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Sharif Garmon
In this painting, the three Westwood brothers have just come inside with freshly gathered flowers and cherries. Accompanying them is the family dog, who firmly grasps a bird captured on their outdoor excursion. The brothers wear matching trouser suits, fashionable for male children at the time. The younger children, Henry and George, clasp hands, while their older brother, John, extends a protective arm behind them. Johnson's sympathetic pose of the three boys makes their brotherly relationship the subject of this portrait.
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works with themes related to identity, representation, mass media, and popular culture. The National Gallery has acquired his stainless-steel wall sculpture A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection) (2020), which draws a fictional map of an African American continent. It is the first sculpture by this celebrated artist to enter the collection.
Howardena Pindell made her influential video Free, White and 21 following a car accident in 1979 that left her with partial memory loss. In the video, Pindell faces the camera and recounts her personal experiences of racism as an African American woman in America. Throughout the video, she adds to or takes away materials from her head and face, concealing and revealing the social construct of race based on skin color.
Still Life with Fruit and Nuts, signed and dated 1848, is a classically composed work with fruit arranged in a tabletop pyramid. The painting includes remarkable passages juxtaposing the smooth surfaces of beautifully rendered apples with the textured shells of scattered nuts.
The artist's turn from still-life subjects to the landscapes for which he is better known may have been inspired by Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life; Cole's series was exhibited in Cincinnati, where Duncanson lived in 1848. Duncanson soon began painting landscapes that incorporated signature elements from Cole and often conveyed moral messages. Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Duncanson traveled to Canada, where he remained until departing for Europe in 1865. Often described as the first African American artist to achieve an international reputation, Duncanson enjoyed considerable success exhibiting his landscapes abroad.
In contrast, the crisper lines and radiating red parabolas added to the final print call to mind contemporary meteorological imagery: weather maps, Doppler radar, storm fronts, wind speeds, vectors, and so forth. Having pushed Circulation in one direction, Mehretu changed course, transforming a freely drawn, turbulent scene into a more precise, scientific, and modern view.
Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. Although Tanner achieved some success as a painter in the United States, he left for Europe as a young man to escape racial prejudice. Tanner spent most of his professional career in France, where he exhibited paintings at the Paris Salon and in expositions.
In 1936, Douglas was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Installed in the elegant entrance lobby of the Hall of Negro Life, his four completed paintings charted the journey of African Americans from slavery to the present. Considered a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural phenomenon that promoted African and African American culture as a source of pride and inspiration, Douglas was an inspiring choice for the project.
Burroughs was an extraordinary artist, poet, educator, curator, and activist who played a key role in advancing opportunities for Black artists and bringing recognition of the contributions of Black art, history, and culture to American life. In Chicago, she helped establish the renowned South Side Community Art Center and founded the DuSable Museum of African American History. As an artist, Burroughs worked in a variety of media, including painting and sculpture, but she is perhaps best known for her linocuts of African American leaders, historical events, and scenes of daily life featuring Black people that were seldom seen in art museums and galleries.
In Egress, numerous long, spiraling bands and short, spiky shards of rubber appear to unfurl from within and pour over and around the pedestal. The layers curl, pile, and protrude to form a mound that is simultaneously monstrous and playful, hard and soft, abstract and representational. While the plantlike, layered form recalls ivy or fern, the tracks, treads, and manufacturer name (Cooper) embossed on the sidewalls remind us of the medium's previous automotive life.
Booker's artistic practice is highly physical, from transporting the tires to reshaping them with machinery. Her use of discarded rubber references industrialization and factory labor as well as transportation, consumer culture, and environmental concerns. Her process of salvaging beauty from scraps of black rubber serves as a metaphor for Black American experiences of struggle, strength, and survival.
Details of the tires demonstrate the capacity for meaning in Booker's forms: the varied tones that parallel human diversity, the treads suggestive of African scarification and textile designs, and the visible wear and tear that evokes the physical marks of human aging and inevitable distress in life. As she has said, "[my] intention is to translate simple yet complex materials into imagery that stimulates people to reconsider the expressive nature of art and how broad, complex cultural transformations can continue to be expressed through common materials."
Several years after the publication of God's Trombones, Douglas began translating the eight illustrations he had created to accompany Johnson's poems into large oil paintings. The Judgment Day, the final painting in the series of eight, was the first work by Douglas to enter the Gallery's collection. At the center of the composition a powerful black Gabriel stands astride earth and sea. With a trumpet call, the archangel summons the nations of the earth to judgment.
The artist Lois Mailou Jones often visited the Caribbean nation of Haiti, depicted here, during her life, through her marriage to Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel. In this scene of everyday life, Mailou Jones has taken care to show adults and children at work and at play, living in a dense community of brightly colored stacked houses.
Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance of her youth, Mailou Jones cultivated a lifelong interest in African and African Diasporic cultures and artistic traditions. In the 1960s, she traveled to 11 African countries to meet, learn from, and document the work of contemporary artists. Through teaching at Howard University for more than 40 years, Mailou Jones raised awareness of the contemporary artistic traditions developing in Black communities across the globe for a generation of Black artists in the United States.
Horace Pippin turned to art after serving in World War I in the African American regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Pippin was shot by a sniper and lost full use of his right arm, receiving an honorable discharge from the military. He returned to his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and taught himself to paint using his left arm to support his injured arm. By the late 1930s his work had attracted the interest of such notables as the artist N. C. Wyeth, critic Christian Brinton, and collector Albert Barnes.
Although she is best known for her rhinestone-encrusted paintings, celebrated African American artist Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) has made photographs since the beginning of her artistic career. Melody: Back (2011), a Polaroid print that depicts a seated nude woman, draws on European art history with the model mimicking the pose of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's The Grand Odalisque (1814).
Instead of placing her figure on sumptuous silks, as Ingres did, Thomas has used boldly patterned fabrics, and her black model proudly displays a tattoo on her back that says "Only God Can Judge Me." Proclaiming her subject's beauty and sexuality, Thomas provocatively challenges cultural stereotypes while creating a richly textured work of art.
This work is known by two titles: Mother and Awaiting His Return. The woman who dominates the composition stares into space, her strongly modeled figure a study in patience. Given the work's date (1945), the framed star in the background (a symbol of the US military), and the word mother inscribed in the lithograph's lower left corner, the two titles make equal sense. The woman's face is easily interpreted as that of a mother waiting for a loved one to return from service in World War II. Artist Charles White has chiseled her facial features with determination while infusing her expression with sadness. The cubist faceting of her figure imparts a feeling of solidity and strength in her that is reinforced by her imposing size and foreground placement. Her hands and face are nearly architectural, with their sharp edges and straight-line markings of light and shadow. Yet her tired eyes, her chin set into the palm of her hand, and the merest hint of doubt in her expression signal concern.
In 1942 White, primarily known as a painter of historical murals, shifted his focus to portraits of everyday African Americans on the advice of Harry Sternberg, an instructor at the Art Students League, New York. White's portraits, including Mother, depict anonymous people dealing with situations common to the black experience. The meticulous draftsman used his skill to render human emotion and endurance in the face of such obstacles as discrimination. His works from the 1950s, the decade when the civil rights struggle exploded in the United States, show the cost of such perseverance in images of black men and women fighting for social justice.
She has labeled him a shopper, not a looter; a visitor, not a trespasser; a community member, not an imposter. He belongs. In the stillness of a breezeless summer night, the flag above him hangs limply, but the angle of his hat and his upright posture communicate youth, confidence, and leisure. He reminds me of my late father, who spent much of his youth on naval submarines wearing just such a hat.