Artists African-American Art
David Butler was an African American sculptor and painter from Good Hope, Louisiana. His style is epitomized by kinetic sculptures made from recycled tin or wood, which he embellished with saturated colors and geometric patterns. His work is now in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Arthur Dial is an American painter and sculptor living and working in Bessemer, Alabama. He is a part of the Dial family of artists, which include his older brother, Thornton Dial, and his nephews, Thornton Dial Jr., Richard Dial, and Ronald Lockett.
Dial created reliefs and paintings that narrowed in on a specific moment within the broader narrative that he wished to convey. He uses these moments, such as Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit or "George Wallace blockading the entrance to the University of Alabama in Montgomery," to highlight historical or folkloric moments of extreme tension. Dial's focus on scenes of conflict in humanity's real or imagined history come from his direct observation of southern life throughout the 20th century. He describes his narratives as "a record of what went by".
Thornton Dial was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.
Ed Dwight, full name Edward Joseph Dwight Jr. is an American sculptor, writer, and former test pilot.
He was the first African-American to enter the Air Force training program from which NASA selected astronauts. He resigned from the Air Force in 1966 for reasons of racial discrimination, politics and bureaucracy and turned to the arts. Dwight earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Denver in 1977 and excelled as an artist. Most of Dwight's work depicts only black people, and his acclaimed series Jazz: The Shape of American Art focuses on the evolution of jazz and includes all iconic jazz performers.
Ed Dwight has had a thriving career in sculpture and has many high-profile projects to his credit. His unique masterpieces are displayed in several memorials across the United States. He has also become a historian and writer.
Minnie Eva Evans was an African American artist who worked in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Evans used different types of media in her work such as oils and graphite, but started with using wax and crayon. She was inspired to start drawing due to visions and dreams that she had all throughout her life, starting when she was a young girl. She is known as a southern folk artist and outsider artist as well as a surrealist and visionary artist.
Jacob Armstead Lawrence was a pioneering American artist, renowned for his dynamic cubism and profound portrayals of African-American life and history. Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, he moved to Harlem at a young age, where he was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. This vibrant cultural period helped shape his unique artistic style, which combined abstract expression with narrative elements.
Lawrence gained national recognition at just 23 years old with his 60-panel series "The Migration of the Negro" (later known as "The Migration Series"), which depicted the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. This work was first displayed at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in 1941, making him the first African American artist to be represented by a mainstream New York gallery.
His art often depicted both historical and contemporary themes, making significant contributions to the representation of African American history in modern art. His works are housed in prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Phillips Collection. In addition to painting, Lawrence also dedicated much of his life to teaching, influencing generations of artists at institutions like the University of Washington.
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Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-taught African-American artist, musician, poet and preacher. Sister Morgan achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her folk art paintings. Her work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1970s onwards.
Similar to other self-taught artists, Sister Morgan used simple forms to depict the human figure. Her works are characterized by their lack of the use of formal techniques such as perspective and definition of light and shadow, giving them a flat, two dimensional quality. She painted and drew using acrylics, tempera, ballpoint pen, watercolors, crayon, colored and lead pencils and felt tip markers. Using inexpensive materials she had at hand, Sister Morgan painted on paper, toilet rolls, plastic pitchers, paper megaphones, scrap wood, lampshades, paper fans and styrofoam trays. The fact that she was self-taught, coupled with her choice of materials as well as her style and subject matter have led her to be characterized as a naive, folk, visionary, vernacular and outsider artist.
Nellie Mae Rowe was an African-American artist from Fayette County, Georgia. Although she is best known today for her colorful works on paper, Rowe worked across mediums, creating drawings, collages, altered photographs, hand-sewn dolls, home installations and sculptural environments. She was said to have an "instinctive understanding of the relation between color and form." Her work focuses on race, gender, domesticity, African-American folklore, and spiritual traditions.
Henry Speller was an American artist and blues musician working in Memphis, Tennessee. His style of drawing and painting is characterized by ornate, colorful, intimidating figures which he likened to "characters from Dallas".
Speller is best known for his drawings of detailed houses, modes of transportation (trains, cars, riverboats, and planes), and adorned figures, particularly women. His figures are often white women with angular faces, round breasts made of concentric circles, and exposed genitals with common southern white names, like "Katie Mae" and "Lisa Jean". Through these characters, Speller creates a metaphor for mobility and freedom in the Jim Crow South, which white women, and even some black women, can attain, but are inaccessible to him.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was a twentieth-century American artist. She is known as a painter and educator, a member of the Harlem Renaissance African American cultural movement.
Alma Thomas rose to fame as an artist after her retirement after a 35-year career teaching high school art in Washington, DC. She created colorful abstract paintings. The artist's technique was to draw thin pencil lines on canvas to create shapes and patterns and then fill the canvas with paint. Thomas' later work has been compared by critics to West African paintings and Byzantine mosaics.
William Traylor was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. Born into slavery, Traylor spent the majority of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper. It was only after 1939, following his move to Montgomery, Alabama, that Traylor began to draw. At the age of 85, he took up a pencil and a scrap of cardboard to document his recollections and observations. From 1939 to 1942, while working on the sidewalks of Montgomery, he produced nearly 1 500 pieces of art.
While Traylor received his first public exhibition in 1940, it was not until 30 years after his death that his work finally began to receive broader attention, in the late 1970s. Recent acceptance of Traylor as a significant figure of American folk and modern art has been founded on the efforts of Charles Shannon, as well as the evolving tastes of the art world. Shannon, who first encountered Traylor's work in 1940, brought Traylor to the attention of the larger art world. Traylor now holds a central position in the fields of "self-taught" and modern art.
