Introduction
The Harlem Renaissance was a prolific era, lasting from the 1920s through the 1930s, and one of the most important moments in African American cultural history. Throughout this time, African American art, literature, and music kept growing out of Harlem, New York, as Black artists and intellectuals celebrated their culture and voiced their desire for equality. Central to this was a change in African American art, which now included not just the legacy of African traditions but also the modern experiences of Black Americans. The Harlem Renaissance had a great impact on African American art because it confronted dominant narratives of racial inferiority head-on while redefining Black artistic expression.1 This essay will show that the Harlem Renaissance gave African American creatives a chance to express themselves through their art while connecting that art with the wider modernist movement.
March 21, 1924
Civic Club dinner
More than 100 publishers, editors, artists and writers meet at the Civic Club in Manhattan. Charles S. Johnson organizes the evening, with Alain Locke as master of ceremonies, to put Harlem’s Black writers before white publishers.
In the essay Introduction
March 1925
“Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”
Paul Kellogg, who attended the dinner, gives a whole issue of the Survey Graphic to Black Harlem. Alain Locke edits it.
In the essay Introduction
1934
Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life
Douglas completes a four-panel mural for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center, through the Public Works of Art Project. The panels run from an African setting through the Deep South and Reconstruction to the modern city.
In the essay Aaron Douglas and the Return to African Heritage
1940–41
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series
Lawrence, who moved to Harlem at 13 and found art in its community workshops, paints the 60 panels in casein tempera on hardboard.
In the essay Modernism as Social Commentary: Lawrence and Motley
November 1941 – January 1942
Fortune and the Downtown Gallery
Fortune magazine publishes the series in its November issue, and the Downtown Gallery in New York shows it, when Lawrence is 23.
In the essay Modernism as Social Commentary: Lawrence and Motley
1942
The series divided
The Phillips Collection and the Museum of Modern Art buy the series jointly: the Phillips takes the odd-numbered panels, MoMA the even-numbered ones.
In the essay Modernism as Social Commentary: Lawrence and Motley
1943
Archibald Motley, Nightlife
Motley paints a crowded cabaret in Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side, in magenta and violet, partly inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.
In the essay Modernism as Social Commentary: Lawrence and Motley
Dates and facts come from the sources below; the first two are from the essay’s own first source.
Sources: Sarah Ritchie, “The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural, Social, and Political Movement” (2013); The Living New Deal, “Schomburg Center: Douglas Murals”; The Phillips Collection, press release on the 2016 reunion of The Migration Series; Art Institute of Chicago, Nightlife.
Aaron Douglas and the Return to African Heritage
A pivotal effect of the Harlem Renaissance was a change in how the arts viewed African American identity. Before this period, Black artists were frequently confined to the margins of a predominantly white art world. The Harlem Renaissance allowed them to identify with their culture and, in turn, give voice to their lives. Aaron Douglas is often described as the “father of African American art,” and he symbolizes this change in many ways. His works, such as the mural series Aspects of Negro Life (1934), challenged how the path of African Americans from slavery to modernity had been represented, using African-inspired motifs integrated with geometric designs.2 The inclusion of African symbols was an important departure from the accepted art norms of the time and spoke volumes about Black cultural pride, while relating the struggles of African Americans to their African heritage.3
By putting African heritage in the foreground of his art, Douglas provided a new iconography for Black artists, one that celebrated cultural identity rather than suppressing it. His use of African iconography with modernist abstraction symbolized the reclaiming of African traditions and positioned African American art as a response to racial oppression. It marked a serious turning point in the redefinition of Black identity and self-expression, within a cultural movement that used creativity as its means of empowerment.
Modernism as Social Commentary: Lawrence and Motley
Besides reclaiming African heritage, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance developed modernist aesthetics, applying contemporary artistic means in ways that revealed their changing social landscape. One example is Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940–41), which expresses social and racial concerns through modernist means. In bright colors and forms emptied of detail, Lawrence told the story of the Great Migration, the movement of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North in search of opportunity.4 Joining social commentary with modernism, Lawrence combined abstraction and narrative storytelling in ways that were new to African American art.
Archibald Motley responded to the same need in Nightlife (1943), which framed the vibrancy of a Black nightclub in Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side, with poise and dignity and commented on racial segregation in less forthright ways.5 His stylized figures and vibrant colors celebrated the cultural dynamism of African American life but also mirrored tensions of race and identity in urban America.6 Both Lawrence and Motley showed that the artists of the Harlem Renaissance were not only exploring the African American experience but also pushing artistic boundaries and digging deeper into modernist techniques.
Conclusion
The Harlem Renaissance was, therefore, one of the most pivotal moments in African American art history. It gave artists a place to express their culture and to take part in larger artistic movements. A number of figures stood at the heart of the movement, celebrating their African heritage, contending with racial oppression, and bringing modernist styles into their work. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance can be felt in the way it recast African American art, on which succeeding generations of Black artists draw. By melding African traditions with modernist experimentation, these artists created a new visual language for the art of today.
