California.[8] And she has taught internationally at Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Bogota, Colombia.

In 1984, O'Neal worked on monotype printmaking with Robert Blackburn at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City. She enjoyed the process so much and she explored various other printing processes and printed over 200 prints at Blackburn's shop over the years.

O’Neal's involvement with civil rights movements, and how they are represented in her art, can not be fully understood without mentioning the influence of Stokley Carmichael (O’Neal's former boyfriend) who coined the terms "Black Power" and "Black Panther" meaning "Power to the People". O’Neal traces her activism to Stokley, and in an interview with Bomb Magazine, O’Neal recalls how a chance encounter living in Morocco with other printmakers and creatives inspired her famous 1984 series Panthers in my Father’s Palace, a likely homage to her experience being a Mississippi native. Akin to O’Neal's experience with abstract layering, she began collecting torn sheets of paper from printmaking studios in the early 1990s, breathing new life into another man's trash- reconstructing waste into experimental collage paintings. Along with Toro, who introduced new mediums and experimented with O’Neal, they displayed their original works Troisieme Triennale Mondiale d’Estampes at the Musee d’Art Contemporaine de Chemalieres, France from 1994 to 1997.

Lampblack series, 1960s–1970s

O'Neal developed these paintings while earning her MFA at Columbia University. This series of monochromes, made in the late 1960s-early 70s, were monumental and made using ebony pigment that was rubbed into raw unstretched canvas using a chalkboard eraser or her hands. The deep black of the surface could, "absorb and silence the noise of ideology, activate space, and impact the body."

Exhibitions

In February 2020, Mnuchin Gallery held O'Neal's first solo exhibition in New York since 1993, which surveyed over five decades of her work, from the late 1960s through 2000s. The mini retrospective, Chasing Down the Image, reveals the ways in which O'Neal has engaged abstraction and materiality exuberantly for political ends, marrying experimental black aesthetics with influences of Minimalism. She was engaged with issues taken up by Donald Judd, Joseph Stella, and Sam Gilliam while simultaneously having conversations with Amiri Baraka who pushed her to make images of the Black Power movement instead of abstraction. During the 60s and 70s O'Neal's abstraction went against the emphasis placed on figuration by the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panthers as a means for Black empowerment. O'Neal's work, "insists on the aesthetic integration of experiences and styles once construed to be mutually exclusive."

In March 2020, the Museum of the African Diaspora mounted a solo exhibition of O'Neal's Whales Fucking series from the 1970s. These expressionist abstract landscapes were made in response to her first visit to the Bay Area that decade. They are made using oil paint, glitter and tape.

Public collections

Her work is in various permanent art collections including the Oakland Museum of California, National Gallery of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum. the Smithsonian Institutions, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile.

Personal life

O'Neal dated activist Stokely Carmichael, whom she met while attending Howard University in the 1960s. Her first husband was John O'Neal. In 1983, O'Neal met the Chilean painter Patricio Moreno Toro, eventually she remarried.

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Roy DeCarava December 9, 1919 – October 27, 2009) Roy DeCarava was an American artist. DeCarava received early critical acclaim for his photography, initially engaging and imaging the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in the communities where he lived and worked. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.

Career in fine art photography

DeCarava produced five published art books, including The Sound I Saw and The Sweet Flypaper of Life, as well as landmark museum catalogs and retrospective surveys from the Friends of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The subject of at least 15 solo art exhibitions, DeCarava was the first African-American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship and as a result of the fellowship, was able to photograph his community and New York City for one year; expressing early creative impressions through the black and white silver gelatin process. His first photo exhibit was in 1950, at the Forty-Fourth Street Gallery in New York City, and he soon found a mentor in Edward Steichen, director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Gradually, DeCarava became known for his dedication to the field of visual art and for his own work within it, including many distinctive black and white, silver gelatin photographs of great American musicians. His work also appeared on several record album covers, such as Porgy and Bess, by Miles Davis, Bless this House, by Mahalia Jackson, Flamenco Fire by Carlos Montoya, and Big Bill's Blues, by Big Bill Broonzy.DeCarava received honorary degrees from Rhode Island School of Design, the Maryland Institute of Art, Wesleyan University, The New School for Social Research, The Parsons School of Design and the Art Institute of Boston for contributions to American art.

