America is a blend of many different cultures. This is also true of the modern African-American artist. American education, unfortunately, has stressed his European heritage and not his African. In spite of improved awareness of the outstanding role of African Americans, their artistic work remains greatly ignored and unappreciated today, except in music and the performing arts.
African-American artists had to depend on the enlightened attitudes of a few individuals until patrons of abolitionist groups and the Freedman's Bureau gained prominence in the nineteenth century. Even the talented free African-
Americans were subject to all the legal restrictions, social disgrace associated with the slave system. European colonists had rationalized, in order to justify the system, that by nature, temperament, pigmentation and civilization the African-American's natural lot was slavery and he was not fit for anything else, including art.
During America's infancy (in the period between the 1600s and the early 1800s), what one could describe as African American art indeed embraced a range of forms and definitions.
A small drum, several wrought-iron figures, dozens of ceramic face vessels, and a few examples of domestic architecture found among enslaved black communities in the southern United States have been singled out for their similarities with comparable crafts, functional objects, and structures in West and Central Africa.
In contrast, black artisans like the New England-based engraver SCIPIO MOORHEAD and the Baltimore portrait painter Joshua Johnson created art that, despite occasional portrayals of black subjects, was conceived in a thoroughly western European fashion.
Aaron Douglas (May 26, 1899 - February 3, 1979) was an African-American artist who was associated with the Harlem Renaissance art movement. Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, and studied art at the University of Nebraska. He later moved to Harlem, New York, and soon became a pre-eminent artist. Douglas did many paintings, woodcut prints, murals, and book and magazine illustrations.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois (February 23, 1868 - August 27, 1963) was a writer, historian, leader and one of the founders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
He was a gifted student who became a reporter for the New York Globe when he was 15 years old. He later attended Fisk University, then transferred to Harvard University; he was the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established in 2003 by an Act of Congress, making it the 19th Smithsonian Institution museum. It is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, art, history and culture. Construction is expected to be completed in 2015.
|
