Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance 9781626740488, 1626740488, 9781626742086, 1626742081, 9781628460339, 1628460334, 9781628460346, 1628460342

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WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Edited by Amy Helene Kirschke University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us he University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Page iii: Elizabeth Catlett, Young Woman, 2002. Graphite on paper, 11" x 8". Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana. Chapter 6, “Modern Dancers and African Amazons: Augusta Savage’s Daring Sculptures of Women, 1929–1930” by heresa Leininger-Miller, was previously published in he Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Tirza Latimer. Copyright © 2003 by Rutgers, the State University. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press. Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ∞ First printing 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance / edited by Amy Helene Kirschke. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-62846-033-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62846-034-6 (ebook) 1. African American women artists. 2. Harlem Renaissance. 3. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Kirschke, Amy Helene, editor of compilation. N6538.N5W66 2014 704’.0420899607307471—dc23 2014010107 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Valena Minor Williams, activist, journalist, mentor, mother of four fabulous women. Your guidance, patience, friendship, and love mean the world to me.

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CONTENTS ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

3

Chapter ONe Harlem and the Renaissance: 1920–1940 Cary D. Wintz

22

Chapter twO Liting as She Climbed: Mary Edmonia Lewis, Representing and Representative Kirsten Pai Buick

53

Chapter three Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia and the America’s Making Exposition of 1921 Renée Ater

85

Chapter FOur Laura Wheeler Waring and the Women Illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance Amy Helene Kirschke

115

Chapter FIve May Howard Jackson, Beulah Ecton Woodard, and Selma Burke Lisa E. Farrington

157

Chapter SIx Modern Dancers and African Amazons: Augusta Savage’s Daring Sculptures of Women, 1929–1930 heresa Leininger-Miller

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Contents

175

Chapter SeveN he Wide-Ranging Signiicance of Loïs Mailou Jones Susan Earle

205

Chapter eIght Elizabeth Catlett: Inheriting the Legacy Melanie Anne Herzog

239

List of Contributors

243

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the exceptional authors of this volume for their important research, their commitment to our ield, and their passion for this topic. I would also like to thank our copyeditor, Deborah Upton, for her skill, warmth, and patience during this project. Leila Salisbury has been a pleasure to work with, and we are grateful for her guidance. Special thanks to my support system, especially Kindra Clyne, Tom Schwartz, the Gonzaghini, including Elizabeth Patterson, Michael Fossett, Keith Powers, and Bill Fossett, as well as Kemille Moore, Mary Browning, Barbara and Richard Leland, Diane Doolittle, Elena Pezzuto, Nic Stockdale, Dr. George Stewart, Dr. Gregory Bebb, Katherine Mann, Denise Di Puccio, Kathleen Berkeley, Steve McNamee, Carol Pilgrim, and Professor Mercedes Carrara, who started me on this wonderful journey and continues to inspire me. Jessie Poesch was a wonderful professor at Tulane University. I would like to thank the important women in my life, including Valena Minor Williams, to whom this book is dedicated; my cousin Andrea Zizzi; my beloved mother, Jane Bruce; my sisters, Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Bonnie Bruce, and Amy Metteer Storer; and my wonderful daughters, Helene, Genevieve, and Marigny. Finally, I want to thank James, with love.

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INTRODUCTION hroughout his life, W. E. B. Du Bois passionately discussed the double consciousness, the veil that African Americans peered through, an identity that David Levering Lewis has described as “spun out between the poles of two distinct racial groups—black and white—and two dissimilar social classes— lower and upper—to form the double consciousness of being.”1 his theme appeared throughout Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. African American women experienced this double consciousness even more profoundly than did African American men. Du Bois considered the visual arts to be a signiicant part of the development of a black aesthetic. He understood that Americans saw high culture as a measure of greatness, and also fully grasped African Americans’ lack of opportunities to receive training to pursue a career in the arts. African American women felt this lack of training and opportunity keenly. Women artists were used to taking a back seat not only to their white counterparts, but also to the men of their race, both in politics and visual arts. Even in images of slavery, women were not emphasized. he earliest political depictions of slavery addressed the enslavement of black men before the enslavement of their black sisters. While abolitionists created coins showing shackled black men asking, “Am I not a man and a brother,” in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the female counterpart to this coin did not appear for another forty years.2 he African American artists examined in this book bear testament to the fact that for them becoming a visual artist was at times a seemingly unattainable goal. African American women artists experienced acutely the confusion and doubt that Du Bois referred to: “the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people”3 he black artist carried a burden, a great social responsibility, in Du Bois’s eyes. While opportunities for black male artists were limited, including support from foundations and government-supported programs such as the Works Projects Administration (WPA), those opportunities were even scarcer for black women. Black women had greater diiculty obtaining proper training in the visual arts, and as was true for black male visual artists the best training was in Europe. While xi

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Introduction

Paul Gilroy and others have written extensively on the politics of location, especially important to the people of the “Black Atlantic”4 and on the connection of people of the Diaspora to Europe, the connection in the visual arts is more complicated. Artists of any color hoped to go to Paris to study; the best opportunities, studios, and original art were there. A few of the artists whose struggles are chronicled in this volume were able to go abroad, especially to Paris, for study. Although discrimination also existed in Paris, it was still a much more open environment; when these women artists returned home, they again faced the lack of opportunities for work and continued training. Du Bois had maintained for years that European civilization had advanced beyond the rest of the world, “economically, industrially and militarily.” he past had provided Europeans the building blocks to create their civilization. According to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, history for Du Bois was “the struggle of humanity to triumph over animal savagery.”5 he arts had their place in this triumph. As a young man, Du Bois realized the obligation he had as a “cultural aristocrat” to lead his people and deine his own position as a cultural leader and member of the Talented Tenth. he inluence of German philosophy, with its strong emphasis on idealism, on the young scholar was evidenced when he formally dedicated himself to “see Truth” on his twentyith birthday in Germany and to “Take the work that the Unknown lay in my hands and work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world.”6 Du Bois wrote oten on the signiicance of the visual arts for African American culture in the pages of Crisis, where he served as editor from the founding of the magazine in 1910 until his resignation in 1934. In Criteria of Negro Art, Du Bois asserted the obligation of the black artist: hus it is the bounded duty of black American to begin this great work of the creation of beauty, of the preservation of beauty, of the realization of beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the truth . . . again artists have used goodness . . . justice, honor and right . . . as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.7

he years of the Harlem Renaissance found African American artists trying to support one another and better the race through a celebration and expression of black culture. Women artists found very little support in this endeavor, attempting to create while balancing the sole responsibility, in most cases, for the home life as well. Several of the women whose artistic lives are chronicled here became educators, answering the call to teach other hopeful

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artists. Women artists, just like Du Bois, realized deeply “the need of upliting the masses” of their people.8 his goal could be aided with thoughtful, digniied representations of African Americans. However, before the Harlem Renaissance, most black visual artists did not depict black subject matter in their work. hey avoided it for many reasons, most importantly because white patrons either had no interest in or despised such subject matter. Meanwhile, developing a suicient audience of black middle-class patrons to support such endeavors was a slow process. Not surprisingly then, very few black visual artists were known in the beginning of the twentieth century. When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote Souls of Black Folk, only a handful of African American artists had created scenes of black life. Joshua Johnson painted his early Portrait of a Cleric, a depiction of an African American minister in 1805–1810. Edmonia Lewis sculpted her Forever Free in 1867, portraying two freed African American slaves. Edward Mitchell Banister had painted his Newspaper Boy in 1869, which most art historians believe to be a portrait of a young African American boy. hese were among the few pieces known to include African American subjects, created by African American artists. Henry O. Tanner, whose genre scenes were known to black and white art connoisseurs alike in the late nineteenth century, was one of the few well-known African American artists. Tanner, whose father was an African Methodist Episcopal bishop and mother a former slave who greatly emphasized education, felt called to share God’s message through his art. Tanner was known to Du Bois and to several of the women discussed in this volume, some of who met him and received advice from him during their sojourns in Paris. Tanner’s early paintings in Paris included genre scenes from African American life. He was an artist who depicted average people going about their daily lives, “liting the veil,” not allowing the viewer to see those depicted in his works as anything else but a part of mainstream American life. His irst major African American genre scene, Banjo Lesson in 1893, was most likely executed in Philadelphia during a brief return to the United States. Of his interest in genre scenes, he stated that he had a desire to “represent the serious, and pathetic side of life among them” noting that many of the artists “who have represented Negro life have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm bug heart that dwells within such a rough existence.”9 Tanner’s second known genre scene of black life, he hankful Poor, was painted sometime in 1894. Although this subject was common in European painting, Tanner replaced Dutch or French peasants with two African Americans. he women artists discussed in this volume were aware of Tanner and his groundbreaking work, as well as the work of Edmonia Lewis. Tanner’s inal work of this

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period, he Young Sabot Maker, which focuses on an African American igure, was completed in 1895. he women artists of the Harlem Renaissance were well aware of the few known active black artists of the era, and several, including Meta Fuller and Augusta Savage, indicated an obligation to depict their race with respect and accuracy. hese visual artists were conscious of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, some of the artists worked for the Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity as illustrators. Black women had made some strides in the arts despite the overwhelming odds against them, especially with the aid of the National Association of Colored Women, which was formed in 1896. his organization, which joined the National Federation of Afro-American Women with the National League of Colored Women, supported a platform to be recognized as “an integral part of the general womanhood of American Civilization.”10 Members were also dedicated to increasing their visibility in the arts. Historian Paula Giddons notes that at the turn of the century, he Creole Show, a theatrical production that broke with minstrelsy traditions, featured glamorous, attractive Black women. his type of theater production paved the way for stars such as opera singer Sissiretta Jones and dancers, including Hattie McIntosh and Madah Myers. Ada Overton, a famous female vaudeville star and dancer, contended that a black woman “no longer lost her dignity when she entered the theatre.”11 hese African American women in the performing arts had more opportunities for public performance than visual artists had in exhibitions. Still, their contributions were also important for the visual arts. Black women writers were more visible than visual artists during this era (this was true of men, too), most notably Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. It has been argued that Fauset and Larsen chose to make their heroines “light-complexioned, upper-middle-class black women with taste and reinement.”12 Fauset did not focus on the “depressing conditions” that most blacks lived in at the turn of the century;13 like Du Bois, she chose to stress characters who were “trying for a life of reason and culture.”14 Fauset worked closely with Du Bois at the Crisis, and was more than familiar with his ideas about the “Talented Tenth.” Not only was she a writer, but poet Langston Hughes commented that she was one of the intellectuals who had “midwifed” the Harlem Renaissance.15 In her irst novel, here is Confusion, one character encourages a friend to “build up Negro art,” and her protagonist replies: “Why I am . . . You don’t think I want to forsake us . . . not at all. But I want to show us to the world. I am colored of course, but American irst. Why shouldn’t I speak to all America?”16 Larsen’s protagonists were less sure of themselves than Fauset’s. Most important, these two women writers helped create a community of black women in the arts.

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he women visual artists depicted women of all walks of life in black society, from the housekeeper to the performer, light skinned and dark skinned, African American and African. And like African American women writers, they depicted their subjects with respect and dignity. he artists of both disciplines followed Du Bois’s ideal of culture, that “each cultural group had something to learn from, and to teach, every other cultural group.”17 Du Bois attempted to characterize race in a social, cultural, and historical framework,18 and the arts were an important part of his desire to highlight the Talented Tenth. hese visual artists wanted their art to make a diference. Du Bois had encouraged all black artists, men and women alike, to create art that served a purpose: “hus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is conined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.”19 Du Bois wasn’t the only intellectual to acknowledge the role of art as propaganda. William Pickens, in 1924, ofered his viewpoint on art and propaganda in the black publication the Messenger:20 “Art and Propaganda always do exist side by side; for in fact propaganda is the subsoil out of which all art has grown—religious, ethical, racial or class propaganda. But (and here’s what the near-artists stumble over) it is the function of art to conceal the propaganda as to make it more palatable to the average recipient, while yet not destroying its efect . . . And were not all Italian art, and most of the music of the world, done in the cause of religion? he art element will outlast the propaganda element, of course; for if a thing is a good work of art, it will still be a good work of art ater the propaganda cause has passed.”21 Pickens went on to note that art existed without propaganda, but questioned its purpose: “here is plenty of propaganda without art, but at least mighty little worthy art without propaganda—for propaganda is the raison d’être of the greatest arts . . . We have no quarrel with a purpose. If it is tastily done up in the proper dress of art.”22 Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke outlined the legacy of Africa and the goals of African American arts in his essay, “Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” published in the New Negro in March 1925. Locke had served as the issue editor of a special issue of the Survey Graphic and his ideas were expanded in the book that followed. In the “Legacy” essay Locke argued that the black artist lacked a mature tradition and might consider the newfound African arts as his real and exploitable heritage. He stated: here is a real and vital connection between this new artistic respect for African idiom and the natural ambition of Negro artists for a racial idiom in their

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Introduction art expression . . . he Negro physiognomy must be freshly and objectively conceived on its own patterns if it is ever to be seriously and importantly interpreted . . . We ought and must have a school of Negro art, a local and racially representative tradition.23

he artists discussed in this volume celebrated aspects of African culture in their work. In the “Answer of Africa” written in 1926, Du Bois connected the arts of the Diaspora: “he sense of beauty is the last and best git of Africa to the world and the true essence of the black man’s soul. African art is the ofspring of the African climate and the Negro soul . . . the primitive art of Africa is one of the greatest expressions of the human soul in all time.”24 Working through profound challenges, balancing the struggles of minimal training, limited patronage, and the very great responsibility of home life, African American women artists of the Harlem Renaissance felt great social responsibility to create art. Artists assumed this burden and forged ahead, shut out from the artistic world by a white-controlled society, oten shunned by their male counterparts, excluded from the creative world by “a vast veil.” hey illuminated the issues of race and they hoped to uplit the souls of their people. he artists discussed in this volume were lifelong proponents of social justice, including issues particularly important to women. Women had a unique role in society to express emotion, both the joys and sorrows experienced in their daily lives. Even Du Bois understood that Western society oppressed black women: “Our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them . . . we have still our poverty and degradation, our lewdness and our cruel toil, but we have, too, a vast group of women of Negro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, and unselish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group of women in the civilized world.”25 Like their white counterparts, black women were denied the vote, yet they were also largely excluded by white women from the sufrage movement. hese women artists spoke to the struggles of their race, including racial terrorism and violence committed against African Americans: lynchings, torture, discrimination. hey addressed issues pertaining to war, politics, the right to vote, and education, family, and motherhood. hey worked in an environment also known to white women, a world that did not support women who had a family and a career. he authors of this volume intend to reveal the tremendous strength of the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the challenges they faced in this triple consciousness of being American, black, and women. Historian Cary Wintz provides the context of the era in his introductory essay on the

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Harlem Renaissance as a cultural tour de force. Kirsten Buick sets the stage for these artists by illuminating the work of sculptor Edmonia Lewis and reveals how Lewis’s race both hindered and helped her career. Reneé Ater introduces the reader to Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, and her Ethiopia, which was created for the America’s Making Exposition in New York City in 1921. Ater discusses the ine line Meta Fuller had to walk, creating a sculpture that was to celebrate “Americanness” while asserting a Pan-Africanist message. May Howard Jackson, Beulah Ecton Woodard, and Selma Burke are brought to light by Lisa Farrington, who asserts that these three artists, who have at times been largely ignored by scholars, are uniquely representative of the Jazz Age. he chapter “Laura Wheeler Waring and the Women Illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance” provides insight into the lesser-known artists who largely served as illustrators for the black journals of the time, including the Crisis and Opportunity magazines. hese illustrators played an active leadership role in the quest to express the true-life experiences of black Americans, and the need for social and cultural change in a racist society. heresa Leininger-Miller examines the work of sculptor Augusta Savage; in particular, Savage’s sculptures of women, the historical inluences on Savage, and how her life in Paris gave her the artistic and cultural freedom to explore new ideas. Loïs Mailou Jones’s long and proliic career is examined by Susan Earle. Earle recalls Jones’s life on Martha’s Vineyard where black and white children mixed freely, her time in New York and Paris, and the limitations put on Jones’s career as a black woman artist. While celebrating her ethnicity, Jones hoped to achieve a freedom of subject matter, where she could choose to embrace African American themes or turn to other subjects for inspiration. Finally, Melanie Anne Herzog reveals the legacy of Elizabeth Catlett, who was born in 1915 and was just a child during the Harlem Renaissance. Catlett’s interest in education, her ierce sense of justices, and her awareness of the oppression of African Americans shaped her work through the black arts movement to the present day.26 Catlett was dedicated to the social component of her work: she was an advocate for black women and her work relected this deeply rooted commitment. he women artists of the Harlem Renaissance were on a mission of truth telling, of reclaiming a lost history, of dealing directly with issues of memory and identity, issues denied their race and their gender. heir legacy would provide the groundwork for the artists of the civil rights era and beyond.

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Notes 1. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 12. 2. Lisa Gail Collins, he Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 40. 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, he Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 12. 4. Paul Gilroy, he Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 133. 5. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: he Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge, 1998), 161. Moses quotes Du Bois in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920), 39–40. 6. Lewis, “A South of Slavery, Rebellion and Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois, 109–10. See also Barkin, “W. E. B. Du Bois’ Love Afair with Imperial Germany,” German Studies Review 28, no. 2 (May 2005): 284–302. 7. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32 (October 1926): 296–97. 8. Ibid., 6. 9. Dewey F. Mosby, Henry Ossawa Tanner (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1991), 116. 10. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: he Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984), 136. Within twenty years, the NACW represented 50,000 women in twenty-eight federations and over one thousand clubs. Ibid., 95. 11. Ibid., 137. Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, from Helen Armstead Johnson, “Some Late Information on Some Early People,” Encore American & Worldwide News (June 1975), 12. 12. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: he Development of a Tradition, 1892– 1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 40. 13. Ibid., 41. 14. Ibid., 41, quoted from Zona Gale, Introduction to he Chinaberry Tree, by Jessie Fauset (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1931), viii. 15. Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 41, from Langston Hughes, he Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 218. 16. Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 191, from Arthur P. Davis, From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974), 92. 17. Bernard Boxill, “Du Bois and Cultural Pluralism,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bernard Bell, Emily Groshotz, and James Benjamin Stewart (New York: Routeledge, 1997), 61. 18. Ibid., 61. Bernard Boxill has noted that Kwame Anthony Appiah asserts that Du Bois failed to deine race in social, cultural, and historical terms, and that he fell back on a biological deinition of race. Boxill does not agree and ofers a more “charitable interpretation of Du Bois’s views.”