In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest award given to artists by the United States Government.

DeCarava encouraged other fine art photographers and believed in the accessibility of the medium. From 1955 to 1957, at his own expense, he established and supported A Photographer's Gallery in his apartment in a brownstone block at 48 West 85th Street, New York, in which was shown artwork by the great names of American photography of the period. In 1963, he co-founded and became the first director of the Kamoinge Workshop, a Harlem-Based collective that supported the work of black photographers through exhibitions, public programs, group critiques, and published portfolios. He taught for many years at Hunter College, in both its undergraduate and MFA programs.

In 1972 DeCarava received the Benin Creative Photography Award for his contributions to the black community as a creative photographer. Roy DeCarava received the 1996 Cooper Union President's Citation Award and the 2007 and the Cooper Union Alumni Association(CUAA) Augustus Saint Gaudens Award. He was inducted into the Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.

DeCarava died in New York City, on October 27, 2009.

Art historical context and commentary

Coming of age in the 1940s, DeCarava appears nothing short of iconoclastic in both his approach to photography, a medium strenuously identified with evidentiary truth, and in his aesthetic ambitions to, as he said, “break through a kind of literalness,” and “express some things I felt.” Maintaining his quest to create a visually autonomous photographic subject of color, DeCarava endured decades of embittering misunderstanding. He has pointed out over and over that despite his “reputation as a documentar[y] photographer, … I really never was,” and reiterated his steadfastly modernist concern to achieve “a creative expression,” rather than a “documentary or sociological statement.” While DeCarava never worked in the field of cinema himself, he grew up in the era of black-and-white filmmaking and, in an interview much later in his career, noted, “I think I absorbed the visual aesthetic of black-and-white films, so that when I started taking pictures, it was natural.”

His largest work is Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective, over 200 black and white photos spanning the late 1940s to the 1990s. Another work is The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Published in 1955, it is a pictorial narrative of family life in Harlem with photographs by DeCarava and text by Langston Hughes. DeCarava wrote ”in spite of poverty, you see people with dignity and a certain quality that contrasts with where they live and what they’re doing.” His Guggenheim fellowship helped fund the project while he spent a full year shooting the photographs for the book.

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Charles Alston (November 28, 1907 – April 27, 1977) Charles Alston was an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Alston designed and painted murals at the Harlem Hospital and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building. In 1990, Alston's bust of Martin Luther King Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House.

Professional career

While obtaining his master's degree, Alston was the boys’ work director at the Utopia Children's House, started by James Lesesne Wells. He also began teaching at the Harlem Community Art Center, founded by Augusta Savage in the basement of what is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Alston's teaching style was influenced by the work of John Dewey, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Thomas Munro. During this period, Alston began to teach the 10-year-old Jacob Lawrence, whom he strongly influenced. Alston was introduced to African art by the poet Alain Locke. In the late 1920s Alston joined Bearden and other black artists who refused to exhibit in William E. Harmon Foundation shows, which featured all-black artists in their traveling exhibits. Alston and his friends thought the exhibits were curated for a white audience, a form of segregation which the men protested. They did not want to be set aside but exhibited on the same level as art peers of every skin color.

In 1938, the Rosenwald Fund provided money for Alston to travel to the South, which was his first return there since leaving as a child. His travel with Giles Hubert, an inspector for the Farm Security Administration, gave him access to certain situations and he photographed many aspects of rural life. These photographs served as the basis for a series of genre portraits depicting southern black life. In 1940, he completed Tobacco Farmer, the portrait of a young black farmer in white overalls and a blue shirt with a youthful yet serious look upon his face, sitting in front of the landscape and buildings he works on and in. That same year Alston received a second round of funding from the Rosenwald Fund to travel South, and he spent extended time at Atlanta University.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, Alston created illustrations for magazines such as Fortune, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Melody Maker and others. He also designed album covers for artists such as Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins. Alston became staff artist at the Office of War Information and Public Relations in 1940, creating drawings of notable African Americans. These images were used in over 200 black newspapers across the country by the government to "foster goodwill with the black citizenry."

