Photo By Gail
This monumental portrait of a claimed opera singer Marian Anderson (1944) was part of artist Laura Wheeler Waring’s Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin series, commissioned by the Harmon Foundation for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Anderson had become a celebrated star of the concert stage in Europe, where Waring first saw her perform in 1916. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Portrait of Marian Anderson By Laura Wheeler Waring
Photo By Gail
Laura Wheeler Waring’s portrayals of Black women across the social spectrum often transcended class norms and disrupted prevalent stereotypes. For Girl in Pink Dress (ca. 1927), her young sitter is presented as an icon of the Jazz Age, with the sleek, bobbed coiffure and elegant drop-waisted flapper dress – exquisitely detailed, and with nuanced tonal variations – that are emblematic of the period.
Continue reading Pink Thing of The Day: Girl in Pink Dress By Laura Wheeler Waring
Photo By Gail
William H. Johnson (1901 – 1970) created his lively Jitterbugs series of paintings and screen prints from about 1940 to 1942 while teaching at the Works Progress Administration’s Harlem Community Art Center. After long periods spent abroad, the artist returned to the United States in 1938 to record the daily lives of African-Americans in a manner akin to folk art.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: William H. Johnson, Jitterbugs V
Photo By Gail
Artist Beauford Delaney (1907 – 1979) met writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts – intellectual, social, and artistic – the two gay men began a friendship that would last 38 years.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Dark Rapture (James Baldwin) By Beauford Delaney
Photos By Gail
Kansas-born Aaron Douglas (1899 – 1979) was the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, the great flowering of the arts in the 1920s and 1930s in New York’s predominantly African American neighborhood. Rendered in Douglas’s flat silhouetted style and with lavender and yellow-gold hues, this work, Let My People Go (1935-39), depicts the Old Testament story about God’s order to Moses to lead the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Let My People Go By Aaron Douglas