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19. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 297–97. 20. he Messenger (founded 1917) was the third-largest national black publication, behind the Crisis (founded 1910) and Opportunity (founded 1923) magazines. 21. William Pickens, “Art and Propaganda” in Messenger, April 1924, reprinted in Art and Social Change, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate, 2007), 74. 22. Ibid., 74–75. 23. Alain Locke, ed., he New Negro (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 254. 24. Du Bois, “he Answer of Africa,” in What is Civilization? ed. Maurice Maeterlinck, Dhan Gopal Mukerji et al. (New York: Duield, 1926), 46. 25. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices within the Veil (1920; rpt., Millwood, NY: Kraus-hompson, 1975), 185. 26. Catlett was as much an educator as an artist; she attended Howard ater winning a scholarship at Carnegie Mellon (when it was learned she was black she was not allowed to matriculate), earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, and went on to teach at several institutions, including Dillard University in New Orleans. For more on Elizabeth Catlett, see Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2005).

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WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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Chapter ONe

HARLEM AND THE RENAISSANCE: 1920–1940 Cary D. Wintz

What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin? his seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the movement we know varyingly as the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question it is necessary to place the movement within time and space, and then to deine its nature. his task is much more complex than it might seem. Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis. It was also traditionally viewed as a male-dominated movement, although it was acknowledged that women poets and writers played a role, but generally as second-tier talent. he names that dominated were male writers—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and others; promoting and guiding the movement were other men: Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles S. Johnson. Jessie Fauset was given some slight credit as a minor novelist, but little was said about her role in nurturing the movement. he signiicance of Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston would not be fully acknowledged for a half century ater the end of the Renaissance. Music and theater were mentioned briely, more as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for iction. However, there was no analysis of the developments in these ields. Likewise art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, but little or no analysis of the work of African American artists. And there was even less discussion or analysis of the work of women in the ields of art, music, and theater. 3

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Cary D. Wintz

Fortunately this narrow view has changed. he Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it as a national movement with connections to international developments in art and culture that places increasing emphasis on the nonliterary aspects of the movement, and, of course, brings the participation of women more fully to the center of the movement. In this essay, I will provide a brief introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, focusing largely on time and place in the emergence of the movement in literature, musical theater, music, and the visual arts. Although of necessity it is limited in scope and detail, I hope to bring awareness to the complexity of its subject.

Time First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. his event did not occur in Harlem, but was held almost one hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Club on Twelth Street of Fith Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League’s monthly magazine, conceived the event to honor writer Jesse Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, here is Confusion. Johnson planned a small dinner party with about twenty guests, a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, he agreed only if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist. So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over one hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group, calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the “new literary age” emerging in America.1 he Civic Club dinner signiicantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper’s, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his magazine as soon as the poet inished

Harlem and the Renaissance: 1920–1940

5

reading them. As the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, then ofered Charles S. Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Under the editorship of Alain Locke, the “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” number of Survey Graphic hit the newsstands March 1, 1925.2 It was an overnight sensation. Later that year Locke published a book-length version of the “Harlem” edition, expanded and re-titled he New Negro: An Interpretation.3 In the anthology Locke laid down his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a collection of poetry, iction, graphic arts, and critical essays on art, literature, and music. For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the birth occurred three years earlier when Shule Along opened at the Sixty-hird Street Musical Hall. Shule Along was a musical play written by a pair of veteran vaudeville acts—comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles and composers/singers Eubie Blake and Nobel Sissle. Most of its cast featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had only minor roles in the production, were on their way to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the signiicanceof the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller accomplished something that the other great African American performers—Cole and Johnson, Williams and Walker—had tried, but failed to achieve. “We did it, that’s the story,” he exclaimed, “We put Negroes back on Broadway!”4 Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shule Along as a seminal event in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. It introduced him to the creative world of New York, and it helped to redeine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process it introduced white New Yorkers to black music, theater, and entertainment and helped generate the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, just arrived in the city, the long-range impact of Shule Along was not on his mind. In 1921 it was all about the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was “a honey of a show”: Swit, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Besides, look who were in it: he now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Nobel Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second act. Trixie Smith sang “He May Be Your Man, But He Comes to See Me Sometimes.” And Caterina Jarbors, now a European prima donna, and the internationally

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Cary D. Wintz celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to see it innumerable times. It was always packed.5

Shule Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring. And, the show was a critical and inancial success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned three touring companies. It was a hit show written, performed, and produced by blacks, and it generated a demand for more. Within three years nine other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies. Music was also a prominent feature of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. he term Jazz Age was used by many who saw African American music, especially the blues and jazz, as deining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. hey emerged out of the African American experience around the turn of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread across the country, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years before to World War I. Blues and black blues performers such as musician W. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were popular on the vaudeville circuit in the late nineteenth century. he publication of W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” in 1912 and the irst recordings a few years later brought this genre into the mainstream of American popular culture. Jazz reportedly originated among the musicians who played in the bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, but it is doubtful that any one person holds that honor. According to James Weldon Johnson jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor’s Twenty-hird Street heater. Johnson described the band there as “a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was called the Memphis Students—a very good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis. here was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass.”6 Seven years later composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, one of the “Memphis Students,” took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall; during World War I, while serving as an oicer for a machinegun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow oicer Nobel Sissle, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.

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Following the war, black music, especially the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, but very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem one club opened ater another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Nobel Sissle, of course, was one of the team behind the production of Shule Along, which opened Broadway up to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles. he visual arts, particularly painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat later in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. One of the most notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. Later that year his irst pieces appeared in Opportunity and ten Douglas pieces appeared as “ten Decorative Designs” illustrating Locke’s he New Negro. Early the next year, W. E. B. Du Bois published Douglas’s irst illustrations in the Crisis. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace hurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Fire!!, and his role designing book jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the most high-proile artist clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to late 1920s. And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this period. More signiicant in launching the art phase of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. he early stirrings of the African American art movement in Harlem followed a 1919 exhibit on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s work at a midtown gallery in New York, and an exhibit of African American artists two years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Even more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight ields, including ine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933 the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American art. Initially the exhibits were held in New York, but beginning in 1929 the exhibits traveled across the country following their New York debut. Also the Harmon Foundation developed catalogs for the exhibits that attempted to deine the nature and the appropriate

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aesthetic for black art. Alain Locke was inluential in the activities of the Harmon Foundation. He served as a judge for the Harmon prizes and inluenced the black aesthetic promoted by the foundation in their catalogs and exhibits. While some African American artists and intellectuals accused the Harmon Foundation of exerting undue inluence on African American art, and harming young artists by prematurely displaying their works, the foundation’s work certainly provided inancial support for artists through its prizes and travel grants and efectively publicized African American visual arts through its exhibits and catalogs. he Harlem Renaissance was also linked to the social and demographic changes impacting African Americans in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. he most visible of the social forces was the black migration that had begun in the early twentieth century, accelerated during the war, and continued through the 1920s, bringing from the South the hundred thousand or more who would transform Harlem into the Negro metropolis, and impacting cities across the country—north, south, and west. he result was an increasingly urbanized African American population that was national in scope rather than being largely conined to the old South. his migration directly impacted the Harlem Renaissance. Along with the thousands of mostly poor, working-class blacks coming north into Harlem were the musicians, writers, poets, artists, dancers, actors, editors, publishers, critics, businesspersons, professionals, and intellectuals who created and nurtured the Harlem Renaissance. his pattern was repeated in Chicago and other northern cities, as well as in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other cities of the South and West. Adding to the creative ferment of the period was social and political upheaval. World War I brought in its wake a series of devastating race riots culminating in the 1919 outbreaks in Washington and Chicago, as well as the 1921 Tulsa riot. During this period traditional African American leadership was in a state of transition. he death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 had temporarily let Du Bois and the NAACP as the dominant political voice among African Americans. However, black politics shited as Marcus Garvey mobilized tens of thousands of supporters and confronted the NAACP and the African American establishment with a mass political movement championing black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, while A. Philip Randolph and the Messenger challenged traditional black leadership from the socialist let. Du Bois, who had turned ity in 1918, stumbled in his eforts to address issues raised by the world war, and largely failed to connect with the younger, more strident black voices emerging in politics and in the arts.

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Place Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as complex as deining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is central to the Harlem Renaissance, but it serves more as an anchor for the movement than as its sole location. In reality the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its inluence across the United States, the Caribbean, and the world. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other igures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and only a relatively small number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance period. And yet, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Island north of Central Park and generally east of Eighth Avenue or St. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch village, it evolved over time. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it housed the country estates of the rich, and it remained largely rural or semirural through the mid-nineteenth century, with a mix of poor squatters in the marshes and mudlats along the Harlem River, and weekend homes of the wealthy in the uplands. Following its annexation by the city in 1873 the marshes and mudlats were illed in and building lots were sold. he resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected most of the physical structures that deined Harlem as late as the mid-twentieth century. hey designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle class; it contained broad avenues, a rail connection to the city on Eighth Avenue, and expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied by commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra. By 1905 Harlem’s boom turned into a bust. Excessive speculation and overbuilding resulted in empty apartments and houses that had to be leased out to renters or subdivided into multifamily units. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, oten at greatly discounted prices, while black real estate irms provided the customers. At this time approximately 60,000 blacks lived in New York, scattered through the ive boroughs, including a small community in Harlem. he largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York’s black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for

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additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the west side of Manhattan into Harlem. Harlem’s transition, once it began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As soon as blacks started moving onto a block, property values dropped further as whites began to leave. his process was especially evident in the early 1920s. Both black and white realtors took advantage of declining property values in Harlem, the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated by the city’s rapidly growing black population, they acquired, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants. Year by year the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly as they could ind afordable housing. By 1910 they had become the majority group on the west side of Harlem north of 130th Street; by 1914 the population of black Harlem was estimated to be 50,000. During the next two decades black Harlem continued to grow as tens of thousands of migrants from the South were joined by thousands of black immigrants from the West Indies. All seemed to ind their way to Harlem’s streets and tenements. In 1920 black Harlem extended from 130th Street to 145th Street and from Fith to Eighth Avenue, and contained approximately 73,000 blacks; by 1930 black Harlem had expanded north ten blocks to 155th and south to 115th; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. he core of this community, bounded roughly by 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the west, was more than 95 percent black. By 1920 Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual capital of black America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the country to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their way northward, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem’s vulgar splendor, and while it housed no signiicant black university as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race’s cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring young. It housed the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated black nationalist movement among its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal point of African American literature, art, music, and theater. Its nightclubs,

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music halls, and jazz joints became the center of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade following World War I. Harlem and New York City also contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century New York had replaced Boston as the center of the book publishing industry. Furthermore new publishing houses in the city, such as Alfred Knopf, Harper Bothers, and Harcourt Brace were open to adding greater diversity to their book lists by including works by African American writers. By the late nineteenth century, New York City housed Tin Pan Alley, the center of the music publishing industry. In the 1920s when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American art world. In short in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to support literature and the arts that New York did. In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very complex. he word Harlem evoked strong and conlicting images among African Americans during the irst half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a land of plenty, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the image of Harlem was more personal. King Solomon Gillis, the main character in Rudolph Fisher’s “he City of Refuge,” was one of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transixed: Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight. Gillis set down his tan-cardboard extensioncase and wiped his black, shining brow. hen slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down One Hundred and hirty-ith Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face driting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. here was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. his was Negro Harlem.7

Gillis then noticed the commotion in the street as trucks and autos crowded into the intersection at the command of the traic cop—an African American traic cop.

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Cary D. Wintz he Southern Negro’s eyes opened wide; his mouth opened wider. . . . For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one hand while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, too, was a Negro! Yet most of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. One of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the oicer’s shrill whistle and gruf reproof, saw the driver’s face turn red and his car draw back like a threatened pup. It was beyond belief—impossible. Black might be white, but it couldn’t be that white! “Done died an’ woke up in Heaven,” thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and ater a while, as if the wonder of it were too great to believe simply by seeing, “Cullud policemans!” he said, half aloud; then repeated over and over, with greater and greater conviction, “Even got cullud policemans.”8

Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He led North Carolina ater shooting a white man. Now in Harlem the policeman was black. Not that this changed his fate. At the end of the story, one of these black policemen dragged Gillis away in handcufs. he reality of Harlem oten contradicted the myth. For poet Langston Hughes Harlem was also something of a refuge. Following a mostly unhappy childhood living at one time or another with his mother or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding father to inance his education at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 arrival: “I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not want to move into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to go to college at all. I didn’t want to do anything but live in Harlem, get a job and work there.”9 Ater a less than happy year at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of school and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of most Harlem residents. For Hughes, too, the desire to just “live in Harlem” was as much myth as reality. Ater dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent little time there. Until the late 1930s he was much more of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. Typically he passed through, visited for weekends or several weeks, while his life and jobs took him away from Harlem. For example, he spent much of 1922 working on Staten Island and on

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ships anchored up the Hudson River. In 1923 and 1924 he worked on freighters sailing to Africa and Europe and spent several months in Paris and Italy. He returned to the United States in 1925 but spent the year in Washington, DC. From 1926 through 1929 he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. From 1930 to 1938 he spent most of his time traveling, with extensive stays in the South, the Caribbean, the Soviet Union, and California, occasionally passing through New York and spending brief periods there. He again made Harlem his home in 1938. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln University, during the height of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the city more than he was there, more a visitor than a full-time resident. James Weldon Johnson saw a still diferent Harlem. In his 1930 book, Black Manhattan, he described the black metropolis in near utopian terms as the race’s great hope and its grand social experiment: “So here we have Harlem—not merely a colony or a community or a settlement . . . but a black city located in the heart of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies.”10 When Johnson looked at Harlem, he did not see an emerging slum or a ghetto, but a black neighborhood north of Central Park that was “one of the most beautiful and healthful” in the city. “It is not a fringe, it is not a slum, nor is it a ‘quarter’ consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-law apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, as well lighted, and as well kept as in any other part of the city.”11 Without question Harlem was a rapidly growing black metropolis, but what kind of city was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued that “the most profound change that Harlem experienced in the 1920s was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the space of a single decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially ideal community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic problems called ‘deplorable,’ ‘unspeakable,’ ‘incredible.’”12 Many problems contributed to Harlem’s growing pathology. Housing, which had initially attracted blacks to the area, was, for most, overpriced, congested, and dilapidated. Jobs were scarce, in part because of the competition for jobs among the many migrants, but primarily due to job discrimination practiced even in the heart of Harlem. As a result most of Harlem’s residents lived in poor housing, either in poverty or on the verge of poverty, in a neighborhood experiencing the typical results of poverty and discrimination: growing vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, and drug addiction. In short, the day-to-day realities that most Harlemites faced difered dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson.

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Harlem was beset with contradictions. While it relected the self-conidence, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her demand for equality, and it relected the aspirations and creative genius of the talented young people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economic aspirations of the black migrants seeking a better life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulill these dreams. he 1935 Harlem Race Riot put to rest the conlicting images of Harlem. On March 19, 1935, a young Puerto Rican boy was caught stealing a ten-cent pocketknife from the counter of a 135th Street ive-and-dime store. Following the arrest, rumors spread that police had beaten the youth to death. A large crowd gathered, shouting “police brutality” and “racial discrimination.” A window was smashed, looting began, and the riot spread throughout the night. he violence resulted in three blacks dead, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than $2,000,000 worth of destroyed property. he Puerto Rican youth whose arrest precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Shocked by the uprising Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established an interracial committee headed by E. Franklin Frazier, a professor of sociology at Howard University, to investigate the riot. hey concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a general frustration with racial discrimination and poverty. What the committee failed to report was that the riot shattered once and for all James Weldon Johnson’s image of Harlem as the African American urban utopia. In spite of the presence of artists and writers, nightclubs, music, and entertainment, Harlem was a slum, a black ghetto characterized by poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile ground for political action, but not for art, literature, and culture. Harlem would see new black writers in the years to come. Musicians, poets, and artists would continue to make their home there, but it never again served as the focal point of a creative movement with the national and international impact of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson did not personally witness the 1935 riot. He had let the city in 1931, the year ater he published Black Manhattan, to take the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived there until his death in 1938.