Eventually Alston left commercial work to focus on his own artwork. In 1950, he became the first African-American instructor at the Art Students League, where he remained on faculty until 1971. In 1950, his Painting was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his artwork was one of the few pieces purchased by the museum. He landed his first solo exhibition in 1953 at the John Heller Gallery, which represented artists such as Roy Lichtenstein. He exhibited there five times from 1953 to 1958.

In 1956, Alston became the first African-American instructor at the Museum of Modern Art, where he taught for a year before going to Belgium on behalf of MOMA and the State Department. He coordinated the children's community center at Expo 58. In 1958, he was awarded a grant from and was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1963, Alston co-founded Spiral with his cousin Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff. Spiral served as a collective of conversation and artistic exploration for a large group of artists who "addressed how black artists should relate to American society in a time of segregation." Artists and arts supporters gathered for Spiral, such as Emma Amos, Perry Ferguson and Merton Simpson. This group served as the 1960s version of "306". Alston was described as an "intellectual activist", and in 1968 he spoke at Columbia about his activism. In the mid-1960s Spiral organized an exhibition of black and white artworks, but the exhibition was never officially sponsored by the group, due to internal disagreements.

In 1968, Alston received a presidential appointment from Lyndon Johnson to the National Council of Culture and the Arts. Mayor John Lindsay appointed him to the New York City Art Commission in 1969.

In 1973, he was made full professor at City College of New York, where he had taught since 1968. In 1975, he was awarded the first Distinguished Alumni Award from Teachers College. The Art Student's League created a 21-year merit scholarship in 1977 under Alston's name to commemorate each year of his tenure.

Painting a person and a culture

Alston shared studio space with Henry Bannarn at 306 W. 141st Street, which served as an open space for artists, photographers, musicians, writers and the like. Other artists held studio space at "306", such as Jacob Lawrence, Addison Bate and his brother Leon. During this time Alston founded the Harlem Artists Guild with Savage and Elba Lightfoot to work toward equality in WPA art programs in New York. During the early years of 306, Alston focused on mastering portraiture. His early works such as Portrait of a Man (1929) show Alston's detailed and realistic style depicted through pastels and charcoals, inspired by the style of Winold Reiss. In his Girl in a Red Dress (1934) and The Blue Shirt (1935), Alston used modern and innovative techniques for his portraits of young individuals in Harlem. Blue Shirt is thought to be a portrait of Jacob Lawrence. During this time he also created Man Seated with Travel Bag (c. 1938–40), showing the seedy and bleak environment, contrasting with work like the racially charged Vaudeville (c. 1930) and its caricature style of a man in blackface.

Inspired by his trip south, Alston began his "family series" in the 1940s. Intensity and angularity come through in the faces of the youth in his portraits Untitled (Portrait of a Girl) and Untitled (Portrait of a Boy). These works also show the influence that African sculpture had on his portraiture, with Portrait of a Boy showing more cubist features. Later family portraits show Alston's exploration of religious symbolism, color, form and space. His family group portraits are often faceless, which Alston states is the way that white America views blacks. Paintings such as Family (1955) show a woman seated and a man standing with two children – the parents seem almost solemn while the children are described as hopeful and with a use of color made famous by Cézanne. In Family Group (c. 1950) Alston's use of gray and ochre tones brings together the parents and son as if one with geometric patterns connecting them together as if a puzzle. The simplicity of the look, style and emotion upon the family is reflective and probably inspired by Alston's trip south. His work during this time has been described as being "characterized by his reductive use of form combined with a sun-hued" palette. During this time he also started to experiment with ink and wash painting, which is seen in work such as Portrait of a Woman (1955), as well as creating portraits to illustrate the music surrounding him in Harlem. Blues Singer #4 shows a female singer on stage with a white flower on her shoulder and a bold red dress. Girl in a Red Dress is thought to be Bessie Smith, whom he drew many times when she was recording and performing. Jazz was an important influence in Alston's work and social life, which he expressed in such works as Jazz (1950) and Harlem at Night.

