Contemporary Art Gallery Online is Celebrating Black History Month
Below please find a short synopsis of the Artists we are Celebrating this year.
Emma Amos Throughout her vibrant paintings, prints, and textiles, Emma Amos explored the politics of race, sexuality, gender, and Black subjectivity within a predominantly white, Western canon. She often used bold colors, patterned motifs, and mythical iconography. In addition to her artmaking practice, Amos was an essential member of New York–centered artistic communities that celebrated Blackness and feminist perspectives. Amos’s first solo exhibition was in an Atlanta gallery in 1960. In that same year she moved to New York, where she taught as an assistant at the Dalton School and continued her work as an artist by making prints. In 1961 she was hired by Dorothy Liebes as a designer/weaver, creating rugs for a major textile manufacturer. In 1964 she entered a master’s program in Art Education at New York University. During this time Hale Woodruff invited her to become a member of Spiral, a group of black artists that included Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Charles Alston. She was the group’s youngest and only female member. Amos’s work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the New Jersey and Minnesota state museums, and the Dade County and Newark museums.
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Akili Ron Anderson is a stunningly versatile visual artist. His work includes breathtaking stained glass, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, set design, and photography. His art celebrates African people and culture and emphasizes the importance of maintaining cultural and ancestral practices. His work pays tribute to the African and Black experiences by incorporating many African symbols, patterns, and culturally specific references. In his over 50 years a visual artist, he has carried out a mission to make sure that all members of the community have access to art by designing art for many cultural, religious, and public institutions. He is a faculty member in the Department of Art at Howard University and he is the co- founder of the NationHouse Organization. His works have been exhibited at Duke University and Hampton University. Anderson has been a member of the Nation-African Liberation Arts Ensemble and he is currently a member of the “AfriCobra” artists’ collective. AfriCOBRA brought together artists in a variety of media to create a functional art that expressed a vision of the past, present, and future of the Black community and promoted education and political action.
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Elizabeth Catlett One of the most important American artists of the past century, Elizabeth Catlett is honored as a foremother by subsequent generations. In the United States and in Mexico, where she resided for over sixty years, she produced an unparalleled body of politically charged and aesthetically compelling graphic and sculptural images that were grounded in what she regarded as the historically based necessity to render visible that which had not been the subject of art. She followed the advice of Grant Wood, her graduate school mentor, that she “take as her subject what she knew best” as she dedicated herself to making art primarily for African American – and later Mexican – audiences, determined to give voice to the enduring dignity, strength, and achievements of black women and other oppressed peoples.
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Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator and visual arts educator. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. He was a leading figure in the artistic and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. He is sometimes referred to as "the father of Black American art." Douglas developed an interest in art early on, finding some of his inspiration from his mother's love for painting watercolors
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David Driskell was a legendary African American artist and art historian. As an artist, scholar, and curator, he made substantial contributions to these fields that have changed the way we think about American art. His paintings and collages unite a strong modernist impulse with his personal vision and memory. He has long been recognized for his vibrant and versatile artistic practice rooted in his reverence of the beauty and spirituality of the American landscape and his profound connection to the African diaspora. Featuring over 50 works, David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History offers the first comprehensive examination of the paintings, collages, prints, and drawings of the celebrated American artist, art historian, and educator. His legacy in the history of American art is unparalleled: through his curatorial work, writing, and teaching, he demonstrated that the art of Black people is essential to the story of American art
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Lois Mailou Jones was an influential artist and teacher during her seven-decade career. By the 1920s both European and African-American artists used non-Western art to help them break from prevailing formal styles, and Jones followed that lead. Although her early impressionistic style recurs throughout her career, the bold, emblematic qualities of African art have led her toward abstraction, as they had Post-Impressionist and Cubist artists. The planar design and striking color contrasts in Les Fetiches complement the dynamic, essential forms of the objects.Throughout her career, Jones has championed the international artistic achievement of African-American art. She has also been an important role model for other African-American artists, particularly those involved with her design and watercolor courses at Howard University from 1930 to 1977. Jones was one of the most notable figures to attain fame for her art while living as a black expatriate in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Her career began in textile design before she decided to focus on fine arts. Jones looked towards Africa and the Caribbean and her experiences in life when painting. As a result, her subjects were some of the first paintings by an African-American artist to extend beyond the realm of portraiture. Jones was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance movement and her countless international trips. Lois Mailou Jones' career was enduring and complex. Her work in designs, paintings, illustrations, and academia made her an exceptional artist who continues to receive national attention and research.