Renaissance So, what was the Harlem Renaissance? he simple answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro movement, or whatever name is preferred)

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was the most important event in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every aspect of African American literary and artistic creativity from the end of World War I through the Great Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this movement; it also afected politics, social development, and almost every aspect of the African American experience from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s. But there was also something ephemeral about the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to deine. he Harlem Renaissance, then, was an African American literary and artistic movement anchored in Harlem, but drawing from, extending to, and inluencing African American communities across the country and beyond. We date it roughly from the end of the First World War through the Great Depression, but its roots extend well before the war and its legacy continued many years beyond the 1930s. It had no clearly deined beginning or end, but emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and then faded away in the mid- to late 1930s and early 1940s. Likewise the Harlem Renaissance has no single deined ideological or stylistic standard that uniied its participants and deined the movement. Instead, most participants in the movement resisted black or white eforts to deine or narrowly categorize their art. For example, in 1926 a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace hurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, among others, produced their own literary magazine, Fire!! One purpose of this venture was the declaration of their intent to assume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the process they turned their backs on Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel black creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the eforts of hurman and his young colleagues, Fire!! izzled out ater only one issue and the movement remained ill deined. In fact, this was its most distinguishing characteristic. here would be no common literary style or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more an identity than an ideology or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artist expression to the African American experience. If there was a statement that deined the philosophy of the new literary movement it was Langston Hughes’s essay, “he Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in the Nation, June 16, 1926: We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are

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Cary D. Wintz glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. he tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we will stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.13

Like Fire!! this essay was the movement’s declaration of independence both from the stereotypes that whites held about African Americans and the expectations that they had for their literary works, and from the expectations that black leaders and black critics had for black writers, and the expectations that they placed on their work. he determination of black writers to follow their own artistic vision and the diversity that this created was the principal characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. his diversity is clearly evident in the poetry of the period where subject matter, style, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more inventive. Langston Hughes, for example, captured the life and language of the working class, and the rhythm and style of the blues in a number of his poems, none more so than “he Weary Blues.” In contrast to Hughes’s appropriation of the form of black music, especially jazz and the blues, and his use of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more traditional and classical forms for their poetry. McKay used sonnets for much of his protest verse, while Cullen’s poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms. his diversity and experimentation also characterized music. his was evidenced in the blues of Bessie Smith, the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Roll Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated orchestration of Duke Ellington. In art the sot colors and pastels Aaron Douglas used to create a veiled view for the African-inspired images in his paintings and murals contrasted sharply with Jacob Lawrence’s use of bright colors and sharply deined images. Within this diversity, several themes emerged that set the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No black writer, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, but each did address one or more in his or her work. he irst of these themes was the efort to recapture the African American past— its rural southern roots, urban experience, and African heritage. Interest in the African past corresponded with the rise of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the center of Marcus Garvey’s ideology, and also a concern of W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1920s. Poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes addressed their African heritage in their works, while artist Aaron Douglas used African motifs in his art. A number of musicians, from

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the classical composer William Grant Still to jazz great Louis Armstrong, introduced African-inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions. he exploration of black southern heritage was relected in novels by Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as in Jacob Lawrence’s art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience as a folklorist as the basis for her extensive study of rural southern black life in her 1937 novel, heir Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence turned to African American history for much of his work, including two of his multi-canvass series of paintings, the Harriett Tubman series and the one on the Black Migration. Harlem Renaissance writers and artists also explored life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their poetry, and McKay used the ghetto as the setting for his irst novel, Home to Harlem. Some black writers, including McKay and Hughes, as well as Rudolph Fisher and Wallace hurman were accused of overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in order to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in imitation of white novelist Carl Van Vechten’s exploitation of Harlem in his novel, Nigger Heaven. A third major theme addressed by the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Virtually every novel and play and most of the poetry explored race in America, especially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest form these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay’s sonnet, “If We Must Die,” was among the best of this genre. Langston Hughes also wrote protest pieces, as did almost every black writer at one time or another. Countee Cullen, not noted as a political activist, nevertheless addressed the theme of racism efectively in his poem, “Incident.” he poem recounts an encounter on a train in Baltimore involving two eight-year-old children. Excited to be on the train ride, the black child saw the white child staring at him: Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue and called me, “Nigger.”

Of his eight-month stay in Baltimore that one incident was all that the child remembered.14 Among the visual artists Lawrence’s historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden’s early illustrative work oten focused on racial politics. he struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated antilynching poetry as well as

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Walter White’s carefully researched study of the subject, Rope and Faggot; in the early 1930s the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, as well as a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Most of the literary eforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Among the best of these studies were Nella Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a year later, Passing; both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to deine their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Langston Hughes addressed similar themes in his poem “Cross” and his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel Plum Bun. hat same year Wallace hurman made color discrimination within the urban black community the focus of his novel he Blacker the Berry. Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American culture in its creative work. his ranged from the use of black music as an inspiration for poetry or black folklore as an inspiration for novels and short stories. Best known for this was Langston Hughes, who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the blues in much of his early poetry. James Weldon Johnson, who published two collections of black spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Brown, who used the blues and southern work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 book of poetry Southern Road, continued the practice that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black religion as a literary source. Johnson made the black preacher and his sermons the basis for the poems in God’s Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston’s irst novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern black preacher, while in the last portion of Quicksand Larsen’s heroine was ensnared by religion and a southern black preacher. hrough all of these themes Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were determined to express the African American experience in all of its variety and complexity as realistically as possible. his commitment to realism ranged from the ghetto realism that created such controversy when writers exposed negative aspects of African American life, beautifully crated and detailed portraits of black life in small towns such as in Hughes’s novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and biting depiction of Harlem’s black literati in Wallace hurman’s Infants of the Spring. While these themes were shared across the various arts ields that made up the Harlem Renaissance, there was very little collaboration across the ields, and when collaboration existed, it was generally a one-way street. Poets and writers were most inluenced by artists in other areas. he impact of black music on the work of Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson

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has been noted, but in a broader way music (including musical theater, jazz, blues, and the venues in which they are performed) is one of the elements that appears again and again in the literature and the visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance. Black writers were clearly aware of this arts genre, and they were consumers of the music. Black artists shared this concern. Black writers and artists frequented the clubs and joints and even the house rent parties where the musicians worked and played. To a lesser extent they were also aware of musical theater and theater. In contrast most black musicians seem to have expressed little concern or interest in the black literature of the period. As Cab Calloway noted in his autobiography, “hose of us in the music and entertainment business were vaguely aware that something exciting was happening, but we weren’t directly involved . . . the two worlds, literature and entertainment, rarely crossed.”15 Collaboration between black writers and artists was only marginally more common. Aaron Douglas was close friends with a number of Harlem Renaissance writers, participated actively in the production of Fire!!, and provided cover art and illustrations for a number of literary works, including those of Langston Hughes, Wallace hurman, and James Weldon Johnson. In the mid-1930s artist Romare Bearden frequented the “306 House” where he met other artists as well as several Harlem Renaissance writers. Several years later Bearden and Jacob Lawrence each rented studio space in a building where Claude McKay lived; both young artists enjoyed the conversations with the older author, but there is no evidence that there was any collaboration. Years later Bearden would be involved in designing record album covers for jazz records. However, for the most part the practitioners of art, music, and literature operated separately. However, there is no indication that black literature deeply impacted the work of either artist, or that their art signiicantly impacted either music or literature. ✦

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he Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audience—the African American middle class and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such as the Crisis (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staf, published their poetry and short stories, and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. hey also printed illustrations by black artists and used black artists in the layout design of their periodicals. Also, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition

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to the short-lived Fire!!, Wallace hurman spearheaded another single-issue literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a “Negro Poets” issue of the avant-garde poetry magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an anthology of African American poetry, Caroling Dusk, in 1927. As important as these literary outlets were, they were not suicient to support a literary movement. Consequently the Harlem Renaissance relied heavily on white-owned enterprises for its creative works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and art galleries were primarily white owned, and inancial support through grants, prizes, and awards generally involved white money. In fact, one of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music also played to mixed audiences. Harlem’s cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. he famous Cotton Club carried this to a bizarre extreme by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers moved their performances downtown. he relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to white venues and white audiences created controversy. While most African American critics strongly supported the movement, others like Benjamin Brawley and even W. E. B. Du Bois were sharply critical and accused Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes’s assertion that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought, accurately relected the attitude of most writers and artists. ✦

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he end of the Harlem Renaissance is as diicult to deine as its beginnings. It varies somewhat from one artistic ield to another. In musical theater, the popularity of black musical reviews died out by the early 1930s, although there were occasional eforts, mostly unsuccessful, to revive the genre. However, black performers and musicians continued to work, although not so oten in all-black shows. Black music continued into the World War II era, but the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed as the big band style became popular. Literature also changed, and a new generation of black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with little interest or connection with the Harlem Renaissance. In art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s continued to work, but again with no connection to a broader African American movement. Also, a number of Harlem

Harlem and the Renaissance: 1920–1940

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Renaissance literary igures went silent, let Harlem, or died. Some, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, continued to write and publish into the 1940s and beyond, although there was no longer any sense that they were connected to a literary movement. And Harlem lost some of its magic following the 1935 race riot. In any case few, if any people were talking about a Harlem Renaissance by 1940.

Notes 1. Carl Van Doren, “he Younger Generation of Negro Writers,” Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren’s Civic Club Dinner address was reprinted in Opportunity. 2. Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6 (March 1925). 3. Alain Locke, ed., he New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Atheneum, 1969). 4. See Terry Waldo, “Eubie Blake,” in Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), 151–65. 5. Langston Hughes, he Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 223–24. 6. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21. 7. Rudolph Fisher, “he City of Refuge,” in he New Negro, 57–58. “he City of Refuge” was irst published in Atlantic Monthly, February 1925. 8. Fisher, “he City of Refuge,” 58–59. 9. Hughes, Big Sea, 81–82. 10. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 3–4. 11. Ibid., 146. Johnson also expresses this view of Harlem in “he Making of Harlem,” Survey Graphic 6 (March 1925), 635–39. 12. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: he Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 135. 13. Langston Hughes, “he Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, June 16, 1926, 694. 14. Countee Cullen, “Incident,” My Soul’s High Song: he Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, ed. Gerald Early (New York: Anchor, 1990). 15. Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: homas Y. Crowell Company, 1976), 105.

Chapter twO

LIFTING AS SHE CLIMBED: MARY EDMONIA LEWIS, REPRESENTING AND REPRESENTATIVE Kirsten Pai Buick

Precedent and expediency allowed Mary Edmonia Lewis to forge a successful career as a sculptor, and her racial identity helped as much as hindered her in the pursuit. Her persistence and example proved of long-lasting importance to other artists of African American and Native American descent who were bolstered by her story. his essay chronicles Lewis’s early life and the very beginning of her career as an artist before her expatriation to Rome. Prior to her voyage to Europe, Lewis studied, trained, and practiced in three of the most important centers for education and art culture. Oberlin College trained her for teaching, and it also educated her in the role that women were expected to play in society. In Boston, she found yet another milieu that was both a haven for African Americans and one that would cultivate her objective to train as an artist. In Richmond, Virginia, Lewis taught newly freed slaves, putting her education at Oberlin to good use and providing muchneeded aid to her people.1 One could reasonably argue that environments did exist, if only minimally, to nurture Lewis. She identiied herself forthrightly as African and Native American, and she created works that referred to her heritage, such as the pieces based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s he Song of Hiawatha or those inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation. Because of her willingness to exploit her heritage, she found a signiicant degree of support among abolitionists between 1864, when she arrived in Boston, and 1876, which marked the end of her abolitionist support. he abolitionists of Boston fought not only for the immediate emancipation of African Americans held as slaves, 22

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.. Henry Rocher, Mary Edmonia Lewis, 1875. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, NY.

they also lobbied for the rights of full citizenship for enslaved and free blacks. A signiicant part of their arsenal was the individual example of African American accomplishment. In Lewis, they found it expedient to use the artist as an example of the artistic achievements of which the African American was capable, if given a chance. As a result, Lewis received national and international press coverage from those sympathetic to the cause of human rights. Her most steadfast patron, however, was her brother, Samuel, who lent emotional and inancial support throughout his lifetime. hrough the lens of Lewis’s career we begin to understand that patronage is a dialogue, a kind of cultural discourse of reciprocal manipulation though rarely involving an equal exchange between parties.

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Early History and Oberlin College Contrary to Lewis’s claims, evidence suggests that her mother, Catherine, was not a “full-blooded Indian.” Catherine Lewis was born in Canada to an African American father named John Mike, an escaped slave, and to a mother of mixed African American and Ojibwa parentage. Catherine lived with her parents on the Credit River Reserve, now known as the city of Mississauga, on Lake Ontario. he Indians living on the reservation were entitled to annual government payments. However, because membership derived from the father and Mike was black, the council of elders voted to exclude him and the children from a share in the government grants. Although the council had no authority to enforce its ban, it did bring pressure on the family to leave. he Mike family went to Albany, New York. Once there, records show that Catherine Mike married a black man named Lewis. A date for the wedding was not provided nor was his irst name given. Lewis was from the West Indies and worked as a gentleman’s servant.2 In 1832, Edmonia Lewis’s brother, Samuel, was born. Shortly thereater, the family relocated to Newark, New Jersey. Early in 1844, they moved again—to the village of Greenbush, across the Hudson River from Albany, New York.3 Edmonia Lewis, according to her passport application, was born on or about the fourth day of July in the year 1844.4 By the time that Lewis was about nine years old both parents were dead. Catherine’s two sisters adopted the children, who remained with them near Niagara Falls for approximately four years. hey made and sold baskets, moccasins, blouses, and souvenirs for tourists at the Falls, in Bufalo, New York, and in Toronto, Canada. In 1852, Lewis’s brother placed her in the care of a Captain S. R. Mills and let for California. Conscientiously sending money back for her board and education, his life diverges from that of his sister’s at this point. In 1856 Lewis was enrolled at New York Central College in McGrawville, a Baptist abolitionist school. According to Lewis’s biographer, Marilyn Richardson, the college “was founded in 1848 as a daring and progressive academic enterprise. All of those connected with the school—faculty, students, trustees, and administrators—pledged their commitment to abolitionism, to ‘the doctrine of the unity, common origin, equality and brotherhood of the human race,’ and to the right of women to access to all levels of education.” Lewis was in residence at New York Central College for the second half of the 1856–57 academic year and for the summer and fall terms in 1858. During the summer term, she took classes in the Primary Department, which would have prepared her for regular courses in the academic and collegiate programs.5 According to Lewis in a later interview, she remained for three years but let when she was “declared to be wild.”6

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With Samuel’s aid and with the help of abolitionists, Lewis was sent to Oberlin College in 1859; she was probably iteen years old. At Oberlin, she boarded with the Reverend John Keep and his wife from 1859 until she let the college in 1863. Reverend Keep, who was white, was a member of the board of trustees and was an ardent abolitionist and spokesperson for the beneits of coeducation.7 Although integration was a matter of choice for white and black students, African American students were welcomed in both white and black households. hose who did not board with white families found accommodation among the town’s stable and prosperous black community. Ellen Lawson and Marlene Merrill have demonstrated in their research on antebellum black coeds at Oberlin that “by the mid-1850’s, a growing and substantial black community existed in the town, with many families headed by skilled cratsmen, such as carpenters, masons, and harness makers. he Oberlin census statistics for 1850 and 1860 indicate that these families provided homes not only for kin but for other black students attending the preparatory school and the college.”8 Regardless of race, the college required that the host family be pious and morally upstanding within the community. In 1862, for example, the Ladies’ Board decreed “no young lady shall board in any but a regularly organized family, where one at least of the heads of the family presides at table and family worship.”9 In 1833, Oberlin Collegiate Institute was founded in Lorain County, Ohio, as an all-white technical institute and theological seminary for men. he institute oicially changed its name to Oberlin College in 1850, although it still represented the entire conglomerate of departments, associated schools, and independent private classes.10 By 1835, the decision to admit white women and students of color made Oberlin the irst coeducational and biracial institution in the country. he mission of the college was equal education for all students regardless of race or gender.11 Regarding race, at its inception, Oberlin College was committed to abolitionism. he faculty and the majority of students espoused the “Immediatism” of William Lloyd Garrison, which called for the release of all African Americans held in bondage with no delay. Frequently in the early days of the college, the faculty and students were in conlict with those members of the board of trustees who were businessmen from Cincinnati—bankers, merchants, and manufacturers—who did as much business in Kentucky as Ohio.12 he board was the corporate body legally responsible for the college and dealt primarily with educational policy, inancial matters, appointment of teachers, and the erection of buildings. Although they may have privately supported co- and biracial education, having their names linked to an institution so outspoken about civil rights put their business interests at risk. Gradually, the board of

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trustees changed so that the majority of its members relected more faithfully Oberlin’s abolitionist sentiments.13 he signiicance of education for African Americans during the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. In an 1864 interview with the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Lewis responded to the question of education in this manner: “But, surely,” said (Child), “you have had some education other than that you received among your mother’s people, for your language indicates it.” “I have a brother,” (Lewis) replied, “who went to California, and dug gold. When I had been three years with our mother’s people, he came to me and said, ‘Edmonia, I don’t want you to stay here always. I want you to have some education.’ He placed me at school in Oberlin.”14

Lewis, in a few phrases, managed to convey Samuel’s concern for her future, that he wanted something for her beyond the life she had with her Indian relatives. hat “something” was only attainable through education. In the nineteenth century, there were few opportunities for women. For African American women in the North, there were three basic alternatives: domestic servants, operators of small businesses, or educators. hose who hired out in domestic-related service worked as cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, and caretakers, oten in white households. he small businesses that African American women operated were enterprises such as hairdressing, catering, and owners of boardinghouses, or working as merchants in partnership with their husbands.15 Whether white or black, parity in wages did not exist for men and women. Women always earned less than men earned. Furthermore, teaching did not even ensure a viable living. It proved especially unrewarding for those African American women who established private schools. Frequently, they turned to religious organizations and antislavery societies for inancial help.16 Obviously, then, education meant more than getting a good job. For people of color, during the nineteenth century, it signiied the educated person’s right to be considered human. Native and African Americans occupied tenuous positions in the United States. A series of cases argued before the Supreme Court legislated that Native and African Americans were neither citizen nor alien and thus not legally representable, and in the case of slaves, property outright.17 As the historian James McPherson observed, “most white Americans in 1860 assumed that the Negro race was innately inferior in mental capacity to the Caucasian race. his assumption was one of the main props of slavery, and it also imposed a powerful obstacle to the advancement of

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free Negroes, in the North as well as in the South.”18 Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895), an African American abolitionist who was widely revered, made it clear in his slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1844, that literacy was the only path to real freedom. Douglass further argued that knowledge was only the beginning, that knowledge without power engendered hatred for oneself as well as for the oppressor.19 Power meant assuming all of the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship. When the escaped-slave-turned-author, William Wells Brown (1814–1884), wrote the biographical sketch of Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), it was her education that raised her in the eyes of her owner from slave to human being. “Her school lessons were all perfect, and she drank in the Scriptural teachings as if by intuition . . . Mrs. Wheatley [the owner], seeing her superior genius, no longer regarded Phillis as a servant, but took her as a companion.”20 Between 1835 and 1865, at least one hundred and forty black women attended Oberlin College, 80 percent of whom matriculated into the Young Ladies’ Course proper ater irst attending the preparatory courses within the Young Ladies’ Department. By 1865, three black women had received the bachelor of arts degree.21 he Young Ladies’ Department oversaw both the prep school for young ladies and the Young Ladies’ Course.22 he Preparatory Departments were designed to supplement gaps in students’ education so that they could take classes within the normal college departments. As Oberlin’s historian, Samuel Fletcher, has noted, “young men with little or no schooling but otherwise admissible were placed in the Preparatory Department. his department was a real necessity in the early days of Oberlin when academies and other secondary schools preparing for college were exceedingly rare in the West.”23 he prep school covered arithmetic, English grammar, elocution, spelling, linear drawing, modern geography, and beginning Latin and algebra.24 he curriculum for young women in the prep school was much lighter and more elementary, with no classes in history or Greek but with a strong emphasis on religious instruction.25 Lewis was enrolled in the Young Ladies’ Preparatory Department for the 1859–60 school year.26 Oberlin does have a partial list of Lewis’s classes. During the winter term of her irst year, we know that she took three periods of algebra. Ater successfully completing her preparatory studies, she entered the Young Ladies’ Department where she spent the next three years. During her second year, Lewis was excused from her Conic Sections class, which was a branch of geometry dealing with circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas. She did very well, however, in composition.27 he Young Ladies’ Department was designed “to give Young Ladies facilities for thorough mental discipline, and the special training which will qualify them for teaching and the other duties of their sphere.”28

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.. Edmonia Lewis, untitled drawing after “The Muse Urania,” 1862, pencil on paper, 14¼" x 12". Oberlin College Archives.

