The HCAC was critical in providing black artists continued support and training that helped sustain the next generation of artists to emerge after the war. The HCAC offered hands-on art making led by professional artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. Further, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC) in 1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Yet the Harlem Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Pursuit of jobs, better education, and housing-as well as escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism-drove black Americans to relocate. The formation of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by the Great Migration-the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the continental United States, mainly from rural Southern regions to more populous urban centers in the North. Whether through formal, posed family photographs in his studio or through photo essays of Harlem’s cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, diverse, and thriving community. James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), a photographer, became the unofficial chronicler of African American life in Harlem. In the early part of his career, he created intimate and direct portraits, such as Portrait of My Grandmother of 1922. (1891–1981) began his career during the 1920s as one of the first African American graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) worked in a realistic style, representing his subjects in a nuanced and sympathetic light in which black Americans had seldom been depicted before. Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902–1993) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980) also explored a streamlined approach that drew from African and European artistic influences. They also turned to the art of antiquity, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of popular interest due to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb. He and other artists also looked toward West Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as a link to their African heritage. Douglas began his artistic career as a landscape painter but was influenced by modern art movements such as cubism, in which subjects appear fragmented and fractured, and by the graphic arts, which typically use bold colors and stylized forms. While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts-pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar-sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.Īaron Douglas (1899–1979) is known as the “father of African American art.” He defined a modern visual language that represented black Americans in a new light. Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and interest in the rapidly changing modern world-many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the first time. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). “I believe that the advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the country, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural and the financial center for Negroes of the United States and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples.” -James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” 1925 How do migration and displacement influence cultural production? How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues? How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment?
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