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Carolyn Lawrence is a visual artist and teacher known for her role in the Chicago Black Arts Movement. She earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in 1968 from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a thesis entitled “Teaching Afro-American Culture through the Visual Arts.” In 1967 Lawrence joined OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) to create the Wall of Respect, a mural composed of portraits of African American heroes located on the South Side of Chicago. Lawrence collaborated with muralist William Walker to paint the section of the wall honoring Black MuslimsAfter her work on the Wall of Respect, Lawrence joined the art collective AfriCOBRA shortly after it was founded in Chicago in 1968. AfriCOBRA brought together artists in a variety of media to create a functional art that expressed a vision of the past, present, and future of the Black community and promoted education and political action. As a member of the collective she sought to define a Black aesthetic and to uplift and celebrate African American culture and community by creating positive, empowering images of Black life.
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Jacob Lawrence The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, and one of only several whose works are included in standard survey books on American art, Jacob Lawrence has enjoyed a successful career for more than fifty years. Lawrence’s paintings portray the lives and struggles of African Americans, and have found wide audiences due to their abstract, colorful style and universality of subject matter. By the time he was thirty years old, Lawrence had been labeled as the “foremost Negro artist,” and since that time his career has been a series of extraordinary accomplishments. Moreover, Lawrence is one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in a black community, was taught primarily by black artists, and was influenced by black people.
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Edmonia Lewis was the first sculptor of African American and Native American (Mississauga) descent to achieve international recognition. Her father was Black, and her mother was Chippewa (Ojibwa) Indian. Orphaned at an early age, Lewis grew up in her mother’s tribe where her life revolved around fishing, swimming, and making and selling crafts. In 1859 she attended Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the first schools to accept female and Black students. She developed an interest in the fine arts, but an accusation of poisoning, probably racially motivated, forced Lewis to leave the school before graduating. She traveled to Boston and established herself as a professional artist, studying with a local sculptor and creating portraits of famous antislavery heroes. Moving to Rome in 1865, she became involved with a group of American women sculptors and began to work in marble. Sculptors usually hired local workmen to carve their final pieces, but Lewis did all her own stonework out of fear that if she didn’t, her work would not be accepted as original. In addition to creating portrait heads, Lewis sculpted biblical scenes and figural works dealing with her Native American heritage and the oppression of Black people.
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Archibald Motley was a bold and highly original modernist and one of the great visual chroniclers of twentieth-century American life. He first came to prominence in the 1920s during the early days of the Harlem Renaissance—the cultural flowering of African American art, music, and literature that extended beyond the New York neighborhood of its name to other cities, notably Chicago, where Motley spent most of his life. Motley had a long career and enjoyed recognition for his work early on, yet went through subsequent periods of struggle and obscurity. Motley was born in New Orleans, but his family moved to Chicago when he was quite young, and he later became one of the first black artists to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His training there was academic, rigorously focused on the human figure, and steeped in European tradition. Motley’s sophisticated understanding of art history is especially apparent in his sympathetic portraits, but it was a history that he challenged and advanced with his raucous scenes of everyday urban life.
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Gordon Parks one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, was a humanitarian with a deep commitment to social justice. He left behind an exceptional body of work that documents American life and culture from the early 1940s into the 2000s, with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life. Parks was also a distinguished composer, author, and filmmaker who interacted with many of the leading people of his era—from politicians and artists to athletes and other celebrities. Parks was the first African American to produce and direct major motion pictures—developing films relating the experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, and creating the "blaxploitation" genre. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. Parks also was an author, poet and composer.
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James Phillips James Phillips’ art has been linked to his association and consequent membership with the organizations Weusi and AfriCobra. However, his accomplishments are highlighted rather than mirrored by the association of these two groups that led the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. African spirituality was the ignition, which these artists used as the connective link to the past, and African spiritual heritage was, a strong motivation for producing the art.