It was at Oberlin that Lewis irst expressed an interest in art. Oberlin College was a place where art instruction was taken very seriously. In order to distinguish itself from inishing schools, Oberlin did not allow what it deemed the more frivolous art forms to be taught to its female students—art forms such as embroidery, waxwork, or the making of hair ornaments. In 1855, Anna M. Wyett began her thirty-two-year tenure as a teacher of drawing, and in 1860, a Professor Couch opened a private studio for teaching drawing and painting over “Mr. Fitch’s bookstore.”29 Couch’s studio course would have been an accredited course because Oberlin recognized independent private classes as part of the college curriculum. It was probably at Couch’s studio where Lewis took her drawing classes. Lewis’s irst known work was an untitled drawing of the muse, Urania. Lewis made the drawing of Urania for a classmate and friend, Clara Steele Norton, as a present in honor of Norton’s marriage to Judson Newell Cross, both of whom were white. Norton had been enrolled in the college from 1859 to 1862 and received her bachelor’s degree from the college in 1862. Her iancé was also enrolled in the college, but only from 1861 to 1862 before he enlisted

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in the Union army.30 According to family lore, Cross was on leave and the two decided on short notice to be married. he night before the wedding, on September 10, 1862, Edmonia Lewis made the drawing as a present to them. As she was working on it, the story goes, candle wax fell onto the drawing under the nose of the muse, which explains the darkened area. he subject matter of the drawing, however, was not passed down with family history.31 It was not until 1978 that John S. Crawford, an art historian at the University of Delaware, proposed that the subject of the drawing was the muse, Urania. Crawford believed that Lewis made the drawing from an engraving of an ancient Roman sculpture found in Tivoli during the reign of Pope Pius VI (1775–1800).32 Such engravings were commonly used as teaching tools and were disseminated outside of Rome to educate students in the classical aesthetic. Since the eighteenth century, copying from the antique had been the irst step in a formal, academic art education.33 Further research reveals that the statue was found headless and armless, but was restored with an antique head that was found in the Villa Adriana in 1786. he arms with its attributes (the celestial globe and the stylus) were also attached during the restoration.34 Such attitudes toward an ethics of conservation were typical. he art historian David Irwin calls it “imaginative restoration,” pointing out that contemporary taste in the eighteenth century would not accept broken statues or fragments of statues. Regardless of where those parts came from, in order to sell the sculptures they had to be supplied with all the missing extremities. Needless to say, restorers’ studios were kept very busy.35 he statue of Urania is now located in the “Sala delle Muse” in the Vatican Museum, and despite the probable mediation of an engraving, there are major diferences between the statue and Lewis’s drawing. he igure is standing, while the muse in Lewis’s drawing is seated. Lewis’s muse is actively engaged in coniguring the universe, while the ancient statue contemplates the sphere in her let hand while her stylus hangs limply from her right. Despite such disparities, there is an extraordinary facial resemblance between the statue and the drawing. Lewis also reveals a talent for modeling, and one can see the seed of her style for the future handling of marble. Furthermore, the subject of the drawing was an appropriate git for the newlyweds. For the ancient Greeks, Urania had two manifestations. hey worshiped Aphrodite as a universal goddess called “Urania,” which translated into “Queen of Heaven.” Also, as a muse, Urania remained forever young and beautiful; as a muse she could see into the future and had the ability to banish grief and sorrow. Such sentiments—Queen of Heaven, forever young and beautiful—would have lattered Norton. Furthermore, the ability to banish grief and sorrow would have comforted Lewis’s friend as her new spouse went of to war. Finally, Lewis perhaps

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chose Urania because as the muse of astronomy, she was symbolic of the ability to order the stars and planets and thus control the fates.36 A safe return of Judson Cross was therefore assured. Lewis’s choice of the muse Urania reveals another aspect of her education: her investment in Sentimentalism and the Cult of True Womanhood. he Cult(ure) of True Womanhood reinforced woman’s role within male/ female relationships as passive muse, as symbolic inspiration for masculine activity. Her sphere was circumscribed and deined by the home and the family. Within this domestic ideal, the ideal woman was to be modest, passive, submissive, domesticated, and pious.37 Man and woman were equals who were diferent, and they were equals who functioned, in the words of one Oberlin student, as a “harmonious contrast.” Writing about Oberlin College’s policy of coeducation for the University Quarterly in 1860, he noted that “it is our happy experience, of a quarter of a century’s growth that it is better for both sexes to travel together along the paths of science. Womanhood becomes more beautiful, and manhood more strong and elevated, as they are brought out side by side in harmonious contrast.”38 As historian Ann Douglas maintained, a woman’s “beauty” in nineteenth-century literature “was less a matter of looks, however, than a privilege of protection, a condition of invulnerability which camoulaged her needs as other people’s demands and endowed her with almost superhuman powers.”39 She further wrote that “young ladies were being educated to be themes for thought, not thinkers; they were to be the muses not the practitioners of the arts, aesthetic or practical.”40 For women, in the nineteenth century, education was not for the purpose of economic gain. Teaching was the most active role that a woman should play within the family dynamic. Education was viewed as advantageous for women, who controlled the domestic environment and child development. About the importance of teaching, Samuel Fletcher observed: An able group of American theorists, beginning with Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, had written on the necessity of a more thorough education for females . . . All of them stressed the social signiicance of women as the teachers of the [human] race, whether in the family circle or in the school. Women, they insisted, were especially adapted to teach by their greater patience and gentleness. hey ought therefore to be trained as teachers and if unmarried, and so having no children of their own to teach, they might instruct in schools and release men to occupations for which they alone were qualiied. he “elevation of female character” by education was one chief means by which the whole race was to be elevated.41

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hus, in order to fulill her essential, natural duty as mother, the metaphoric “family” of the classroom is substituted for the “real” family. he extent of a woman’s power was the amount or degree of “inluence” that she exerted over her family. “Inluence” encompassed teaching, but also the shedding of tears as a form of passive blackmail. In addition to teaching and tears, woman should lead by example, by their exemplary moral standing or moral suasion. Training to exercise the power of woman began at Oberlin, where the young women exerted a civilizing inluence on the young men. As Fletcher writes, “It was not in the classroom, however, but in the social intercourse centering about the boarding house table that the two sexes were brought in closest relation to each other. he promiscuous boarding table was the heart of joint education in Oberlin even down into the twentieth century. It was here that the boasted inluence of the fair sex on the manners of the males was brought to bear.”42 Oberlin College had a number of safeguards in place to counteract any possible ill efects of coeducation. In 1836, the trustees ruled on recommendation of the faculty that students be prohibited from becoming engaged to one another while enrolled at the college.43 Also, to ensure that the candidate be of “unimpeachable morals,” letters of recommendation were mandatory for admission. he handbook proclaims that “conditions of admission to the Institute shall be trustworthy testimonials of good intellectual and moral character, ability to labor four hours daily, freedom from debts, total abstinence from ardent spirits as an article of drink or refreshment and Tobacco except as a medicine.”44 However, that protective environment was on occasion not enough to prevent all incidents that could shake the faith in the virtues of biracial and coeducation.45 On February 11, 1862, the Cleveland Plain Dealer carried the following headline: “Mysterious Afair at Oberlin—Suspicion of Foul Play— Two Young Ladies Poisoned—he Suspect Under Arrest.” he “suspect” was Edmonia Lewis.46 he seriousness of the charge was intensiied because the two housemates were white women, Lewis and the two women had been friends, there were men and alcohol involved, and the “poison” Lewis allegedly used was an aphrodisiac well known to the nineteenth century—cantharides, or “Spanish Fly.”47 For Lewis, the repercussions were immediate: friendship was betrayed and lost; vigilantes attacked her; she was arrested, and several local newspapers covered her trial.48 Most damning of all, she had betrayed everything that her education at both McGrawville and Oberlin represented. he Cleveland Plain Dealer, published in Cuyahoga County, in the city of Cleveland had Democratic and consequently antiabolitionist sympathies,

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and it kept the people of Ohio abreast of the scandal. he newspaper had informers at Oberlin and was able to report that the incident had occurred during the winter term on January 27, 1862. he story that followed was quite sensational: About one week since, two young ladies, named respectively, CHRISTIANA ANNIS [sic], and Miss MILES, the former a resident of Birmingham, the latter of Vermillion, who had been attending school at the Oberlin Institution, and boarding in the village, concluded to visit their homes. hey were to be escorted by two young men of their acquaintance, also attending school at the same place. hese young men were a Mr. PELTON, of Vermillion, and PRENTICE LOOMIS, of Berlin. Just previous to their starting on their trip, they were asked by a young woman—an inmate of their boarding house, and whom they had been in the habit of “running on” considerably, to use our informant’s language—if they wouldn’t like a glass of wine, as the air was cold and biting. hey assented and drank the wine. A short time had only elapsed when they were both seized with a terrible sickness. Suspicions that the girl had been playing foul—that the wine had been poisoned by her, were instantly excited, and Mr. Loomis, of Berlin, father of the young man who was to have escorted one of the young ladies home, caused the arrest of the suspected girl. She was to have been tried yesterday. he young ladies are still sufering much from the efects of the drug. We have not been able to get as full an account of this mysterious occurrence as we desire, but the foregoing contains the main facts. We have not heard the result of the examination, or whether or not it came of at all. It is a very singular case.49

Of the ive principals involved, only three had actually attended Oberlin College: Edmonia Lewis, Maria Miles, and Edward R. Pelton. Pelton had been enrolled in the Preparatory Course from 1856 to 1857 and hailed from Maria Miles’s hometown of Vermillion, Ohio, just a few miles north of Oberlin.50 Although Christina Ennis boarded at the John Keep House with Lewis and Miles, neither Ennis nor Prentice Loomis had ever been enrolled at Oberlin College, nor do they appear in any alumni catalogues. he Keeps protected Lewis throughout the trial, and Lewis remained a boarder until she let Oberlin College the next year. Given the high moral standards by which the Keeps lived and upon which Oberlin College staked its reputation, the insinuations made by the newspaper are particularly damaging. During the course of the article, the Cleveland Plain Dealer implied that at least two serious infractions had been committed, causing one to question the license allowed students and the moral iber of the college. First, in light of

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Oberlin’s strict temperance policy and in light of the reputation of the Keeps, the possession of wine by a student was a clear transgression.51 Furthermore, the victims in the afair had set out on a journey, without chaperones, with two young men. For as long as the administration could, they refused to turn Lewis over to the authorities. Lewis was fortunate to secure as her attorney a fellow alumnus of Oberlin College. John Mercer Langston (1829–1897) graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, becoming Oberlin’s ith black graduate. Ater graduation, he remained at the college where he studied theology. In 1854, Langston apprenticed himself to an attorney and was admitted to the Ohio bar, becoming the irst black lawyer of the West. He also served as president of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1855, was elected as township clerk to Brownhelm, Ohio. Securing yet another irst, Langston was the irst African American to hold elective oice. During the Civil War, Langston directed midwestern recruitment for the Fity-Fourth and Fity-Fith Massachusetts regiments and for an Ohio black unit.52 For those whites opposed to the presence of blacks on campus, the nature of Lewis’s alleged crime was tantamount to an assault on the sanctity of True Womanhood. In addition, there appeared to be a delay in arresting, which provoked rumors of a cover-up. his exacerbated the belief that African Americans were given special privileges, literally, at the expense of whites. Meanwhile, for the African American community Lewis was a site of conlict. Langston reported that she was disliked by a majority of the black population for her “easy and rather unusual social relations to the whites,” and that they were “ready and did pronounce her guilty in advance.”53 One should also remember that during the length of her stay at Oberlin, Lewis boarded with and appears to have only socialized with whites. Langston tells of her trial in his autobiography of 1894 entitled From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol. To maintain the anonymity of his client, however, he did not mention Lewis by name.54 When Lewis was inally arraigned, her trial was delayed. he Cleveland Plain Dealer revealed the reason for the delay and that the defendant was African American. he supposed poisoning case that occurred in Oberlin a short time since, an account of which was published in our columns at the time, did not come on for trial at the appointed time, from the fact that the supposed guilty one was ill from the efects of a severe hurt, received, it was thought, at the hands of some persons who threw her upon the ice while skating—breaking a collar bone. he girl is colored.55

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he persons responsible for the beating were never found. here was no attempt to do so. hirty years later, Langston remembered the attack diferently. According to him, Lewis was leaving the boardinghouse “one evening, just ater dark” when she was kidnapped, taken to an empty ield nearby, and severely beaten. Her clothes and jewelry were torn from her and she was let for dead. he town bells were rung in alarm once Lewis was discovered missing, and a community-wide search began. hey found her, ater a long search, in the deserted ield. Langston reported her injuries as “very serious” and “so crippling her that she was conined to her room for several days and then was not able to move about except as she did so on crutches. Her arrest took place within a few days ater this occurrence.”56 He asked for a delay in the trial due to her injuries and once the case was called, she was carried into the courtroom in the arms of her friends. Lewis’s trial lasted six days, from February 26 to March 3, 1862. Langston chose not to call Lewis to the stand; instead, ater a six-hour closing argument, he won the case on the rather brilliant argument of corpus delicti, the prosecutor not having saved the stomach or stool samples of the alleged victims. Langston recalled that Lewis was carried out of the courtroom, victorious, “in the arms of her excited associates and fellow-students . . . fully vindicated in her character and name.”57 here seems to have been a large African American presence at the trial that, by the end of Langston’s soliloquy, were perhaps moved to sympathize with Lewis. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “he above trial was a very peculiar one in some respects. he prisoner was black, many of the lawyers were black, at least one of the Justices was black, the color of a large number of the spectators was black—in fact it was a dark afair viewed in any light.”58 Characterizing Lewis as orphaned and friendless, Langston described how his closing moved all to tears and outbursts of the deepest feeling. In light of Lewis’s subsequent fame as an artist, Langston felt vindicated and triumphant in his defense of her. “Now matured in all those qualities of extraordinary genius and power, the young colored woman who was thus represented by the then young colored lawyer of Ohio, has reached such exalted place in American and European consideration, that she has been very justly termed the irst artist of the negro race of the Western continent. Her works of art as displayed in marble, tell how wisely and well her attorney labored in her case to vindicate justice and innocence!”59 Despite preserving his former client’s anonymity by leaving the subject of the case nameless, Lewis’s fame was such that it would have been no secret at all as to her identity when the book was irst published in 1894. he help that Lewis received from Langston set the tone of her future. hroughout her life she would ind patronage among prominent African

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American men who worked toward the betterment of the race, men like Henry Highland Garnet, Leonard A. Grimes, Frederick Douglass, Dr. William Henry Johnson,60 and William Wells Brown, to name just some. Garnet, Grimes, and the others were referred to among the African American community as “race men,” whose moral character and social standing was deined by their excellence and superiority in their chosen ield, and who believed that the success of one black represented the advancement of the entire race. Also, they were social activists who believed that their successes would only have signiicance if they were placed in the service of racial uplit.61 Lewis honored them through her art, and they in turn were honored to have something crated by the irst internationally known sculptor of African and Native American descent. In 1864, the spring term of the school year began on February 25.62 It was one term shy of Lewis’s graduation from the college. However, as powerful as her allies were among the administration, she also must have made quite a few enemies by her refusal to fade quietly away ater what was tantamount to a sex scandal. Almost one year to the day ater her trial for poisoning, Lewis was accused of thet. he alleged crime was dutifully reported in the Lorain County News: “Mary Lewis had another audience with Esq. Bushnell on Saturday. he provocation was alleged thet of artists’ materials from Prof. Couch; but the evidence was not considered suicient for conviction and Mary was dismissed.”63 In the face of a new scandal, the Keeps appear to have remained steadfast in their belief in Lewis’s innocence. Nevertheless, no one fought for her this time. Although acquitted for lack of evidence, the principal of the Young Ladies’ Course, Marianne Dascomb, refused to allow Lewis to register for the term, which meant she was unable to graduate. No doubt the salacious details of Lewis’s irst alleged crime had ofended everything for which Dascomb and Oberlin stood. In his history, Fletcher called Mrs. Dascomb “a pious product of the pious Ipswich school.” He continued: “We, today, would consider her extremely ‘strait-laced,’ but her Irish wit seems to have saved her from unpopularity. She completely identiied herself with the College.”64 As the principal of the Young Ladies’ Course, Dascomb’s responsibilities included upholding the mores and values of Ideal Womanhood. For this inal ofense, Dascomb exercised her authority to disassociate Lewis from the institution.65 Oberlin College had been in many ways a haven and a prison for Edmonia Lewis. Oberlin’s commitment to equality (within limits), abolition, and education, provided Lewis with everything that she would need to secure a future. Most importantly, Oberlin provided her with contacts that allowed her to pursue an artistic career. Even before the poisoning incident, Reverend Keep and the faculty had protected her and provided her with comfort and friendship. In exchange, all that they asked was that she fulill the contract

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she signed with them upon admission—that she be of good character. For someone of Lewis’s conlicted character, however, Oberlin must have seemed a prison. Proclaiming herself “wild” in an interview, given her extreme youth while at the college, and considering her free-roaming childhood, the strictures imposed upon her to follow the cult of True Womanhood must have been conining to say the least. Yet she did absorb those tenets, and her life and art ater Oberlin was a complex dance between the spectrum of concession and conlict. Blocked from graduating, Lewis let for Boston in early 1864. Once there, she began to pursue a career as a sculptor. With the help of abolitionist supporters, she was able to reestablish herself in the public eye and to redeine her role within the various communities in which she participated. he majority of what we know about Lewis is from newspapers and journals. Despite the oten-conlicting biographical information supplied in the nineteenth century, such sources enable us to piece together a picture of her career, and two years later, Lewis again made local Ohio news. he Lorain County News featured her in a small article titled “A Colored Artist” on March 28, 1866: he papers are noting the advent in Rome of a young colored artist and sculptor—Miss Edmonia Lewis—who is creating something of a sensation in the Eternal City. Report hath it that she is none other than a Miss Mary E. Lewis, who had her brief notoriety here—and for other than artistical eforts—a few years since. If Miss Mary E. is none other than Miss Edmonia, she is indeed enjoying a checkered career.66

he sardonic tone and the reference to her name-change disappear the next time that the Lorain County News covers her as a topic of interest. A year ater the above article appeared in 1866, the Lorain County News briely, and respectfully, acknowledged her transition from infamy to fame. “Edmonia Lewis is gradually but surely attaining fame. Her bust of Col. Shaw, of Fort Wagner fame, and a fancy statue of the Freedwoman on First Hearing of Her Liberty, are highly praised.”67 Signaled by no reference to “Mary Lewis” or to the past, her battles at Oberlin College were inally over, while new struggles loomed on the horizon.

