There could not have been a better way to celebrate Black History Month than when Jill Sanford, art history expert and lecturer, gave her presentation titled, “African American Artists We Should Know” on February 1 at the Mattapoisett Council on Aging.
Sanford’s art history presentations are so thoroughly researched and so tenderly shared one feels as if you’ve spent some time visiting with the artists themselves. While elaborating on artistic styles and forms, biographies of the artists are verbally painted by Sanford.
Thus, on this day, the audience strolled back in time through Sanford, joining seven black artists whose talents were oftentimes overshadowed by racism and discrimination but ultimately were hailed as extraordinary, even visionary artists.
Scipio Moorhead artistic contributions come down to a singular engraving created in the 1700s. Everything else he may have produced is dust in the winds of time. It is an engraving of a black woman, Phyliss Wheatley, a poet who wrote about Moorhead upon seeing his works; it demonstrates that this artist was a master. And but for that meeting between two black artists, the history of black artistic accomplishment would be poorer still. Moorhead lived in Boston.
Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) was an orphan who lived between Boston and Providence. He was primarily self-taught. His style tended towards traditional realistic depictions of woodlands, fields and expansive vistas, but he would also give his hand to softer, more impressionistic renderings.
Bannister submitted his painting The Oaks to a contest in London and won a bronze medal. However, when the judges learned the artist was not white, the award was withdrawn. Other artists in the running were so incensed by this injustice, they banded together and withdrew their paintings from the contest. Bannister’s medal was returned. Bannister would go on to earn artistic recognition, would also teach painting and supported early civil rights activities with his wife.
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) was the son of a minister and a mother who had escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. From a young age, he wanted to pursue the arts and was accepted in 1870 to the Philadelphia Academy where he was the only black student. His paintings were said to be infused with light, radiant light, many on religious themes. Through the efforts of Joseph Hartzell, a white patron, an exhibit of Tanner’s paintings was held in Cincinnati. It failed to excite the public. Hartzell was so sure of Tanner’s artistic capabilities that he purchased all the paintings. This generous act financed Tanner’s studies in Paris.
Sanford reflected that while Tanner was very patriotic. “He found that doing ordinary things in France felt comfortable.” Tanner’s paintings of people of color in everyday domestic settings was a first. People of color were rarely, if ever, the subject of artistic themes. One of the most famous of these is the Banjo Lesson. Tanner would soar to higher acclaim in the 1870s with his painting The Resurrection of Lazarus, which would receive an award at the Grand Salon, establishing him as an artist. And he would break social barriers, marrying Swedish-American opera singer Jessie Macauley. They remained in France.
Horace Pippin (1888-1946) was a self-taught, wounded World War I veteran. He lost the use of his right arm during combat. To try and regain some use of his arm, he created collage-like paintings. His most productive years through the 1930s found him working in a folk-art style that was enjoying a renaissance. His was a linear style with a powerful sense of design and expressive use of color.
Pippin’s work would be noticed by N.C. Wyeth, who along with Christian Brinton would arrange a solo exhibit at the West Chester Community Center in 1937, launching Pippin into national attention. Sanford said, “He brought a slice of black life into the white community.” And he did use his art to make declarative statements about discrimination in the country. His painting of the hanging of John Brown is one such example, along with another titled, Lincoln the Liberator.
Female sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962) knew cruel times at the hands of her father as a child. She desired artistic expression so much so that she used the red clay of her Florida home to create small animals and other figures. But her father was having none of that. “He nearly beat the art out of me,” she is quoted as saying. Yet she persisted.
Savage left home as a 15-year-old wife and soon thereafter, a mother. Savage went to school where she was encouraged by the principal to continue sculpting, later teaching and winning a local contest. Good fortune would come her way when she received a scholarship to Coopers Union. However, the all-white school did not accept her entry graciously. Still she persisted, eventually heading to France to study at the Fontainebleau. While there, she would meet E.B. Dubois, who commissioned her to do a bust of his head. Over time, she would return to the U.S. where she set up shop in Harlem at the height of its renaissance, teaching other black artists and earning broad respect for her artistic achievement.
Savage’s works were never cast in bronze, a very costly process. Instead, it was plaster that she painted to resemble metal that would be her medium. Thus, when she was commissioned to create an entranceway statue to the Negro American Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, it was done in plaster. Nothing remains today of the more than 10-foot-high sculpture titled Lift Every Voice and Sing, except for the small replicas sold in the shops at the fair. Photographs of the statue reveal it was a grand representation of the repressed African American’s ability to remain strong by holding each other up and having faith that a better day was coming.
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) was inspired by his parents to pursue the arts. When he read that blacks were incapable of creating art, he was infuriated. Douglas would go on to become a prominent artist-illustrator during the Harlem Renaissance and was dubbed the “Father of African-American art.” His images are of the jazz age and the people who populated Harlem at that time.
Douglas’ stepping stones to success include earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in fine art from the University of Nebraska in 1922. He would teach art at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri. Douglas’ painting style was modern cubism with an international, avant-garde approach. Figures were two-dimensional but full of movement. Abstractions were used to enhance the emotional narrative of his paintings. His painting of Harriet Tubman bringing people out of slavery through the Underground Railroad is a prime example of the artistic heights Douglas achieved.
And last but by no means least, Sanford gave us Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), who became a prominent artist and student of Augusta Savage. He received a commission to paint 10 panels depicting the great migration of black people from the south – he would end up painting 60.
The Smithsonian website states of Lawrence’s art, “… a social realist … (painted) the African American experience in several series devoted to Toussaint L’Overture, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, life in Harlem and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.” His crowning achievement could be the creation of the 60-panel series on the great black migration from the south in 1941 when he was just 20 years old. In 2017, they were valued at $6,000,000.
The panels show us masses of people on the move carrying all their possessions, carrying their babies, carrying their own, tired, travel-weary souls towards the promise of work, food, shelter and freedom. There are the troubling scenes depicting crowds on railroad platforms, crowded trains, tenant farmers receiving harsh treatment and lynching. Yet, in spite of the threats, the loaded trains kept coming.
Lawrence’s style has been called expressive cubism, chunky, puzzled together blocks of color creating images of lives lived during great transitional, social timeframes in a country still grappling with its history of oppression and eternal human quest for inclusion laced with hope.
Sanford encouraged her audience to research these artists and other black artists whose talent is a gift to the world at large.
Mattapoisett Council on Aging – Art for Your Mind
By Marilou Newell