Through the influence of Ademola Olugebefola and other contemporary African artists and 20th Century African American artists Phillips developed his own personal style of painting. He incorporated African patterns and designs throughout his compositions which included foreground and background to portray one design. In 1973 he became a member of AfriCobra, because some of the members were starting to use similar patterns and motifs to his. That evolved into what young writers and art historians are calling the AfriCobra style or tradition. To his credit, James Phillips’ work is included in several well known collections as well as numerous private collections. His works have been specially created for public art projects for the city of Baltimore, Howard University in Washington, DC, the Department of Parks in New York City and the transit system for San Francisco, California and is highly collected by individuals throughout the nation. James Phillips currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland where he works from his studio located in his home. He also teaches painting and public art in the Department of Fine Arts at Howard University, Washington, DC. Since 1976 he has been both a mural consultant and a lecturer.
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Betye Saar As one of the artists who ushered in the development of Assemblage art, Betye Saar’s practice reflects on African American identity, spirituality and the connectedness between different cultures. Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic, and historical context in which it exists. For over six decades, Saar has created assemblage works that explore the social, political, and economic underpinnings of America’s collective memory. She began her career at the age of 35 producing work that dealt with mysticism, nature and family. Saar’s art became political in the 1970’s namely with the assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in 1972. As did many of the women who came to consciousness in the 1960’s, Saar takes on the feminist mantra “the personal is political” as a fundamental principle in her assemblage works. Her appropriation of black collectibles, heirlooms, and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion, and yet given her status as a pioneer of the Assemblage movement, the impact of Saar’s oeuvre on contemporary art has yet to be fully acknowledged or critically assessed. Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach and continues to both actively produce work and inspire countless others.
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Alma Thomas in 1907, Thomas and her family migrated from Columbus, Georgia, to DC, and by 1924, she became the first art department graduate at Howard University. She studied the latest developments in art, visiting museums in New York, Europe, and DC, including The Phillips Collection. For 35 years and in a segregated city, she empowered art students at Shaw Junior High School to see beauty in the everyday and brought exhibition opportunities and cultural enrichment to Black youth. Thomas’s home at 1530 15th Street, NW, was her artistic epicenter. There, she created small watercolors, aerial landscapes, and brightly patterned large-scale abstractions that reflect her local surroundings and her fascination with space and the environment. She also pursued her interests in performance, puppetry, and fashion. A leader within her creative community, Thomas shaped the DC art scene through her association with Howard University, American University, and the Barnett Aden Gallery (one of the first Black-owned private galleries in the nation), which she helped co-found. She made history in 1971 by becoming the first Black woman given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at age 81, and again in 2015 by becoming the first Black woman to have a work of art acquired by the White House Collection.
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Mickalene Thomas In spectacular staged photographs and dazzling patchwork paintings made from acrylic, rhinestones, and enamel, Mickalene Thomas celebrates female beauty, sexuality, desire, and power. Her compositions often focus on Black female subjects and feature 1970s-style patterns, bold pops of color, and references to art historical figures including Picasso and Manet. Such juxtapositions allow Thomas to explore Black women’s relationships to both art history and contemporary culture at large. The artist has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bass Museum in Miami, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among other institutions. At auction, Thomas’s work can command upwards of seven figures. Along with her fine-art practice, Thomas has shot for such publications as W, Out, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She has also constructed elaborate installations to showcase her works.
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William T. Williams is an American painter known for his process-based approach to painting that engages motifs drawn from personal memory and cultural narrative to create non-referential, abstract compositions. He was a Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, City University of New York from 1971 to 2008. Williams is a recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. He is also a recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem's Artist Award in 1992 and received The James Van Dee Zee Award from the Brandywine Workshop for lifetime achievement in the arts in 2005. He received the 2006 North Carolina Award for Fine Arts, the highest civilian honor the state can bestow. Williams is represented in numerous museum and corporate collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, North Carolina Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Menil Collection, Fogg Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Library of Congress, Yale University Art Gallery, Chase Manhattan Bank, AT&T, General Mills Corporation, UnitedHealth Group, Southwestern Bell Corporation and Prudential Financial Insurance Company of America. He has exhibited in over 100 museums and art centers in the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, People's Republic of China and Japan.
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