Networking and Abolitionist Support in Boston In nineteenth-century America, whether it was a presentation in person or in writing, the “introduction” was the mainstay of networking. Fortunately,

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Lewis retained the support of the Keeps, who were able to write a letter of introduction on her behalf to William Lloyd Garrison in Boston. Garrison, in turn, opened two doors of opportunity for Lewis: an introduction to sculptors already established in the ield; and an introduction to writers who were able to publicize Lewis in the abolitionist press. In Boston, she found continuity in the abolitionist network that had so strongly supported her while at Oberlin. In 1780, Massachusetts abolished slavery. Nevertheless, Boston embodied the central paradox of America: it upheld the Enlightenment ideals that emerged during the Revolution pertaining to liberty and justice for all, yet the majority of New Englanders feared the consequences should the former slaves descend on them en masse.68 Garrison had dominated the moral debate in New England since the early 1830s. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, in his book he Anti-Slavery Impulse, proposed that New England became the primary and most outspoken seat for abolitionist activity because it was “remotest from the South in distance and in economic interest.” With regard to Boston in particular, “by 1836, most abolitionists considered Boston ‘the most important part of the ield.’ For Bostonians believed that in projects of moral reform, ‘Boston rules Massachusetts, Massachusetts rules New England and New England rules the nation’; and nowhere was this conviction deeper than among the abolitionists. Of them all, Garrison had the surest faith in Boston’s moral primacy, especially in the antislavery cause.”69 Boston was the stronghold from which abolitionists transformed the terms of the slavery debate by placing it on the national agenda.70 he African American population in Boston was small. By 1831 when Garrison founded the Liberator, there were 60,000 inhabitants in the city but African Americans numbered only 1,875. Nevertheless, the African American community was powerful. As Henry Mayer, Garrison’s biographer, has commented: “Garrison would not begin he Liberator until he gained the conidence of black Bostonians . . . for Garrison they stood large as the living embodiment of the cause.”71 Among African Americans, Boston had the reputation of being the most hospitable in terms of advocacy and its protection of fugitive slaves, particularly ater the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed. During the time that Edmonia Lewis was living in Boston, some of the most prominent African Americans included William C. Nell, who worked in the post oice, one of the irst black men to hold a federal job. Also, there was William Wells Brown, former slave, doctor, writer, and lecturer; and Richard Greener, the irst African American to graduate from Harvard University. hen there was the Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, for whom Lewis would return from Europe in order to honor him with a sculpture; and Harriet and Lewis Hayden, who had operated an Underground Railroad station from

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their home on Phillips Street. Lewis Hayden was a state employee, a messenger to the Massachusetts secretary of state, and in 1873, was himself elected to the legislature. As James Oliver Horton wrote “life in Boston never matched its reputation for racial egalitarianism, yet compared to most other northern cities, largely through the eforts of dedicated white abolitionists and the black community, Boston was a racially tolerant place. If blacks did not ind complete racial equality there, they did at least ind opportunities for education, employment, and community.”72 he sense of community was reinforced, no doubt, by the fact that by 1860 over two-thirds of Boston’s black population lived in the district now called the North Slope of Beacon Hill. he North Slope was located between Pinckney and Cambridge Streets and between Joy and Charles Streets. he neighborhood was established in 1806 when free blacks raised $7,000 to establish the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill. It was built entirely by black cratsmen and laborers and served both secular (abolitionist meetings, for example) and sacred needs within the community.73 he irst door that the Garrisonian network opened for Lewis was an introduction to Edward A. Brackett (1818–1908). Himself a moderately successful sculptor, Brackett became Lewis’s instructor. Although their relationship did not end amicably, Lewis continued to mention the sculptor kindly or not at all in future interviews. By August 9, 1864, they had a deinite parting of the ways. We know that something did disrupt the relationship between Lewis and Brackett because a fellow sculptor and friend of Lewis’s, Anne Whitney, reported the split in a letter to her sister. Edmonia is engaged on a bust of Col. Shaw. Brackett has given her up apparently—& she wants to salaam me as her teacher!—I advised her to see Ball Hughes—she went but his family wont let him go to town—as his visits are apt to be indeinitely prolonged (you know his weakness;) I’d recommend King—but King cant for some reason—so just now she has nothing but me to lean upon . . . Edmonia is very much of an aboriginal—spiteful, vengeful, a little cunning and not altogether scrupulous about the truth when dealing with those she doesn’t love; open, kind and liberal as day with those she does—I like her in spite of her faults and will help her all I can—I wish she were a little less of an aborigine about the ordering of her wigwam.74

he reason for the dispute, however, was never revealed. Whitney’s language, however, is revealing. Whitney’s chatty, gossipy tone emphasizes those traits stereotypical of “Indianness.” Her attitude demonstrates the limits of transracial friendship where there is a irm belief that each race has speciic traits.

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Lewis’s experience with the abolitionist media was equally fraught. Her irst interview with Lydia Maria Child happened in 1864, soon ater she arrived in Boston. It was the second door opened to her by the Garrisonian network, and it opened early. Published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Lewis told of her sojourn to Boston: [Samuel] placed me at school in Oberlin. I staid [sic] there two years and then he brought me to Boston, as the best place for me to learn to be a sculptor. I went to Mr. Brackett for advice; for I thought the man who made a bust of John Brown must be a friend to my people. Mr. Brackett has been very kind to me.75

While leaving out the poisoning incident, Lewis fearlessly claimed Oberlin College, and the Garrisonian abolitionists, in turn, embraced her. he term “Garrisonian abolitionists” is the accepted label for those abolitionists who worked under the guidance of William Lloyd Garrison out of Boston. Garrison espoused the immediate abolition of slavery, and his unrelenting position oten made him and his followers the targets of violence. Garrison’s he Liberator was one of the most inluential antislavery newspapers of the pre–Civil War period. One year later, in 1832, the National Anti-Slavery Standard was founded in New York as an organ of the newly reestablished American AntiSlavery Society. Because letters of introduction were used as the primary means of networking, the abolitionist communities remained well informed. hus, it is almost certain that the Garrisonian abolitionists knew of the scandal. Undeterred, they continued to lend Lewis their support. In controlling what was written about Lewis, the abolitionists were able to recast her public persona so that nothing remained of the Ohio debacle. Mary Lewis was buried under a barrage of publicity for the “girl of about twenty years old, of brown complexion and a short, slight igure.” Other notices mentioned the “colored lady, whose sex, extreme youth, and color invite [the] warmest sympathies,” who was “born of an Indian mother, and a Negro father.”76 Between the years 1864 and 1871, Lewis was written about or interviewed by four very important women in the Boston and New York abolitionist circles: Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, and Anna Quincy Waterston, all of Boston, and Laura Curtis Bullard of New York.77 hese four women had the power of access to the printed word. Because of them, articles about Edmonia Lewis appeared in at least eight nationally circulating abolitionist journals: National Anti-Slavery Standard, the Liberator, the Freedmen’s Record, Broken Fetter, the Revolution, the New National Era, the Christian Register, and the Independent. Lydia Maria Child was perhaps the most efective writer and advocate for the abolitionist cause ater William Lloyd Garrison.

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Although she never gained power through wealth, she was one of the most inluential people active in the movement. Lewis’s status within the movement ensured a market for her work; while simultaneously, she herself was sold to the public as a “representative Negro.” he term representative was not originally used to describe the function within society of people of color or even women. Borrowed from “hero studies” like that of homas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the irst person to employ “representative” in an American context. Emerson suggested that “men have a pictorial or representative quality, and serve us in the intellect . . . Men are also representative: irst, of things, and secondly, of ideas. As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw material in nature to human use.” Emerson described superior men who have found their place as “fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his purpose.” Consequently, a life of service is required of the representative man.78 While Emerson limited his discussion to white males, the term had currency within the culture. “Representative” had enough currency that Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) was also described as “one of the ‘representative’ women of America.”79 In his discussion of Frederick Douglass, Henry Louis Gates Jr. provides a convincing discussion of what it meant to be a “representative” African American in the nineteenth century. Following Emerson, Gates proposed that “representative” did not mean average. “Douglass, then, was the most representative colored man both because he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race’s great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion. Black Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images. It is this sense of (re)presentation as reconstruction.”80 Unlike Douglass, however, Lewis’s eloquence wasn’t in the pen, and thus she lost a signiicant degree of control over her own re-presentation to the public. Lewis’s image, her “pictorial quality,” was largely (re)shaped by the white women who wrote her into existence. In this endeavor, Lewis was complicit. As Benjamin Quarles has remarked, “the abolitionist press had a marked efect in making Negroes more active in social and civic afairs. Negro organizations felt no hesitancy in asking these newspapers to carry notices of their coming meetings and lists of their oicers . . . Brief notices of Negro weddings dotted the back pages of abolitionist weeklies. How warming to the selfesteem to see one’s name in print! But more important was the sense of civic participation it engendered.”81 hat sense of access and entitlement stretched to individuals such as Edmonia Lewis as well. In an 1864 interview with Lydia Maria Child, Lewis conirmed, “some praise me because I am a colored girl, and I don’t want that kind of praise. I had rather you point out my defects, for that will teach me something.”82 Lewis was not objecting to the coverage she

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received in the abolitionist press, nor did she ever turn down monetary aid. Rather, what she found insupportable was the condescension regarding her skill as an artist. Here, one must make the very important distinction between support and false praise. Lewis did wrest some control through the subject matter of her art, whether it was the people she chose to make portraits of, or the ideal subjects that she chose to depict. Early in Brackett’s career, he was praised in the columns of the New-York Mirror for understanding that the formula for fame rested on the subject that the artist chose to depict, a subject whose deeds and whose face were instantly recognizable. “When an artist is aspiring ater fame, there is no other way of making himself known in this country than to take the likeness of some man well known in the community, for the dullest perception can trace resemblances [sic].”83 Lewis’s subjects between 1863 and 1864 can be counted among the most famous men of her day, and for the African American community, perhaps the most revered men of the day: John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw’s face was certainly identiiable. Lewis does not represent him in military garb, however. Composed simply of the head, neck, and chest and just the suggestion of shoulders, Lewis divested Shaw of his garments. Lewis lits him out of a speciic historical context; he is transcendent. Shaw’s “assumption” is reinforced by the inscription Lewis places on the front of the bust. Under Shaw’s bare chest are the words “Martyr For Freedom.” Lewis could not have chosen a better market for her bust. Boston, ater all, was Shaw’s hometown. Born in 1837, he was from a very wealthy Massachusetts family. His father, Francis G. Shaw, was an abolitionist, and his mother, Sarah Sturgis Shaw, a society hostess in Boston’s upper circles. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he entered the New York State National Guard on April 19, 1861. When, in 1863, African Americans were allowed to ight, Governor Andrews of Massachusetts approached his father and asked him to speak to Robert about commanding the all-black regiment. Shaw took command of the Fity-Fourth on February 15, 1863. He fell in July of that year at the assault on Fort Wagner, Morris Island, South Carolina.84 Lewis’s bust portraits signify or have meaning on three diferent levels: publicly, or politically; personally; and artistically. he men and women whom Lewis sculpted were, for the most part, famous abolitionists from the Boston area. Lewis sculpted a small bust of Sergeant William Carney, 1867, which, according to Naurice Woods in his dissertation, was Lewis’s irst work with an African American theme. Carney was a soldier in Shaw’s Fity-Fourth Massachusetts, and although wounded in battle, never allowed the lag to touch the ground.85 Among her other political subjects were Wendell Phillips (1865), William Lloyd Garrison (1865), Anna Quincy Waterston (1866),

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Maria Weston Chapman (1867), Abraham Lincoln (1870), John Brown (1872), Senator Charles Sumner (1876), Ulysses S. Grant (1878), and Frederick Douglass (1887). he portraits were a testament to her continued empathy for and alliance with the African American community. Lewis continued to honor the heroes of abolitionism and those who struggled for racial equality in the United States well beyond the Civil War and Reconstruction. On a personal level, the bust portraits were of the people who helped Lewis or of people whom she admired. One can then ask who was missing from Lewis’s gallery of important men and women. Without question, she received a great deal of help from Lydia Maria Child, yet she never sculpted her. As I will discuss later, theirs was a troubled relationship. Artistically, the bust portrait was an established Western tradition, handed down from ancient Rome. It was a way to honor great women and men, but also, it was a way to proclaim the self as a great artist. he works are a bridge in which the artist shares the prestige of the subject. heir fame becomes the artist’s fame. hrough the sculptor’s talent, the portrait likeness is linked to the subject in the same way that, through a dedication ceremony, an ideal work is linked to someone famous. While honoring someone notable and deserving, both portrait and ceremony were ways to validate the self as artist. Fortunately for Lewis, at the beginning of her career as a sculptor, she netted a space at the Boston Soldier’s Relief Fair of 1864 where she exhibited the bust of Robert Gould Shaw and sold over one hundred plaster copies of her sculpture. he Relief Fairs were held all over the North to beneit freedmen, soldiers, and their widows.86 Referred to in Child’s private letters as the “Fair for Colored Soldiers,” it was a charity beneit organized in this instance by Christian Carteaux Bannister, the wife of the African American landscape painter Edward Mitchell Bannister.87 Both artists exhibited portraits of Robert Gould Shaw, Bannister a painting and Lewis a sculpture. At the time, Bannister’s wife worked as a hairdresser, while he was listed in the Boston directory as a “Photographist,” living at 85 Studio Building on Tremont Street. Lewis lived down the street at 89 Studio Building.88 he Studio Building was the place for artists. Anne Whitney, John La Farge, William Morris Hunt, Elihu Vedder, and William Rimmer were just some of the artists who had rooms there.89

Richmond, Virginia Before she let for Europe, Lewis tried the only viable profession for women of her race and education, probably responding to an ad much like the following from the Freedmen’s Journal of 1865:

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TEACHERS FOR THE SOUTH.—Several teachers, principals and assistants, male and female, are needed for the Government schools (white and colored) recently established in the District of Eastern Virginia by order of Major-Gen. Butler. he salary of male teachers is, principals $60 a month, assistants $45; female principals $30, assistants $20. Applications stating qualiications with accompanying testimonials should be forwarded at once to the Superintendent of Public Education. Preference will in all cases be given to disabled soldiers and soldiers’ widows and wives, if suitably qualiied. he schools will be opened Jan. 1, 1865. hose wishing situations should address Charles A. Raymond, Chaplain U.S.A., and Superintendent of Public Education, District East Virginia, Chesapeake Hospital, Fortress Monroe, Va.90

he African American population in Boston may have been small, but it formed part of a larger network of African Americans who lived in major northern cities, such as Philadelphia and New York. he lines of communication between the cities comprised a sophisticated network of black newspapers, personal contacts, and letters.91 Prior to emancipation, the network had been used to argue for liberty and to aid fugitive slaves. Ater the Civil War, the network of northern black newspapers carried advertisements for teachers to go south. Ater all, the most pressing need was to educate the newly freed slaves, and black as well as white women journeyed south to teach. he missions of black and white women, however, appeared to be quite diferent. he historian Linda Perkins notes that the several thousand New England white women who made the trip were “overwhelmingly single, upper and middle-class, unemployed and educated in New England seminaries and Oberlin College.” Perkins also states that their letters of application expressed a desire to escape “idleness and boredom.” Black women, on the other hand, were “overwhelmingly employed and inancially supported families.” heir letters of application, comments Perkins, “consistently relected a theme of ‘duty’ and ‘race uplit’; while the tenure of the white female educator in the South was normally two to three years, the black female expressed a desire to devote their entire lives to their work and most did.”92 Ironically, Lewis, with her education at Oberlin College and her temporary, rather than lifelong, commitment to teaching, seems closer to the model proposed by Perkins for white women rather than that for black women.93 Answering the call for teachers in the South, Lewis let Boston with her friend, Adeline T. Howard, to teach freed people in Richmond, Virginia. Howard was an African American woman whose family was part of the circle of inluential, cosmopolitan blacks living in the area. Both Adeline and her sister Imogene were well educated, and eventually, they became principals of their

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own schools, Imogene in New York City and Adeline in Washington, DC.94 In Richmond, Lewis and Howard shared a room at a boardinghouse. We know that Lewis was in Richmond because of a short notice published by the New York Tribune titled, “A Colored Sculptor,” dated August 8, 1865: Miss Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor, who so beautifully executed the busts of Col. Shaw, 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, and John Brown, has been in Richmond the past month teaching school. She, however, leaves for Florence, Italy, by the steamer from New York on the 19th . . . intending abroad to complete her education, at the same time chiseling busts of Abraham Lincoln, Horace Mann and others, for which she now holds orders. Since her stay here, her trunk containing a large and elegant wardrobe has been stolen, and although suspicion points to the thief, nothing deinite can be proven; the loss has been a heavy one.95

Although no mention is made of Howard we know that she was with Lewis because on August 25, 1865, the Liberator picked up a short notice from the Anglo African [NYC]. he article reported that “the Misses Ada Howard and Edmonia Lewis of Boston had their trunks taken from their boarding house in Richmond to a vacant lot and the contents stolen, leaving Howard and Lewis without a change of clothing.”96 By 1860, Richmond was a unique entity—an industrialized city of the South. Neighborhoods were clustered according to racial and ethnic backgrounds, but by 1852, free blacks lived throughout the city. Richmond did not become segregated until the development of suburbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Blacks and whites even shared certain public spaces like the theater and some churches; although, within the structures themselves, segregation according to race was practiced. Before emancipation, slaves also lived within the city as part of the hiring out and living out system. Masters would rent out the labor of their slaves, who then worked as blacksmiths or in factories. hese urban slaves sometimes lived in the outbuildings of businesses and factories where they were employed, but also they lived in boardinghouses run by whites or by free black householders. Immediately ater emancipation and to the chagrin of the whites, black Richmonders began following their own political calendar. It revolved around four civic holidays: January 1, George Washington’s birthday, April 3 (or Emancipation Day), and July 4. As historians Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball explain, black Richmonders “thus inserted themselves in preexisting national political traditions and at the same time expanded those traditions. White Richmonders watched in horror as former slaves claimed civic holidays white