The 1960s civil rights movement influenced his work deeply, and he made artworks expressing feelings related to inequality and race relations in the United States. One of his few religious artworks was Christ Head (1960), which had an angular "Modiglianiesque" portrait of Jesus Christ. Seven years later he created You never really meant it, did you, Mr. Charlie? which, in a similar style as Christ Head, shows a black man standing against a red sky "looking as frustrated as any individual can look", according to Alston.

Modernism

Experimenting with the use of negative space and organic forms in the late 1940s, by the mid-1950s Alston began creating notably modernist style paintings. Woman with Flowers (1949) has been described as a tribute to Modigliani. Ceremonial (1950) shows that he was influenced by African art. Untitled works during this era show his use of color overlay, using muted colors to create simple layered abstracts of still lifes. Symbol (1953) relates to Picasso's Guernica, which was a favorite work of Alston's.

His final work of the 1950s, Walking, was inspired by the Montgomery bus boycott. It is taken to represent "the surge of energy among African Americans to organize in their struggle for full equality." Alston is quoted as saying, "The idea of a march was growing....It was in the air...and this painting just came. I called it Walking on purpose. It wasn't the militancy that you saw later. It was a very definite walk-not going back, no hesitation."

Black and white

The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a major influence on Alston. In the late 1950s, he began working in black and white, which he continued up until the mid-1960s, and the period is considered one of his most powerful. Some of the works are simple abstracts of black ink on white paper, similar to a Rorschach test. Untitled (c. 1960s) shows a boxing match, with an attempt to express the drama of the fight through few brushstrokes. Alston worked with oil-on-Masonite during this period as well, using impasto, cream, and ochre to create a moody cave-like artwork. Black and White #1 (1959) is one of Alston's more "monumental" works. Gray, white and black come together to fight for space on an abstract canvas, in a softer form than the more harsh Franz Kline. Alston continued to explore the relationship between monochromatic hues throughout the series which Wardlaw describes as "some of the most profoundly beautiful works of twentieth-century American art."

Murals

In the beginning Charles Alston's mural work was inspired by the work of Aaron Douglas, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He met Orozco when they did mural work in New York. In 1943, Alston was elected to the board of directors of the National Society of Mural Painters. He created murals for the Harlem Hospital, Golden State Mutual, American Museum of Natural History, Public School 154, the Bronx Family and Criminal Court and the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York.

Sculpture

Alston also created sculptures. Head of a Woman (1957) shows his shift toward a "reductive and modern approach to sculpture....where facial features were suggested rather than fully formulated in three dimensions,". In 1970, Alston was commissioned by the Community Church of New York to create a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. for $5,000, with only five copies produced. In 1990, Alston's bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. (1970), became the first image of an African American to be displayed in the White House. When Barack Obama became the first black president in 2009, he brought the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. into the Oval Office, replacing a bust of Winston Churchill. This marked the first time an image of an African American was displayed in the president's work quarters. Furthermore, the bust became a predominant work seen in official portraits of visiting dignitaries. Now, a second copy of the famous Martin Luther King Jr. bust is displayed in Washington for the public to view up close.

World War II propaganda

During World War II, scholars have theorized that the black press strived to appeal to the black readers, while also appeasing the U.S. government by supporting the war. Charles Alston produced over one hundred government propagandistic illustrations that supported the national position on the war for the U.S. Office of War Information. Simultaneously, the cartoons were targeted to a black audience, designed exclusively for publication in the weekly black newspapers to address specific, controversial issues in the black community.

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