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Art and Illustration  

James Smalls

Generally speaking, slavery and the slave trade have rarely been subject matter for art. Although many artists from different parts of the globe produced an image or two reflecting the practice of human enslavement, most avoided the topic altogether for political, ideological, or esthetic reasons. The visualization of slavery and the slave trade through art is an inherently political act that automatically positions an artist as either pro- or anti-slavery. The visual representation of slavery or the slave trade was for the most part instigated by and parallel in development with abolitionist movements.

With the increase in anti slavery sentiment throughout Europe and the United States during the late eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth there developed a need for visual propaganda to support the cause Thus most graphic representations were didactic intended to stir sympathy and outrage in the viewer Most were rendered during the eighteenth and ...

Article

Bannister, Edward Mitchell  

Pamela M. Fletcher

painter, was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, the son of Hannah Alexander, a native of New Brunswick, and Edward Bannister, from Barbados. While his birth date has generally been given as 1828, recent research has suggested that he was born several years earlier. After the death of his father in 1832, Edward was raised by his mother, whom he later credited with encouraging his artistic aspirations: “The love of art in some form came to me from my mother. … She it was who encouraged and fostered my childhood propensities for drawing and coloring” (Holland, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 17). His mother died in 1844 and Edward and his younger brother William were sent to work for a wealthy local family where he was exposed to classical literature music and painting Edward s interest in art continued and an early biography of the ...

Article

Basquiat, Jean-Michel  

Aaron Myers

Born to a Haitian father and a first-generation Puerto Rican-American mother, Jean-Michel Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn, New York. As a child he created drawings inspired by Comic Books and television cartoons. His mother, who often took him to local museums, nurtured his early interest in art.

In May 1968 Basquiat was hit by a car. He suffered a broken arm and his spleen had to be removed. While he was hospitalized, his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, a book that inspired many of his later works as well as the name of the Gray, the noise band he co-founded in 1979. After his parents separated in 1968, Basquiat and his two sisters lived with their father. At the age of seventeen, Basquiat dropped out of high school and lived, by choice, in the streets and with various friends.

Basquiat s career as an ...

Article

Basquiat, Jean-Michel  

Amy Helene Kirschke

painter. Basquiat was born to a Puerto Rican mother, Matilde Basquiat, and a Haitian father, Gérard Jean-Baptiste Basquiat, who was a former Haitian minister of the interior. Basquiat's mother encouraged his interest in all forms of the visual arts. He attended a Catholic high school but dropped out a year before his graduation and moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There he lived with various friends and supported himself by selling small, postcard-size art and T-shirts.

When Basquiat was only seventeen he started partnering with his friend Al Diaz in lower Manhattan to graffiti dilapidated buildings and subway trains with images and poems, signing the artwork “SAMO,” which represented “same ole shit.” The graffiti often included cryptic sayings, such as “plush safe he think; SAMO,” “SAMO is an escape clause,” and “SAMO does not cause cancer in laboratory animals.” Within a year this graffiti garnered considerable interest. The Village ...

Article

Basquiat, Jean-Michel  

N. Elizabeth Schlatter

painter, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Gerard Basquiat, an accountant originally from Haiti, and Matilde Andradas, of Puerto Rican descent. A precocious draftsman from childhood, Basquiat received little formal artistic training. The last school he attended was the experimental City-as-School program in Manhattan, where he befriended his fellow artist Al Diaz.

Before quitting school altogether in 1978, Basquiat created SAMO (meaning “same old shit”), which was variously a pseudo-religion, a fictional logo, a nom de plume, and a persona. Basquiat and Diaz spray-painted original aphorisms with a copyright symbol next to the word SAMO on walls and in alleys in lower Manhattan. Their mock epigrams and mottoes included “SAMO as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy,” “SAMO saves idiots,” and “plush safe he think, SAMO.” Whereas other graffiti artists such as Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000 and ...

Article

Bearden, Romare  

Amy Helene Kirschke

painter, printmaker, and collage artist. Romare Howard Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on 12 September 1911, to Richard Howard and Bessye Bearden. Although he only spent two years in North Carolina, his grandparents conveyed a sense of history and connection to the South, a connection that was reflected in his work throughout his career. Most of his childhood and adult life were spent in New York. He moved to New York in 1914, and then to Harlem in 1920. His mother, Bessye, was elected to the New York City school board in 1922 education was of paramount importance in his family Bearden had an expansive diverse career and is considered one of the finest American artists of the twentieth century He had an interest in political social and cultural issues including the visual arts music and literature He was particularly ...

Article

Black Visual Artists and Modernism in New York, 1920s–1950s  

Adrienne L. Childs

While many urban centers boasted a flowering of Black creative energies early in the twentieth century, New York was the epicenter of Black engagement with modern art fueled by modern attitudes, and remained a hub for avant-garde Black artists through the twentieth century. There is no more important episode in this phenomenon than the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and no more important locale than New York City’s Harlem. This movement was largely inspired by Alain Locke’s compendium of essays that first came together in “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine. They were later enhanced and published in the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation In it Locke and the other contributors heralded Harlem as the center for the development of modern Black identities also known as the New Negro and declared that the arts and culture were ...

