1. Harlem Renaissance

2. Harlem Renaissance 1920s and 30s Based primarily in Harlem
A flowering of African American art, literature, and music

3. Characteristics
Created a consciousness about what it meant to be a black American
Sought to break down racial stereotypes
Emphasized and celebrated the creative ability of black Americans

6. William Johnson Jesus and 3 Marys
Van Gogh and Gaugan
By almost any standard, William H. Johnson (1901–1970) can be considered a major American artist. He produced hundreds of works in a virtuosic, eclectic career that spanned several decades as well as several continents. It was not until very recently, however, that his work began to receive the attention it deserves.
Born in South Carolina to a poor African-American family, Johnson moved to New York at age seventeen. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for an art education at the prestigious National Academy of Design. His mastery of the academy's rigorous standards gained him both numerous awards and the respect of his teachers and fellow students.
Johnson spent the late 1920s in France, absorbing the lessons of modernism. As a result, his work became more expressive and emotional. During this same period, he met and fell in love with Danish artist Holcha Krake, whom he married in The couple spent most of the '30s in Scandinavia, where Johnson's interest in primitivism and folk art began to have a noticeable impact on his work.
Returning with Holcha to the U.S. in 1938, Johnson immersed himself in the traditions of Afro-America, producing work characterized by its stunning, eloquent, folk art simplicity. A Greenwich Village resident, he became a familiar, if somewhat aloof, figure on the New York art scene. He was also a well-established part of the African-American artistic community at a time when most black artists were still riding the crest of the Harlem Renaissance.
William Johnson Jesus and 3 Marys
William Johnson Self Portrait with Bandana

7. William H. Johnson Cafe
Matisse - Fauvism

8. Aaron Douglas Into Bondage 1936
The style Aaron Douglas developed in the 1920s synthesized aspects of modern European, ancient Egyptian, and West African art. His best-known paintings are semi-abstract, and feature flat forms, hard edges, and repetitive geometric shapes. Bands of color radiate from the important objects in each painting, and where these bands intersect with other bands or other objects, the color changes.

9. Lois Mailou Jones The Lovers Lois Mailou Jones Les Fetiches
In 1937, for her first sabbatical from Howard University on a general educational fellowship, she went to Paris for the first time where she worked very hard producing 35 to 40 pieces during one year’s time, including "Les Fetiches" a stunning, African inspired oil which is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum [1] and one of her best known works and her first piece which combined traditional African forms with Western techniques and materials to create a vibrant and compelling work.
In the painting Les Fetiches, there are five masks which occupy most of the painting. All the masks seem to symbolize different cultures joining together. From a distance, the image looks as if a man is attempting to move the center mask. The mask on the left side portrays a demonic look. All these masks show different characteristics. Les Fetiches is a valuable painting because of its expressivism, or how it demonstrates the power of art to touch the heart, or the mind. The painting shows how different cultures or ethnics come together to unite. It shows how many different races can come together in their own different ways. The image portrays emotions. The picture is not based on an intellectual level but on an emotional level.
Pan-African colors are black, red, yellow, and green. Black represents the peoples of Africa, red represents African bloodshed during the years of European occupation, yellow represents the African riches plundered under occupation, and green represents the fertility of the land.
Lois Mailou Jones The Lovers
Lois Mailou Jones Les Fetiches

10. Archibald Motley, Jr. Blues
He studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s.
His night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture, are perhaps his most popular and most prolific. He depicted a vivid, urban black culture that bore little resemblance to the conventional and marginalizing rustic images of black Southerners so popular in the cultural eye[4]. It is important to note, however, that it was not his community he was representing--he was among the affluent and elite black community of Chicago. He married a white woman and lived in a white neighborhood, and was not a part of that urban experience in the same way his subjects were.
Skin tone and identity
Motley was highly interested in skin tone, and did numerous portraits documenting women of varying African-American blood quantities ("octoroon," "quadroon," "mulatto"). These portraits celebrate skin tone as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic[5]. The also demonstrate an understanding that these categorizations become synonymous with public identity and influence one's opportunities in life[6]. It is often difficult if not impossible to tell what kind of racial mixture the subject has without referring to the title. These physical markers of blackness, then, are unstable and unreliable, and Motley exposed that difference.
Archibald Motley, Jr. Blues