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residents believed to be their own historic possession, and as black residents occupied spaces, like Capitol Square, that formerly had been reserved for white citizens.”97 hree years ater Lewis’s departure for Europe, she and Howard were still corresponding. Until Howard’s papers can be located, the only record we have of their ongoing communication is through a diary entry belonging to Francis Rollin. Rollin was a young African American woman who moved to Boston to write the memoirs of Major Martin R. Delany, the highest-ranking black man in the Freedmen’s Bureau. From just the few excerpts reprinted in Dorothy Sterling’s book, We Are Your Sisters, Rollin’s diary reads like a who’s who of Boston in the nineteenth century. Among her friends was Howard. On May 9, 1868, Rollin wrote that she went to Addie Howard’s and that “Addie received today two photographs of Edmonia Lewis from Rome taken in her Studio dress.”98 he text of the notice published by the New York Tribune provides a clue as to why Lewis went to Richmond, but the title of the article, “A Colored Sculptor,” irmly identiies Lewis’s profession. She had no thought to abandoning her vocation; rather, she went south to teach former slaves out of a sense of duty to her people. She certainly would not have done it for the money. he salaries listed in the above ad provide an excellent idea of what she would have been paid. As a “female assistant,” Lewis would have earned approximately twenty dollars for one month’s employment. Fulilling her sense of civic duty was possible because she was still supported by her brother. Furthermore, she had earned money while in Boston with the sale of her medallions of John Brown and plaster busts of Robert Gould Shaw, both martyrs for the cause of African Americans. Her short stay in Richmond to teach newly liberated African Americans was a way for her to return some of her own good fortune. ✦

✦

✦

he steadfastness of family, the opportunities available in speciic places, and most important, efective timing, all play a signiicant role in Lewis’s career. Her brother, Samuel, provided lifelong support. He ensured that Lewis received as much education and the best education then available to an African American woman. When the situation, irst in McGrawville and then at Oberlin College, became insupportable, he funded a studio for Lewis in Boston, an abolitionist stronghold the equal of Oberlin, and also a center for art. he timing was perfect. he debate over the character and quality of African Americans, emancipation and its consequences, pushed the achievements of

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Lewis to the forefront. She desired, however, to move beyond the culture that simultaneously nurtured and stiled her. In Rome, Lewis fully realized her ambition to be a sculptor, because she followed the model of so many women who had taken up the chisel before her. If not always fully supportive emotionally, nevertheless their very presence had prepared a place for her. In Lewis’s art, we decipher a kaleidoscope of responses, from questioning, to conlicted, to concession toward an education that emphasized the sanctity of family and domesticity. In her ideal works created in Rome, we can begin to understand how culture shaped her, the inescapability of it, and how it educated her in the interpolated cultures of “True Womanhood” and of “Sentiment.”

Notes 1. A version of this essay appears in my book, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 2. In 1866, Lewis revealed in an interview with Henry Wreford of the Athenaeum that her father was “a negro” and “a gentleman’s servant.” Henry Wreford, “A Negro Sculptress,” Athenaeum (March 3, 1866): 302. 3. he irst, most complete biography was contained in Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present, 54–63. Unless indicated otherwise, all early biographical details derive from this source. See also Rinna Evelyn Wolfe, Edmonia Lewis: Wildire in Marble (Parsippany, NJ: Dillon Press, 1998). 4. he passport application is reproduced in Wolfe, Edmonia Lewis, 13. 5. Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists, 54–55. See also Marilyn Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis at McGrawville: he Early Education of a NineteenthCentury Black Woman Artist,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000): 242; 239–56. 6. Henry Wreford, “A Negro Sculptress. Rome, February, 1866,” Athenaeum (March 3, 1866), 302. If the date of her birth, 1844, is accurate and she enrolled in Oberlin in 1859, then she was probably at Central College for two and a half years instead of three. 7. For Keep’s status on the board, see Annual Catalogue of the Oicers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year 1862–3. For Keep’s views on abolition and coeducation, see Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College: From Its Foundation hrough the Civil War, 2 vols. (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1943), vol. 1, 167–77; 237–65; 376; and 463–68. 8. Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “Antebellum Black Coeds at Oberlin College,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine (January 1980–February 1980), 18–20. 9. Robert Samuel Fletcher reproduces the actual petition and provides an account of the debate in his A History of Oberlin College, vol. 2, 604. 10. Ibid., 710. Oberlin College was divided into ive departments: heological Department, College Department, Preparatory Department, Young Ladies’ Course, and Ladies’ Preparatory Department. here was also the Teacher’s Course and the Scientiic Course.

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he associated schools and independent private classes consisted of the Winter School, the Ohio Agricultural College, the Department of Music, the Commercial Institute, the French School, the German classes, writing classes, elocution classes, and drawing classes. 11. When Oberlin College was still debating the issue of biracial education, the administration polled the students “as to the practicability of admitting persons of color” in 1834. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 1, 170–72; for the chapter related to the admittance of women, see vol. 1, 373–85; and for the chapter related to the admittance of African American students, see vol. 2, 523–36. 12. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 1, 142–66. 13. Ibid., vol. 2, 665–67. 14. Lydia Maria Child, “Letter From L. Maria Child,” National Anti-Slavery Standard 24, no. 42 (February 27, 1864), 1. 15. Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 15–16, 20–21. See also Sharon Harley, “Northern Black Female Workers: Jacksonian Era,” he Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, ed. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1997), 5–16. 16. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, 66. 17. Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh (1823) translated Indian notions of native peoples’ relation to their lands into the language of Anglo-American property law and thus the lands could be “legally” transferred to the federal government. he Johnson decision paved the way for the Cherokee cases of 1831 and 1832. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) concerned Georgia’s right to violate federal treaties and extend its legislation into Cherokee territory contained within the state’s borders but exempt from state law. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) was argued before the Supreme Court when Scott, a slave, argued for his freedom based on his residence between 1834 and 1838 in a free state and free territory, both created under the Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery. Sandford, his owner, argued that Scott, as a black man and therefore not a citizen, did not have the right to sue. he justices ruled in Sandford’s favor, excluding blacks from any legal or social representation. Priscilla Wald, “Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 59–84; Eric Cheyitz, “Savage Law: he Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham’s Lessee V. M’Intosh and he Pioneers,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 109–28; and “Dred Scott V. Sandford,” in Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court II, ed. Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert (San Diego, CA: Excellent Books, 1992), 14–34. 18. James M. McPherson, he Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union, revised 1965 ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 101. 19. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 78, 81–87. 20. William Wells Brown, he Rising Son; or, he Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston: Boston, Brown & Co., 1874), 423. 21. Lawson and Merrill, “Antebellum Black Coeds at Oberlin College,” 18.

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22. here were two preparatory schools at Oberlin College in the nineteenth century; one was for young men and was called the “Preparatory Department” and the other was for young women, the “Young Ladies’ Preparatory Department,” and was taught within the Young Ladies’ Department. he prep school for males was overseen by the male Board, while the school for females was overseen by the Ladies’ Board of Managers. Sometimes, when appropriate, men took classes in the Young Ladies’ Preparatory Department. here were also a number of classes that were accessible to all students, such as Arithmetic, English Grammar, Algebra, Geometry, and introductory Latin Grammar, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and Conic Sections. he prep classes were taught by student teachers or by a principal in conjunction with a tutor. he student teachers were paid by the hour and were recruited from the college or from the theological school. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 2, 710–11, 719. 23. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 2, 713. 24. Annual Catalogue of the Oicers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year 1862–3 (Oberlin: V. A. Shankland & Co., Printers, 1862). 25. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 2, 715. 26. General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833–1908 (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1909), 591. 27. Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists, 486. 28. Annual Catalogue of the Oicers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year 1862–3, 39. 29. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 2, 717–18. 30. See the General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 237, 717. 31. Marcia Goldberg, “A Drawing by Edmonia Lewis,” American Art Journal 9 (November 1977): 104; and Marcia Goldberg, and W. E. Bigglestone, “A Wedding Git of 1862,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine (January/February 1977): 20. 32. Jan Van Norman Turano, “More Information on the Edmonia Lewis Drawing,” American Art Journal 10 (May 1978): 112. he journal requested the assistance of John S. Crawford and Wayne Craven, both professors at the University of Delaware. While Crawford identiied the subject matter, Craven was able to add that it was the only known drawing by Edmonia Lewis. 33. Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism (New York: Penguin Books, 1968); David Irwin, Neoclassicism (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1997); Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, eds., Taste and the Antique: he Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900, 3rd printing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 34. Rome. Vatican. Musei e Gallerie Pontiicie. I. Guida del Museo Vaticano di Scultura (Roma: Tipograia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1911), 31. 35. Irwin, Neoclassicism, 63. 36. “Urania,” “Muses,” “Astronomy,” and “Astrology,” World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia (Chicago: World Book, 1999). 37. Barbara Welter, “he Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74. 38. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 1, 384. 39. Ann Douglas, he Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 63.

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40. Ibid., 59. 41. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 1, 374. 42. Ibid., vol. 1, 381. 43. Ibid., vol. 1, 379. 44. Ibid., vol. 2, 711–12. Fletcher cites several cases in which students were not allowed admission: none were admitted who traveled on the Sabbath, while in 1853, a young girl was refused admission because her parents were unmarried. Another fellow, it was rumored, was refused admission because he was seen drinking a glass of root beer. 45. See “Prejudice at Oberlin College!” National Anti-Slavery Standard 25, no. 5 (June 11, 1864): n.p. National Anti-Slavery Standard 25, no. 5 (Saturday, June 11, 1864). For information on Coppin, see Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 202–5, 407–11; see also Lawson and Merrill, “Antebellum Black Coeds at Oberlin College,” 19. 46. In 1968, a historian from Harvard University brought the poisoning incident to light again. Reading John Mercer Langston’s autobiography, he made the connection between Langston’s discussion of the case of his famous, though unnamed, client and Edmonia Lewis. See Geofrey Blodgett, “John Mercer Langston and the Case of Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862,” Journal of Negro History 53, no. 3 (1968): 201–18. 47. We know that the suspected poison was cantharides because of a letter by a fellow student who makes a mocking reference to the incident. Fred Allen, letter to A. A. Wright (February 18, 1863), 4. Oberlin College Archives, 30/17, Box 1. 48. he newspapers that covered the trial were the Lorain County News, February 19, 1862, and March 12, 1862, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 11, 1862, February 25, 1862, and March 3, 1862; the Cleveland Morning Leader, March 3, 1862, and the Elyria Independent Democrat, March 5, 1862. See also Geofrey Blodgett, “John Mercer Langston and the Case of Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862,” Journal of Negro History 53, no. 3 (July 1968): 201–18. 49. “Mysterious Afair at Oberlin—Suspicion of Foul Play—Two Young Ladies Poisoned—he Suspect Under Arrest,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 11, 1862, 3. 50. General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833–1908 (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1909), 591, 667, and 755. 51. For the history of Oberlin College and the temperance movement, see Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 1, 336–40. 52. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Oiceholders During Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 127–28. 53. John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; or, he First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1894), 177. 54. Ibid., 172–73. 55. “he Oberlin Poisoning Case,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 25, 1862, 3. 56. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, 176–77. 57. Neither the stomach contents nor the stool samples taken from the alleged victims was saved, thus for lack of evidence, Lewis was exonerated. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, 178–79. 58. “he Oberlin Poisoning Case Again,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 3, 1862, 3.

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59. Ibid., 179–80. 60. In 1875, Lewis initiated the contact with William Henry Johnson, an African American physician from Albany, New York. While visiting New York City, Lewis wrote to ask if he would be interested in having a copy of her life-size bust of Senator Charles Sumner, who had died the previous year. If Johnson were interested, Lewis proposed, the price of the sculpture could be raised through eforts by friends of Johnson and by the sculptor herself. William Henry Johnson, Autobiography of Dr. William Henry Johnson, irst published 1900 (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970), 2, 18–19. 61. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4–5. 62. See page 36 for the date in which she enrolled for the fall term of her inal year. 63. Lorain County News, February 25, 1863. 64. In an earlier passage, Fletcher had only two things to say about Lewis: he mentioned the poisoning incident and characterized her as an “adventuress.” Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, vol. 2, 533; 680. 65. Clara Hale, Oberlin, to “Dear Folks at Home,” February 26, 1863, 3. Oberlin College Archives, Reed-hayer Letters in R. S. Fletcher Papers, Box 1. his letter, together with Allen’s, is oten quoted when twentieth-century scholars write about Lewis’s inal year at Oberlin College. Yet those same scholars never mention Allen or Hale’s references to “darkies” or “niggers.” Nor do they mention Hale’s “practical joke.” Hale relates a trick that she played on her best friend and fellow classmate, “Artie.” “Played of a good joke on Artie tonight. She can’t bear the niggers, says they stink. [Her emphasis.] So going into prayers tonight, I took the lead and there was a seat with only a black nigger in it. I aimed for it and to be polite let her go in irst, so, got her . . . by the side of a nigger. Had a good laugh tonight.” Allen’s and Hale’s letters are important because they help to illuminate the trials of African American students in general and the ordeal of Edmonia Lewis in particular, caught as she was in the glare of notoriety. It soon becomes clear that the reason for Hale’s callous attitude, like Allen’s, was racism. he letters provide a context for Lewis and other African American students who attended Oberlin. I believe that those scholars do a disservice to the historical material by censoring, or by omitting certain parts of, the letters, that they in some way diminish the survivors of this racism. 66. “A Colored Artist,” Lorain County News, March 28, 1866, 3. 67. “[Edmonia Lewis is gradually but surely attaining fame],” he Lorain County News, December 4, 1867, n.p. 68. Ann Uhry Abrams, he Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 197. 69. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, he Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), 88, 90, and 91. 70. Alexander Saxton, he Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 247. 71. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 107. 72. Horton, Free People of Color, 29. 73. Kim Sichel and Edmund Barry Gaither, “African Americans in Boston: A Demographic Survey,” Black Boston: Documentary Photography and the African American Experience (Boston: Trustees of Boston University, 1994), 25.

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74. Anne Whitney to Addy (August 9, 1864), Anne Whitney Papers, Wellesley College Archives, Margaret Clapp Library. 75. Lydia Maria Child, “Letter From L. Maria Child,” National Anti-Slavery Standard 24, no. 42 (February 27, 1864): 1. 76. Ibid.; and Wreford, “Lady-Artists in Rome,” Art Journal [London], (1866): 177. 77. In addition to these four female writers, Lewis was helped greatly by another woman, Maria Weston Chapman of Boston. Perhaps the most comprehensive biography of Childs is by Carolyn L. Karcher, he First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); see also Deborah Pickman Cliford, Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 78. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” Representative Men, originally published 1850 (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995), 6–7. 79. “American Sculptors in Italy,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 2 (1857–1858): 142. 80. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “he Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129. 81. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 36. 82. Interview with Lydia Maria Child, Liberator, February 19, 1864, n.p. 83. “Mr. Brackett, the sculptor,” New York Mirror, December 14, 1839, n.p. Courtesy of Col. Merl M. Moore Jr. of Falls Church, Virginia. 84. Robert Ewell Greene, Swamp Angels: A Biographical Study of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (Washington, DC: BoMark/Greene Publishing Group, 1990), 233–34. See also Joan Waugh, “‘It Was a Sacriice We Owed’: he Shaw Family and the Fity-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment,” Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the Fity-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, ed. Blatt, Brown, and Yacovone, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 52–75. 85. Woods, Insuperable Obstacles, 202. See also Marilyn Richardson, “Taken From Life: Edward M. Bannister, Edmonia Lewis, and the Memorialization of the Fity-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment,” in Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the Fity-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, 94–115. 86. For example, a charitable society in Brooklyn, New York, advertised their own fair to “be opened on the 8th of February, at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn. he ladies earnestly appeal to a benevolent and Christian public to aid them in this good work. All contributions of clothing, goods, ornaments, confectioneries, etc., will be gladly received at Room No. 20, Cooper Institute. Tickets for sale at Rushton and Clark’s Astor House; at the Academy on the morning of the 8th; Freedmen’s rooms, 118 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn. A New Year’s eve git for the poor Freedmen will be gratefully received at No. 20 Cooper Institute.” “he Ladies’ National Union Fair for the beneit of the Freedmen and Soldiers,” National Anti-Slavery Standard,” 24, no. 37 (January 23, 1864): 1. 87. Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw, November 3, 1864. Harvard University, Houghton Library, bMS Am 1417 (93). he artist Edward Mitchell Bannister’s wife, Christiana Carteaux Bannister, became a very wealthy woman with her hairdressing business in Boston. Lynda R. Hartigan, Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in NineteenthCentury America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 71–73. 88. See Boston Directory 1864–1866. Reel 2, Library of Congress. 89. Juanita M. Holland, Edward Mitchell Bannister (New York: Kenkeleba House, 1992), 25.

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90. Historian Gerda Lerner found this ad in Boston newspapers, where it was reprinted in the Freedmen’s Journal 1, no. 1 (January 18, 1865). Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 101–2. 91. James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 30. 92. Linda M. Perkins, “he Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women,” Journal of Social Issues 39 (1983): 17–28. See also Gerda Lerner, ed., “Teaching the Freedmen,” Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 94–118. 93. I would like to thank art historian Diane Kirkpatrick at the University of Michigan for pointing this out to me. 94. Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 454. See also Horton. Addie, as she was called, was born in Massachusetts in the year 1845 but let the state in 1869. She moved to Washington, DC, where she is mistakenly listed in the 1870 census as a white woman and boarded with a clergyman, J. Sella Martin, and his wife, their two children, and a white domestic. Martin was the editor of the African American paper New National Era. By 1871, Howard was living alone and identiied as “colored” in the Washington Directory. Her profession is given as “teacher.” Howard eventually became the principal of the Stevens School and earned $900 per year. he year 1918 is the last year her name appeared in the city directory. She never married. For information on Howard’s career, I would like to thank Anatol Steck at the Archives of the Board of Education at the Sumner School, in Washington, DC. A short biography of J. Sella Martin is included in William Wells Brown, he rising son; or, he antecedents and advancement of the colored race (Boston: Boston, Brown & Co., 1874), 535–36. By 1875, DC had stopped listing the race of its residents. 95. “A Colored Sculptor,” New York Tribune, August 8, 1865, 1. I wish to thank Professor Elsa Barkley Brown of the University of Michigan for bringing this citation to my attention and Professor Craig S. Wilder of Williams College for retrieving it. 96. Liberator, August 25, 1865, 5. 97. For an excellent discussion of black Richmond during the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, see Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History 21, no. 3 (March 1995): 296–346. 98. Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, 453–61; 459.