Article

Delaney, Beauford  

Lawrie Balfour

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. According to his younger brother, painter Joseph Delaney, Delaney was preoccupied with art even as a young child. He received his first formal art training from Lloyd Branson, a white artist living in Knoxville. Branson encouraged him to move to Boston, Massachusetts in 1924. There he studied painting at the Massachusetts Normal School, the South Boston School of Art, and the Copley Society.

In 1929 Delaney moved to New York, where he held a variety of jobs while he established himself as a painter. Twelve of his portraits were displayed in a 1930 group show at the Whitney Studio Galleries later the Whitney Museum of American Art In exchange for working at the Whitney as a guard telephone operator and gallery attendant Delaney received studio space and a place to live He had his first one man ...

Article

Douglas, Aaron  

Aaron Myers

Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, he taught art at Lincoln High School in Topeka from 1923 to 1925. He moved to Harlem, New York in 1925, the year cultural critic and philosopher Alain Leroy Locke launched the New Negro movement. This movement expressed African Americans' new pride in their African heritage, which manifested itself in literature, song, dance, and most significantly for Douglas, art.

Douglas soon made the acquaintance of German American portrait artist Winold Reiss, who illustrated the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic an issue devoted to the New Negro movement and edited by Locke Both Reiss and Locke encouraged Douglas to develop his own aesthetic from design motifs in African art Douglas followed their suggestions and sought examples of African art which in the 1920s were beginning to be purchased by American museums ...

Article

Douglas, Aaron  

Amy Helene Kirschke

artist and educator, was born in Topeka, Kansas, the son of Aaron Douglas Sr., a baker from Tennessee, and Elizabeth (maiden name unknown), an amateur artist from Alabama. Aaron had several brothers and sisters, but he was unique in his family in his singular drive to pursue higher education. He attended segregated elementary schools and then an integrated high school. Topeka had a strong and progressive black community, and Aaron was fortunate to grow up in a city where education and social uplift were stressed through organizations such as the Black Topeka Foundation. He was an avid reader and immersed himself in the great writers, including Dumas, Shakespeare, and Emerson His parents were able to feed and clothe him but could offer him no other help with higher education When he needed money to pursue a college degree he traveled via rail to Detroit where ...

Article

El Anatsui  

Jennifer Anne Hart

Ghanaian painter and sculptor, was born in Anyako in the Volta region of what was then the Gold Coast and is now Ghana. He was the son of a weaver, and is a member of the Ewe ethnic group.

Anatsui began professional art training at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana (1965–1969). During this four-year training period, which emphasized Western art techniques, Anatsui specialized in sculpture with particular focus on life and figure studies. During the early years of his career and training, however, Anatsui was influenced by the work of Oku Ampofo, Vincent Akwete Kofi, and Kofi Antubam, who began to reject the foreign influences in their artistic training and pay increasing attention to indigenous art forms. This artistic movement was encapsulated in the Ghanaian concept of sankofa. Responding to colonial efforts to denigrate African culture, sankofa encouraged the careful selection and inclusion of ...

Article

Flood, Curt  

Gerald Early

baseball player and artist, was born Curtis Charles Flood in Houston, Texas, the youngest of six children of Herman and Laura Flood. In 1940 the family moved to Oakland, California. Flood's older brother, Carl, who had trouble with the law from childhood, slipped into a life of crime. Flood, however, began playing midget-league baseball at the age of nine. George Powles coached the team and produced, besides Curt Flood, such players as Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Joe Morgan, and Jesse Gonder. The other factor that kept Flood out of trouble was encountering Jim Chambers who encouraged his interest and development as an artist at Herbert Hoover High School in Oakland Flood played baseball throughout his teenage years and became a promising athlete However he was small weighing barely one hundred forty pounds and standing only five feet seven inches tall as a senior in ...

Article

Guyton, Tyree  

Cheryl A. Alston

artist and activist, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the third of ten children of Betty Solomon Guyton and George Guyton, a construction worker. His mother reared the children on her own after George Guyton left the-family, when Tyree Guyton was nine years old. Guyton grew up on the east side of Detroit in an area called “Black Bottom,” one of the oldest African American communities in the city. He attended Northern High School, but he did not graduate and earned his GED at a later date.

Guyton began painting at the age of eight when his grandfather, Sam Mackey a housepainter at the time who later became a painter of fine art gave him the tool to create a paintbrush Because of his family s poverty Guyton felt all he had was his art He felt like he had no freedom and he realized early on that ...

Article

Haitian Art  

André Juste

Many studies of Haitian art suggest that its central theme is national identity. Issues that are related to Haitian national identity—such as colonialism, national sovereignty, and nation building—are all seen as the underlying force behind the production of what has been called “L'Art Haitien.” Thus, a number of artists from the early days of Haiti's independence in 1804 to the present have produced works that attempt to assert and reassess their country's sociocultural tradition.