11. Blues & Jazz

12. Blues African American origins Based on “blue” notes and chords
Slightly lower pitch than major scale
Bessie Smith St. Louis Blues
One of the best known blues songs
Rich, deep alto voice used to convey emotion
Blues is a music genre based on the use of the blues chord progressions and the blue notes. Though several blues forms exist, the 12-bar blues chord progressions are the most frequently encountered. Blue notes are sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Blues emerged at the end of the 19th century as an accessible form of self-expression in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.[1] The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of African influences. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as the blues form became a basic pattern of jazz, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and rock and roll. In the 1960s and 1970s, blues evolved into a hybrid form called blues rock. In the 1990s, punk blues appeared as an outgrowth of the blues rock and punk movements.

13. Bessie Smith St. Louis Blues

14. Big Band & Swing
No microphones meant that musicians increased band size to increase sound
Little room for improvisation
Dominant American pop music in 30s and 40s
Swing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and had solidified as a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States. Swing uses a strong anchoring rhythm section which supports a lead section that can include brass instruments, including trumpets and trombones, woodwinds including saxophones and clarinets or stringed instruments including violin and guitar; medium to fast tempos; and a "lilting" swing time rhythm. Swing bands usually featured soloists who would improvise a new melody over the arrangement. The danceable swing style of bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and Count Basie was the dominant form of American popular music from 1935 to 1945.

15. Big Band Duke Ellington Satin Doll Composer Pianist Band leader
Pulitzer prize winner

16. Duke Ellington Satin Doll

17. Jazz Distinctly American Early 20th Century Improvised solos
Polyrhythms
Jazz is a primarily American musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. The style's West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note.[1]
From its early development until the present, jazz has also incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music.[2] The word jazz began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915; for the origin and history, see Jazz (word).
Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and late 1980s developments such as acid jazz, which blended jazz influences into funk and hip-hop. As the music has spread around the world it has drawn on local national and regional musical cultures, its aesthetics being adapted to its varied environments and giving rise to many distinctive styles.

18. Jazz Louis Armstrong West End Blues Virtuoso on the trumpet
Improvisation passes from trumpet other instruments
Scat singing
Scat Singing: In vocal jazz, scat singing is vocal improvisation with random vocables and syllables or without words at all. Scat singing gives singers the ability to sing improvised melodies and rhythms, to create the equivalent of an instrumental solo using their voice.

19. Louis Armstrong West End Blues

20. Bebop Different form of jazz Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie KoKo
Faster tempos
More intricate melodies
Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie KoKo
Saxophone – Charlie Parker
Trumpet – Dizzy Gillespie
Bebop or bop is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempi and improvisation based on the combination of harmonic structure and melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s. It first surfaced in musicians' argot some time during the first two years of the Second World War.
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era, and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers. The music itself seemed jarringly different to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy, organized, danceable tunes of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller during the swing era. Instead, bebop appeared to sound racing, nervous, and often fragmented. But to jazz musicians and jazz music lovers, bebop was an exciting and beautiful revolution in the art of jazz.

21. Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie KoKo

22. Call and Response Origins in Sub-Saharan Africa
Used in public gatherings
Cab Calloway
Jazz singer
Band leader
Actor
Call and Response
In Sub-Saharan African cultures, call and response is a pervasive pattern of democratic participation -- in public gatherings in the discussion of civic affairs, in religious rituals, as well as in vocal and instrumental musical expression. It is this tradition that African bondsmen and women brought with them to the New World and which has been transmitted over the centuries in various forms of cultural expression -- in religious observance; public gatherings; sporting events; even in children's rhymes; and, most notably, in African-American music in its myriad forms and descendants including: gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and jazz extensions.

23. Cab Calloway
Minnie the Moocher
Hi De Ho Man

24. Modern Blues
BB King, John Lee Hooker, SRV, Ray Charles, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Melvin Taylor

25. Stevie Ray Vaughn Texas Flood