Chapter three

META WARRICK FULLER’S ETHIOPIA AND THE AMERICA’S MAKING EXPOSITION OF 1921 Renée Ater

Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) created Ethiopia for the America’s Making Exposition, a 1921 fair that focused on the contributions of immigrants to American society (ig. 3.1). his festival and accompanying pageants were held at the Seventy-First Regiment Armory at hirty-Fourth Street and Park Avenue from October 29 to November 12. James Weldon Johnson, ield secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and an organizer of the exposition’s “Americans of Negro Lineage” section, commissioned Fuller to sculpt an allegorical igure of Ethiopia for this event. “hey had an idea all cut and dried that they would have Ethiopia,” Fuller recalled. She agreed to make “a twelve-inch sketch or model which could be enlarged to whatever size they wanted.” he inished sculpture was prominently situated in the African American section as a “symbolic statue of the emancipation of the Negro Race.”1 Contemporary scholars have interpreted Ethiopia as a Pan-Africanist work, symbolizing a reawakening of African diasporic identity. he statue, celebrated for ushering in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, seemed to mark a new dawn of black intellectual life and creative production.2 Few scholars have noted its historical or exhibition contexts or its reception, although these are fundamental to interpreting the work.3 he America’s Making Exposition focused on the contributions of immigrants to American society and promoted a Progressive message of nationalism, unity, patriotism, and social order. he event celebrated America’s diverse immigrants, but, more important, it sought “to perfect the unity of Americans of many lineages in loyalty to their common country and pride in their 53

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.. Meta Warrick Fuller, Ethiopia, mid-1920s. Painted plaster, 67" high. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

common race.”4 he exposition organizers, who were largely white, recognized the contributions of immigrants to the making of America, but they championed “Americanization,” stressing homogeneity, civic duty, and American ideals. During World War I and in its atermath, social welfare organizations and government-sponsored agencies encouraged immigrants to show their undivided loyalty to the United States with “100 per cent Americanism.” From schools to factories, immigrants were taught English and “American values.” America’s Making, ostensibly a multiethnic celebration, “told of an inevitable and painless transformation of diverse folk cultures into a uniied American culture.”5

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he white organizers of America’s Making invited African Americans to participate as “honorary immigrants.” hey construed the word “immigrant” to mean the voluntary and willing migration of a people, not forced removal and enslavement. African Americans were not immigrants under this rubric. he white planners’ attempts to apply the immigration and “melting pot” myths to African Americans ignored the nation’s historical legacy of slavery and the reality of black life in the United States in the modern era. In 1921, African Americans did not have full citizenship rights. African Americans were invited to participate because some of the major underwriters for the festival, including John D. Rockefeller, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Altman Foundation, were supporters of the National Urban League, which would coordinate with others the “Americans of Negro Lineage” section.6 Why did African Americans involve themselves in an event that was clearly deined as a commemorative fair devoted to “immigrant gits to American life?” hroughout the 1910s African Americans continued to ight for civil rights. Most believed that their participation in World War I, having proved their loyalty to the nation, would result in the full rights of citizenship and economic empowerment. It did not. Instead, as soldiers returned home from the war and black southerners migrated to the North, African Americans of all classes faced escalating racial tension, segregationist policies, and discrimination. When race riots erupted in twenty-ive American cities during the summer of 1919, the “Red Summer,” African Americans resisted the violence in organized fashion. In the atermath of these riots, African Americans pressed with renewed energy for enfranchisement, desegregation, a federal antilynching law, and basic human rights.7 he black planners of the “Americans of Negro Lineage” section of America’s Making conceived of it as an opportunity to present black history and culture in the context of Americanization. hey planned exhibits that would draw attention to African Americans’ rights to citizenship. hrough elaborate displays and a musical pageant, they framed themselves as Americans united through democratic ideals and patriotic fervor. Fuller’s Ethiopia played an important role in drawing attention to the longevity of black culture heritage and bridged past achievements with present aspirations.

“Foremost Sculptor of the Negro Race” Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was born on June 9, 1877, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were members of a thriving black middle class in Philadelphia.8 Her father, William Henry Warrick Jr., ran a proitable barbershop

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at the corner of Broad and Chestnut Streets in the Colonnade Hotel with a clientele consisting mostly of moneyed, white Philadelphians. Her mother, Emma Jones Warrick, was a hairdresser and wigmaker. By the time of her birth, Fuller’s parents lived in the aluent Eighth Ward of Philadelphia, at 250 and then 254 South Twelth Street. In 1883, Fuller entered the Locust Street Girls’ School, an integrated elementary school near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. In addition to her schoolwork, Fuller took private piano and guitar lessons as well as dance classes. Ater a year at Locust Street, her parents enrolled her at Hollingsworth School so that she could take classes in drawing, elementary design, modeling, and wood carving at the ailiated J. Liberty Tadd School of Industrial Art, located on the upper loors of the Hollingsworth building. With her success at J. Liberty Tadd, Fuller gained admission to the Girls’ High School in 1893. A vocational training institution, the school ofered regular academic courses as well as art classes.9 Ater her graduation from high school, she received a scholarship to attend the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts (PMSIA, now the University of the Arts).10 Fuller’s path to art school was not unusual for women of the period, particularly its emphasis on industrial arts education. Ater the Civil War more opportunities opened for women to pursue professional art training. Although few art schools barred women from enrollment (they were a valuable source of revenue), once they were admitted they confronted “broad societal gender restrictions and expectations.”11 Some art schools directed women toward decorative arts, considered feminine; painting and sculpture, framed as masculine, remained the domain of men. As more women entered art academies, male instructors and students oten responded to them with hostility, and critics described them as “girl art students” and “women artists.” Moreover, late nineteenth-century expectations of proper conduct also limited women’s access to the nude in life drawing classes.12 Nonetheless, women, including Fuller, sought art training. Her attendance at PMSIA is remarkable because few African American women pursued formal art education. Perhaps more noteworthy, Emma and William Warrick did not insist that their daughter enroll in a prestigious institution such as Oberlin College or Wilberforce University, which had long admitted blacks. Instead, they encouraged their daughter to develop her skills as a professional artist. At PMSIA, Fuller followed a course of study that focused on applied arts, including decorative painting, design, and ceramics. Ater Fuller graduated from PMSIA, in June 1898, she received a one-year graduate scholarship to continue her studies at the school. With the encouragement of one of her PMSIA teachers, Fuller decided to further her art instructions in Paris. She

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sailed for Europe on September 30, 1899, and spent the next three years in Paris. Fuller took private instructions and later enrolled at the Académie Colarossi. At the academy, Fuller worked from a live model in classes that included both men and women, learning the human form through direct study.13 Fuller’s instruction in sculpture focused on strong modeling and naturalism in form; she later recounted that she attended classes in the morning and oten “worked alone in the aternoon at sketches in clay or wax.” Besides her studies, Fuller also learned from the art collections in Paris—the Louvre, the Luxembourg Museum, and the Musée de Cluny—and from the public monuments in the city. She stated that she “paid frequent visits to the museums, not to look at sculpture alone, but at the paintings as well.”14 By pursuing her artistic education in Paris, Fuller followed a long line of American women artists who went to the city to complete their artistic training and development. Paris ofered American women new freedoms. “In setting their own hours, meeting new colleagues, and immersing themselves without distraction in art,” the historian Kristin Swinth writes, “women had the opportunity to direct their lives in ways unavailable to them at home, where they were oten tangled in household and familial duties.” For these women artists, Paris also ofered the chance to develop their skills and abilities so that upon their return to the United States they could compete in the American art market.15 For Fuller, making her own life choices, whether related to her professional training, housing, food, friends, or dress, was liberating. She spoke of new friends, musical evenings, museum visits, and the excitement of residing on her own. his three-year interlude set her apart from many African American women of her generation and class who were oten chaperoned, married ater inishing high school or college, or worked as teachers in black schools, closely monitored by their communities. Fuller met Rodin, the best-known sculptor of his day, and brought for critique a small sculpture to his Villa des Brillants in late spring of 1902. She was one of the many American artists who sought out Rodin beginning in the early 1880s. His Villa des Brillants and his studio in Paris attracted dignitaries, wealthy patrons, and both established and aspiring artists. In his modern sculpture, Rodin emphasized the sensuous handling of the surface, focused on the expression of universal and private experience, and used the partial igure as a sculpture form in itself.16 His emotive and sensual aesthetic profoundly afected Fuller. His modernist approach to content and form provided a model that allowed her to break away from the conines of academic sculpture and to express herself in new ways in three-dimensional form. Fuller turned to the themes of human sufering and inward states of mind, creating sculpture with strong emotional content rather than idealized subjects.

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Deeply indebted to Rodin’s process of impressionist modeling, Fuller also moved to a more luid handling of her surfaces, leaving traces of her hand in her materials. Fuller’s study in Paris, her encounter with Rodin, and an exhibition of her work at L’Art Nouveau Bing (a leading avant-garde gallery in Paris) were the reasons that critics and biographers would celebrate her as the “foremost sculptor of the Negro race.”17 In Paris, Fuller also established relationships with W. E. B. Du Bois and homas J. Calloway, who were in the city to organize and install the American Negro Exhibit at the Palace of Social Economy for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Ater her return to the United States, these two men would provide Fuller with three major commissions related to fairs and expositions: the Warrick Tableaux, a multiigure set of dioramas for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907); Emancipation, a freestanding group for the National Emancipation Exposition (1913); and Ethiopia for the America’s Making Exposition. For Du Bois and Calloway, Fuller’s life experience made her particularly suited to make works of art for the black community. Her social standing, classical education, Protestant faith, and middle-class upbringing positioned her to be a member of the “Talented Tenth,” the segment of the population Du Bois identiied as uniquely qualiied to lead and “uplit the race.”18 Du Bois, Calloway, and others believed in the transformative power of culture, and they relied on Fuller’s sculpture to contribute to it and to create a new image of African Americans in the early twentieth century.

Embodying Egypt and Ethiopia Ethiopia was positioned at the entrance to the “Americans of Negro Lineage” section of the America’s Making Exposition and it served as the focal point of the exhibit booth, which was designed to resemble an Egyptian temple. he New York Age noted, “the consensus of opinion was that it [Ethiopia] was the best expressed ideal in the whole armory.”19 W. E. B. Du Bois, political theorist, cultural promoter, and editor of Crisis, was the exhibit organizer and pageant producer. He had originally proposed an elaborate igure of Ethiopia with crystal globes in each hand that would occupy a central place among the black exhibits: “Her dark face shines forth from the massed drapery of a white Sudanese bernouse which lows down in folds to the ground and has perhaps a single splash of crimson color. he face has closed eyes and on the cheek a slight trace of tears. he arms and hands are black and bare and in the right hand is a crystal globe marked Music and in the let a crystal globe marked Labor.”20 Fuller, however, relied on her own artistic imagination to develop

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the sculpture for the exposition. As preparations advanced for the fair, Crisis reported that she was “designing a statue which will be in the center of the Negro exhibit, showing a female igure emerging from the wrappings of a mummy with hands upraised, symbolizing the self-emancipation of that race from ignorance into educated, self-reliant citizens and makers of America.”21 In a letter to an acquaintance written shortly before the fair opened, Fuller also elaborated on her intentions: “Here was a group (Negro) who had once made history and now ater a long sleep was awaking, gradually unwinding the bandage of its mummied past and looking out on life again, expectant but unafraid and with at least a graceful gesture. Why you may ask the Egyptian motif? he answer, the most brilliant period, perhaps of Egyptian history was the period of the Negro kings.”22 he artist conceived a striking image of an Egyptian black woman unwrapping her swathed lower body, a mummiied form slowly returning to life. Her right hand rests in the center of her chest where her crossed arms had been positioned in death, and between thumb and foreinger, she holds the end of her linen shroud. Her let hand breaks away at an angle from her bound legs. he igure’s head, draped in a nemes worn by Egyptian kings, is turned to her let and her eyes gaze over her let shoulder. Fuller’s original small-scale model, now lost and only known through surviving photographs (see ig. 3.6), was the irst of several versions she created during her lifetime of the sculpture, variously called Ethiopia, Awakening Ethiopia, Ethiopia Awakening, or he Awakening of Ethiopia.23 Although clearly an allegorical image, Fuller’s Ethiopia also can be understood in the context of the archaeological recovery of Egyptian funerary sculpture during the early decades of the 1900s. While a student in Paris, Fuller visited the Louvre on many occasions and likely saw its collection of Egyptian artifacts, which had been on view since 1826. As a resident of Framingham, a small town outside of Boston, Fuller also had access to one of the most signiicant collections of Egyptian art in the United States at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Among the important objects in the collection at the time was the statue of King Menkaure and his queen, which Fuller viewed in visits to museum. he artist also stated in the previously quoted letter that she was alluding to a period in Egyptian history when “the Negro kings” ruled, a reference to the reign of Kushite kings in Egypt from 712 to 664 BCe. An avid reader of Crisis, Fuller learned about Egyptian and Nubian art, in part from the magazine’s coverage of archaeological excavations in the Sudan. As early as 1911, Crisis informed its readers of the discoveries at the ancient city of Meroe. It described the objects in detail and reported that “great temples, royal palaces, public buildings and splendid tombs have been rescued from the desert. he

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result shows that the black men were in close relation to Greece as well as Egypt.”24 In October 1921, Maud Cuney Hare also reported the excavations in the Sudan for Crisis. She focused on the archaeologist George A. Reisner’s 1916 and 1918–19 expeditions for Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in which he explored the royal pyramids of Nuri. She listed “specimens of Nubian art” including an alabaster vase inscribed with the name of King Aspalta, scarabs, and stone shawabti of King Taharqa, remarking that the shawabti were of “Negro type.”25 Fuller had access to excellent resources related to Egyptian and Nubian art, and this can be seen in her realization of the igure. Ethiopia suggests the self-contained aesthetic of Egyptian funerary statuary. Similar in form to mummies and shawabtis, the igure’s lower body is completely encased, broken only by the let hand jutting away from the legs. he crisscross pattern covering the igure’s shrouded legs evokes Egyptian funerary practices in which the body was tightly wrapped in linen. he mummiied, lower body contrasts with the bust and torso, which moves more freely, the head turned to the let and the right hand resting in the center of the igure’s chest. Here, Fuller shited from the squared, frontality of Egyptian sculpture to a naturalistic treatment of her subject, suggesting the metamorphosis from dormancy to awakening. Ethiopia’s facial features are clearly modeled on black physiognomy: full lips, a wide nose with lared nostrils, and sharply angled cheekbones. he most unusual element of Fuller’s igure is that she wears the Egyptian kingship headdress called a nemes. Artists working in the Egyptian tradition rarely depicted women wearing a nemes. (he exceptions are images of Queen Hatshepsut, who was oten represented as a male in the regalia of the pharaoh.) It is tempting to think that Fuller was associating her igure with that of the ancient queen, but it is more likely that Fuller used the nemes as well as the encased lower body as a synthesis of elements of Egyptian and Nubian art that suited her early twentieth-century sensibilities. She seems to have ignored both the Egyptian and the Western tradition of depicting Cleopatra. In nineteenth-century American literature, poetry, newspapers, engravings, and art, the literary historian Scott Traton notes the partially nude Cleopatra “represented a multilayered sign of social danger and cultural transgression, primarily through her construction as a igure of racial ambiguity and sexual deviance.”26 Cognizant of the various visual associations of Cleopatra, particularly in nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture, Fuller elected not to signify the queen in her work. he art historian Pauline de Souza suggests an interesting link between Fuller’s sculpture and the Egyptian goddess Isis.27 Isis was the most prominent

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of the female deities in the Egyptian pantheon. In the Egyptian belief system, Isis had tremendous magical powers: she could resurrect the dead, blind the unknowing, and heal the sick, and she gave birth miraculously to her son, Horus. She was also the supreme example of motherhood.28 One of Isis’s attributes was the tiet, an amulet consisting of an open, knotted loop of cloth from which hung a long sash lanked by a pair of loops, which lay in the folds of her garment between her breasts.29 De Souza argues that Fuller’s Ethiopia closely resembles Isis, based on an unseen tiet, stating, “It is not possible to see if the mystic knot exists underneath the hand resting between the breasts in Fuller’s image, but the reference is there.”30 De Souza also links her interpretation of Ethiopia as Isis to the writings of Du Bois, particularly his representation of the All-Mother in he Star of Ethiopia and in his literary work Dusk of Dawn (1921): “For Du Bois, the theme of salvation through birth and resurrection is closely linked to Isis as a fertility goddess, as a mother, and as an Egyptian and Ethiopian queen to the rebirth of a black personality and nationalism.”31 On the evidence of his writings on the subject of the All-Mother, Du Bois certainly read Ethiopia in such complex ways. Whether Fuller envisioned a similar cosmological framework when she created the work is diicult to discern; she never discussed her sculpture in such terms, and it is impossible to determine whether a tiet (or any object) is underneath the statue’s hands. Moreover, Fuller appropriated elements of Egyptian and Nubian art to create an allegorical female form that articulated the emergence and transformation of African Americans’ cultural identity in the early twentieth century and that promoted an imagined concept of Egypt, not a personiication of Isis. Fuller’s allusions to Egyptian art and themes were not unusual for an American artist working in the early twentieth century. he painter Elihu Vedder, for example, had evoked mystical Egypt in two versions of he Questioner of the Sphinx (1863); both Edmonia Lewis and William Wetmore Storey carved marble Cleopatras in the 1860s; and Martin Milmore created a monumental sphinx (1872) for the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fuller was certainly aware of two other artists working with the trope of Egypt/Ethiopia. As a reviewer of Freeman Murray’s Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, Fuller read about Daniel Chester French’s igure of Africa for he Continents, which French executed for the United States Custom House in New York City between 1903 and 1907 (ig. 3.2). In an exchange of letters, Fuller and Murray discussed French’s largescale igure of Africa, which was lanked by a lion and a sphinx. Murray saw the igure as an Ethiopian type; Fuller read the igure as symbolic of Africa, remarking that French “probably strove to suggest all the African types, Egyptian etc.”32 In her review of the manuscript, Fuller also read about Anne

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.. Daniel Chester French, Africa from The Four Continents, 1903–7, U.S. Custom House, New York. Bernie Clef Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum Photograph Archives, Washington, DC.