The 1940s were a defining period in Haitian art history. At this time Négritude the ethnographical and literary movement that sought to affirm peasant culture or Haiti s African cultural roots began to spread beyond the limited world of intellectuals The growing lower and middle classes many of whom were the product of the long suffering and oppressed peasant majority became more aware of the importance of the Négritude writers The famous Centre D Art ...

Article

Harrington, Oliver W.  

Christine G. McKay

cartoonist, was born Oliver Wendell Harrington in New York City, the son of Herbert Harrington, a porter, and Euzenie Turat. His father came to New York from North Carolina in the early 1900s when many African Americans were seeking greater opportunities in the North. His mother had immigrated to America, arriving from Austria-Hungary in 1907, to join her half sister. Ollie Harrington grew up in a multiethnic neighborhood in the South Bronx and attended public schools. He recalled a home life burdened by the stresses of his parents' interracial marriage and the financial struggles of raising five children. From an early age, he drew cartoons to ease those tensions.

In 1927 Harrington enrolled at Textile High School in Manhattan He was voted best artist in his class and started a club whose members studied popular newspaper cartoonists Exposure to the work of Art Young Denys ...

Article

Havens, Richie  

Pamela Lee Gray

musician, activist, author, painter, and sculptor, was born Richard Pierce Havens in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest of nine children. He grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. His father, Richard Havens, worked as a metal plater and dreamed of becoming a professional pianist, eventually learning to play a number of instruments. Richie's mother Mildred a bookbinder and casual singer at home encouraged her young son when he started singing background vocals at the age of twelve for local groups All kinds of music were played in the Havens home Richie s grandmother listened to Yiddish gospel and big band music his mother enjoyed country music and his father loved jazz He joined the doo wop singing group the Five Chances at age fifteen and performed the next year with the Brooklyn McCrea Gospel Singers a group that sang hymns for neighborhood churches Havens ...

Article

Herriman, George Joseph  

Thomas M. Inge

cartoonist, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of George Herriman Jr., a tailor, and Clara Morel. There is uncertainty about Herriman's ethnic background. His birth certificate identified him as “Colored,” his parents were listed in the 1880 New Orleans federal census as “Mulatto,” but his death certificate noted that he was “Caucasian.” During his lifetime, friends often thought he was Greek or French because of his Adonis-like appearance, and he has been called a “Creole.” The family moved to Los Angeles when Herriman was a child, and his father opened a barbershop and then a bakery.

Herriman attended St. Vincent's College, a Roman Catholic secondary school for boys. When he finished school in 1897 he followed his artistic bent and began to contribute illustrations to the Los Angeles Herald After the turn of the century he moved to New York City and began to ...

Article

Hunter, Clementine  

Anne Hudson Jones

“If Jimmy Carter wants to see me, he knows where I am. He can come here.” This reply to President Carter’s invitation that she come to Washington for the opening of an exhibition of her work is vintage Clementine Hunter. Her disregard for fame and the famous was part of her special charm and did not change, even after she became known worldwide for her colorful folk paintings of black life in the Cane River region of northern Louisiana.

Hunter was born on Hidden Hill Plantation, near Cloutierville, Louisiana. Her mother, Mary Antoinette Adams, was the daughter of a slave who was brought to Louisiana from Virginia. Her father, John Reuben had an Irish father and a Native American mother Hunter considered herself a Creole When she was a teenager she moved with her family from Hidden Hill to Yucca Plantation which was renamed Melrose seventeen miles ...

Article

Hunter, Clementine  

Thomas N. Whitehead

folk artist, was born Clemence Reuben at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana, the daughter of John Reuben and Antoinette Adams, plantation workers. Her exact birth date is unknown. Most sources agree that she was born in either late December 1886 or early January 1887.

Leaving Catholic school in Cloutierville at a young age because she disliked the discipline of the nuns, Reuben, now called Clementine, became a cotton picker and field hand at several plantations in the Cloutierville area. In her adolescence her father moved the family to Melrose Plantation, about fifteen miles south of Natchitoches, Louisiana, in the central part of the state.

Melrose Plantation had been established in 1796 by Marie-Therese Coincoin a freed female slave who became one of the most successful plantation and slave owners in the United States After the Civil War ownership of the plantation was transferred to white ...

Article

Image of the Mulatta in Latin America and the Caribbean  

Flora González

The term mulatta is a social construction created by colonizers to signify the racial mixing of people of African and European ancestry with the intent of “Whitening” African physical and cultural traits.

The image of the mulatta is inextricably tied to the violence of forced Miscegenation of the female African slave by the European slaveholder beginning in the sixteenth century In the European imagination the mulatta has come to signify the vulnerable yet highly sexualized woman whose sole ambition is to better herself by marrying a white European man and bearing children whose African ancestry is not physically apparent By wishing to gain legal status for her mixed children in the colonies the mulatta represents a threat to the racial purity of the European family The image of the mulatta thus embodies a contradiction fulfilling both the desire to whiten the Latin American and Caribbean population and ...