Harlem Renaissance Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
Jacob Lawrence Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on depicting the history and struggles of African Americans. Lawrence's work often portrayed important periods in African-American history. The artist was twenty-one years old when his series of paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture was shown in an exhibit of African American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This impressive work was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as well as a series of pieces about the abolitionist John Brown. Lawrence was only twenty-three when he completed the sixty-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro, now called The Migration Series. The series, a moving portrayal of the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the North after World War I, was shown in New York, and brought him national recognition. In the 1940s Lawrence was given his first major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and became the most celebrated African American painter in the country.
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Romare Bearden Bearden took snippets of Harlem life and shot them through with vivid images of the American South. His family moved from Mecklenburg, N.C., in 1914 when he was a toddler, and he grew up in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Bearden's mother was a dashing figure, a reporter for a leading black newspaper. Family friends included luminaries such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and famous musicians who helped ignite Bearden's passion for jazz. One of Bearden's first patrons would Duke Ellington. Much later, he designed a record cover for Wynton Marsalis. Bearden's collages bring to mind the pleasing graphic unity of patchwork quilts, into which slaves once sewed coded messages about the Underground Railroad. Meaning literally came out of the seams. Bearden's dense, multilayered art nodded toward codes and complexity. They were cut, etched and painted with magazine photos from Life, Ebony and Look, recalling rural Southern shanties papered with newspaper clippings. Marsalis says one favorite work by Bearden shows a Harlem street. "All of these images of Harlem life," says Marsalis, "Louis Armstrong's in it, in the middle there's a guy in overalls, which you would look at it, and you think, 'That didn't belong,' but at that time, it certainly did belong." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1428038
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
CHARLES ALSTON Alston graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, then attended Columbia College and Teachers College at Columbia University in 1929 where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts in 1931.[1] Alston began his art career while still a student, illustrating album covers for jazz musician Duke Ellington and book covers for poet Langston Hughes. He was influenced by Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera, in particular, who tied their murals into early twentieth century social movements. Alston painted murals throughout Harlem, including depression-era murals as part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. His murals Modern Medicine and Magic in Medicine, situated opposite each other, form part of a series of murals created by Alston and other Harlem artists for the Harlem Hospital Center.[2] The sketches proposed for the murals raised the objections of two of the hospital's leaders, Lawrence T. Dermody and S. S. Goldwater, because of what they considered the excessive numbers of African Americans prominent in the murals. With financial assistance from Louis T. Wright, the first African American physician to serve on the hospital's staff, the matter received enough publicity and support for the murals to allow the artists to go forward with production.[2] Master artists who worked on murals included Georgette Seabrooke, muralist Vertis Hayes, Sicilian-American fresco painter Alfred Crimi; assistants included modernist painter Beauford Delaney, and photographer Morgan Smith. Alston's artwork often incorporated features of African art. During the Great Depression, he and sculptor Henry Bannarn directed the Harlem Art Workshop where Alston and Bannarn were mentors to African American painter Jacob Lawrence, among others. Alston was the first African-American instructor at the Art Students League of New York (1950–1971) and the Museum of Modern Art (1956). He became a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1973. In addition to the murals, some of his paintings, sculptures, and illustrations are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Charles Alston
Charles Alston