Whitney’s now-destroyed Ethiopia (1863–64), which Murray reproduced in his book (ig. 3.3). Murray quoted a description of Whitney’s monumental sculpture from a text titled Our Famous Women: [S]he saw in the near future the deliverance of a race from imbruting bondage, and, later, the illumination of the dark continent from which it sprang. his grand and mighty conception she sought to embody in form. . . . he symbolization is that of a colossal Ethiopian woman, in a half recumbent position. . . . She has been sleeping for ages in the glowing sands of the desert, out of which she is liting herself. . . . Half rising, with sleep yet heavy on her eyelids, she supports herself on the let hand and arm, while she listens with fear and wonder to the sound of broken chains and shackles falling around her.33

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.. Anne Whitney, Ethiopia (Africa), 1863–64, destroyed. Plaster, dimensions unknown. Courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives.

Murray wrote that he thought Whitney’s work should be titled “Ethiopia Awakening” for its “representative expression of the faith, hope, and the ‘high resolve’ of the noblest hearts and minds of the time.” In 1865–66, Whitney reworked the piece speciically to address public criticism of the anglicized features of the work, and she attempted to render an “African” type more realistically.34 Whitney inscribed on the base of her sculpture a verse from Psalm 68:31: “And Ethiopia Shall Lit Up her Hands Unto God”—a slight rephrasing of the King James passage, alluding to the Christian prophecy of the universal freedom of blacks from bondage.35 he fact that Fuller knew of these two works suggests that she hoped to accomplish what French and Whitney had not: an authentic rendering of blackness and an image that signiied black dignity and grace in the face of oppression.

Immigrants and Americanization he America’s Making Exposition’s organizing committee invited thirtythree “racial groups” to participate in the iteen-day civic afair (ig. 3.4). It deined immigrants as “all groups of new comers who have settled in America from 1607 to date, during the period in which their racial distinctiveness

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.. Cover of The Book of America’s Making Exposition . . . Held at the st Regiment Armory, New York, October –November , .

is retained.”36 hese loosely deined “immigrants” ranged from groups who had arrived as colonists, indentured servants, and slaves in the seventeenth century to the wave of Europeans who entered the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the foreword to the souvenir book of the exposition, the organizers declared the nation to be “a land of one people” to which each immigrant population had brought unique “gits” and “laid them on the Altar of America.” hey also stated that “hatred of old-time neighbors, national prejudices and ambitions, traditional fears, set standards of living, graceless intolerance, class rights and the demand of class—these were barred at the gates.”37 heir language reveals an optimistic faith among the organizers of America’s Making in the exposition’s power to efect social change and to unite diverse peoples. hey also believed in the power of Americanization to act as an agent of social uplit. he men and women planners of America’s Making emerged from the social reform movement of the early twentieth century. Dedicated to promoting social improvement through democracy, they believed that their sponsorship of the exposition would help ease the “immigrant problem” through education,

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.. Illustrations of posters from The Book of America’s Making Exposition . . . Held at the st Regiment Armory, New York, October – November , .

Christian morality, and Americanization. Taking place ater the “Red Scare” of 1919–20, when antiracial hysteria, fear of Bolshevism, and xenophobia had swept the country, America’s Making was intended by its creators to foster good citizenship. hrough the exposition, the reformers advocated social harmony among the diverse peoples who composed the nation. he white planners highlighted cultural pluralism as the ostensible theme of the festival, but a belief in the supremacy of American culture underscored their rhetoric and the very way in which they assembled the festival.38 “At the Altar of America we have sworn ourselves to a single loyalty. We have bound ourselves to sacriice and struggle, to plan and to work for this land. We have given that we may gain, we have surrendered that we may have victory. We have taken an oath that the world shall have a chance to know how much of good may be gathered from all countries and how solid in its strength, how wise, how fertile in its yield, how lasting and sure is the life of a people who are one.”39 As outlined by the executive committee, the festival sought to demonstrate “the most important historical, economic, and cultural contributions that Americans of various descent” had made to the nation. One newspaper described the multiple functions of the public spectacle in larger, progressive terms: “[It is] a movement to abolish the racial prejudice growing out of the war, to bring about a better understanding by all Americans of the

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part played in the development of the country by every one of the races of immigrants who sought our shores, to instill an adequate understanding of the greatness of America, and to demonstrate that the country may weather any and all storms.”40 In order to “bring about a better understanding” from the public, the exposition included pageants, pantomimes, plays, concerts, folk dancing, and gymnastic performances. Exhibits presented both ine art and folk art; industrial, scientiic, and historical displays; and live crat demonstrations. Both the state’s and city’s Department of Education supported the festival through pageants, processions, tableaux, and dramatic representations organized by teachers and performed by students in public schools, parks, and playgrounds around the city.41 High school students designed and painted hundreds of posters advertising America’s Making (ig. 3.5). Prizes were awarded for the posters that best captured the ideals of the festival, and the winning entries were hung in shop windows on Fith Avenue.42 Under individual subcommittees, each of the participating immigrant groups organized and inanced its own exhibit.43 he exhibits and pageants focused on “a graphic presentation to show America what the incoming races had successively contributed to its civilization.” America’s Making was a much elaborate version of the Arts and Crats of the Homelands exhibition sponsored by the Department of Immigrant Education of the University of the State of New York in Bufalo in 1919. Highlighting the artistic heritage of immigrants, “the treasures which the immigrants had brought with them from their old homes,” Arts and Crats of the Homelands also explicitly promoted Americanization through the acquisition of English. Expanding on the premise of the Homelands exhibition, the white planners construed America’s Making to show the immigrant as a “participant in the building up of the New World.”44 Within these parameters, immigrants were encouraged to represent the “genius of the group,” rather than individual achievement. hrough the concrete evidence of immigrant contributions, John Daniels, general director of America’s Making, believed that “native-born” Americans would come to understand the plurality of American history: “It is not generally realized that the American life of today has been developed gradually, out of a variety of racial elements.” Furthermore, he invoked the national motto “E Pluribus Unum” stressing its relevance “not only to the union of states but also to the union of racial stocks and cultures.”45 Although Daniel’s remarks suggest that he endorsed the ideals of diversity, he also expressed a hope that the exposition would ultimately transcend diference through the ensemble of architecture, scene, and decoration that “will bind everything harmoniously together and convey at once the central motif of the whole exhibit—that of the essential unity-born-of-variety of the American nation.”46

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Underneath this directive lurked a competing subtext of Americanization: participants were to conceive of themselves as unhyphenated Americans and to view themselves as citizens loyal to the United States. Each group was encouraged to retell American history starting from the colonial period and to emphasize their economic signiicance to the nation. Daniels directed participants to create exhibits that were “clear, striking, attractive, and popularly interesting.” He also gave them tight guidelines as to content: historical objects or replicas; historic events represented through models; arts and crats that “combine historic and cultural interest”; photographs, sketches, and cartoons showing “characteristic activities of immigrant groups”; and “novel devices with motion and color.”47 Movies played an important part in the exposition as well: several groups employed ilm to depict their industrial activities.48 he planners encouraged exhibitors to keep to a minimum overtly didactic material such as charts, diagrams, and maps. Charles Storey, director of exhibits, encouraged groups to reine and hone their exhibits into “one or two great contributions,” shown in a “picturesque manner” because visitors were more likely to be impressed with the “big dramatic thing” than with the “multitude of exhibits.”49 Storey’s emphasis on multimedia display reveals his desire for the immigrant groups to succinctly and vividly capture the attention of the exposition’s audience and to use “dramatic display techniques to sell its message.”50 he daily pageants were central to America’s Making and served as the unifying ritual of the festivities. Every aternoon and evening for the two weeks of the exposition, various ethnic groups presented “living demonstrations.” he organizers hoped that the pageant format would allow each group to present “those more spiritual contributions which cannot be shown so well in any other way.” hese spectacles included processions, folk dancing, music, singing, the occasional tableau vivant, and a patriotic grand inale. In addition, two elaborate pageants, “he Foundation Laid” and “E Pluribus Unum” were held on the opening and the closing nights, acting as framing devices for America’s Making.51 hrough these spectacles, which involved a thousand participants, the executive committee underscored the larger themes of the exposition: the distinctiveness of immigrant contributions and the transformation of ethnic communities into “Americans” uniied in the belief in nation, democracy, and capitalism. he architecture of the Seventy-First Regiment Armory, which resembled a medieval fortress with a tall crenellated tower and thick rusticated walls, played an important role in America’s Making. he main loor space, measuring 200 feet by 200 feet, was kept “entirely clear and open.” Daniels believed that this arrangement permitted an “unobstructed view of the whole

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display” and gave “the impression of unity.” Around the four sides of the drill hall, he arranged the exhibit space into booths, separated by “skeleton framework partitions, covered only in light board or cloth.” Daniels wanted each racial group to have its own booth at the same time that he sought to make a cohesive space that joined all the exhibits into a uniied whole.52 His vision of the space underscored the dual narrative of diversity and unity of America’s Making. On opening day, a Brooklyn newspaper reported the efect: “From the moment the visitor enters the armory he inds himself in the United States as a whole . . . transplanted suddenly into a wonderful cosmic United States seen from every angle and from its every period of growth. his panorama not only moves compass-wise but over 300 years of development as well.”53 President Warren Harding, who supported the emergency anti-immigration laws of 1921, endorsed America’s Making, receiving a delegation of representatives at the White House. Expressing his “hearty approval,” Harding remarked that he would not have known that the delegates were a “foreign group” unless he had been told so. He further stated: “I have said a good many times we of America have no racial entity, and we are making therefore a people which is born of national aspiration. We are the blend of all peoples in the world. I sometimes think we are much the better for that. But, to make the real America, to which all aspire, we must have distinctly an American spirit, and you can’t have that without consecration to America.”54 President Harding stressed citizenship, civic loyalty, and a civic nationalist model at the same time that his policies enacted into law a distinctive racialist tradition of American nationalism. For Harding, to be American meant ultimately to be Anglo-Saxon. New York City mayor John Hylan and New York governor Nathan Miller praised America’s Making for its symbolic representation of assimilation and endorsed a broader vision of what it meant to be American. Hylan remarked: “All of our citizens have an opportunity every day to learn to appreciate the virtues and accomplishments of many races, because we are made up of many racial stocks, all living in amity together, and constantly rubbing elbows in business, in politics, and social intercourse.”55 While citing the diversity of participants during opening-evening remarks, Miller stated, “We have been called a melting pot, and it is very signiicant that there are thirty-three diferent races who are uniting in this efort to teach America what each separately and altogether collectively have done to contribute to the making of America.”56 As mayor and governor of a state with a large immigrant population, Hylan and Miller recognized that their immigrant constituency contributed to the economic vitality of New York. hese men understood America’s Making as a patriotic celebration of the diversity and commonalities of Americans.

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he narrative of harmony among people of diferent origins, appearances, and experiences did not preclude internal dissension. he New York Times reported that behind the scenes “some merry wars” had been going on between the participants.57 Various groups openly debated two issues: who had discovered America and who had made the most valuable contributions. Seven immigrant groups claimed to be the authentic American settlers: the Dutch, the Icelanders, the Irish, the Italians, the Norwegians, the Spanish, and the Welsh. he Dutch, the founders of New York City, threatened to pull out of the exposition, arguing that they deserved to lead the opening-day pageant because “history entitled them to be” seen as the irst Americans.58 he English jumped into the fray, espousing that “the part of England in the making of America overshadows the contributions of all other countries.”59 he Spanish were chagrined that “the committee or society in charge of the preparations for the pageant has omitted to have the nation to which America owes its discovery and civilization represented.”60 In the end, the Dutch withdrew from America’s Making, stating that “while it is true that the Mississippi River was early discovered, these peoples let little constructive work and their lineal descendents are submerged. Nor are there any survivors of the English adventurers who landed in Virginia. . . . From 1614 the shores of the Hudson have always been inhabited by descendents of the irst Dutch settlers.”61 he acrimony of the debate reveals the importance that early European immigrants attached to their versions of American history. hey believed themselves more American because they were founding members of the nation and thus, they argued, more loyal and more deserving than immigrants who had arrived in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, the various groups fell in line with the exposition’s utopianist vision of a society based on harmony, diversity through unity, shared history, and civic pride. hrough the elaborately staged pageants and displays, the participants imagined an all-encompassing American national identity rooted in their contributions to American life.

Race and “Honorary Immigrants” Surprisingly, black participants did not engage in the public debate over deining “Americanness.” he principal coordinators of the “Americans of Negro Lineage” section were Eugene Kinckle Jones, executive secretary of the National Urban League, and James Weldon Johnson. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Arthur Schomburg, a bibliophile and major contributor to the New York Public Library, organized the exhibits. In a letter to solicit Du Bois’s involvement,

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Victor Daly, the corresponding secretary of the committee, emphasized that the festival provided an opportunity to prove African Americans’ productivity and worth: “he city-wide pageant to be known as ‘America’s Making,’ should command attention and interest of every forward-looking Negro of this country. his proposed exhibition gives to the Negro an opportunity for which he has watched and waited many a year. Whether we will avail ourselves of this occasion to demonstrate to the American people what the Negro has done, is doing and intends to do, rests entirely with a small committee.”62 As chairman of the “Negro Group,” Johnson made passing mention of the exceptional status of blacks at the event: “All of the various groups in the nation except the aboriginal Indians have been considered as immigrants and asked to participate.”63 Johnson’s comment hinted at the incongruity of including African Americans under the rubric of immigrant. Given the intensity of the debates surrounding immigration and Americanization and the occasional inclusion of African Americans in these discussions, the black planners’ silence regarding the status of African Americans as “honorary immigrants” is puzzling. Only the Chicago Defender alluded to a problem with the status of African Americans in the exposition, reporting that Eugene Kinckle Jones, who eventually took over the day-to-day organizing of the event from Johnson, “met with much unexpected opposition in certain quarters.”64 he paper provided no additional information on the diiculties nor did others mention the disagreement. In 1919, Senator Hoke Smith and Representative William B. Bankhead introduced the Smith-Bankhead Americanization Bill, which would have provided funds for overcoming illiteracy among immigrant populations by emphasizing English as the primary language in public schools, the workplace, and the military. Even though the bill was defeated in both the Senate and House, its presumption that to be American meant to speak English permeated the discussions of white reformers on Americanization.65 In April 1919 Crisis reported that Franklin K. Lane, then secretary of the interior, was leading the federal push for Americanization. In January 1919 Lane had delivered a speech to the Americanization Conference at the Hotel Astor in New York in which he laid out the scope of his Americanization plan.66 Du Bois quoted Lane’s discussion of the “Negro problem,” in which Lane argued for the “right sort” of education for the “undeveloped negro.” Lane said: “he way has been found to give our colored citizens an education that will strengthen his iber, widen his vision, and at the same time make him happy in achieving a useful place in society.” Arguing that whites should provide “guidance, oversight and a part of the inancial burden,” Lane proposed that “this whole problem of liting a backward people onto a level more compatible

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with our hopes for them and with their status as citizens can be realized.”67 he unmistakable racism of the comments shows that Lane believed blacks to be outside the parameters of Americanization and citizenship, one minuscule step up from the slave. In response to Lane, Du Bois editorialized: “Of course, one might say that the Negro is already an American and needs only the right to enjoy the privileges of his citizenship.”68 Black elites understood themselves as citizens of the American nation, not in need of “Americanizing” through language or literacy. For America’s Making, they remained silent on their characterization as immigrants, choosing instead to create a positive modern self-image and to emphasize black contributions to American society through the themes of labor, personal service, and music. Given the virulent xenophobia and national cries for Americanization that pervaded political debate in the 1910s and 1920s, the desire to belong to the nation outweighed the insult of “honorary immigrant” status. At the time of America’s Making, African Americans frequently found themselves stereotyped in historical pageants and exhibits based on images from popular theater that gloriied the South and from minstrel shows that portrayed blacks as comic bufoons. Since Reconstruction, status of African Americans in the United States had deteriorated signiicantly. At the beginning of the twentieth century, lynching was on the rise, large numbers of African Americans lived in poverty in both the rural South and urban North, and Progressive politics seemed to have had little impact on segregation and racism.69 By participating in America’s Making, a white-organized event, black elites intended to produce new representations of themselves, even as “honorary immigrants,” and to educate the larger public about the political, educational, and cultural advancement of African Americans. Du Bois, in an editorial for Crisis about the festival, expressed certainty that “thousands of people will for the irst time gain direct information concerning the Negro’s worth to America.”70 he “Americans of Negro Lineage” section included displays that focused on labor, property ownership, the church, social uplit, literature, the arts, and military service (ig. 3.6). he entry on “Americans of Negro Lineage” for he Book of America’s Making delivered a succinct statement on the signiicance of black participation from the white organizers’ perspective: “he Negro exhibit is designed to symbolize the origin of the race in Africa and its progress in America. Wall decorations will show their industrial contribution to the nation and the educational work among those of their own race. he industrial school is depicted. heir musical festival typiies their wonderful contribution to this branch of art.”71 Johnson, Jones, Du Bois, and other organizers of the African American exhibit hoped to educate the larger white

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.. “Americans of Negro Lineage,” from The Book of America’s Making Exposition . . . Held at the st Regiment Armory, New York, October –November , .

population, to show the progress of the race, and, above all to locate themselves as Americans who had earned the right to citizenship. As contributing editor of the New York Age, Johnson promoted America’s Making in his weekly column, writing, “his afair ofers the colored people of New York City and State great opportunity . . . We are constantly complaining at the lack of opportunity to bring to the attention of the world the best

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that is in us. ‘America’s Making’ gives us the opportunity to bring to the eyes of hundreds and thousands of people and of the entire press of this great city the worth while things that the race has done and given to help make America the great nation that it is.” Proposing that African Americans had contributed more than any immigrant group, besides the English or Spanish, to the making of the United States, Johnson asserted, “the Negro preceding as he did the Pilgrim Fathers in landing on these shores, became at once a factor and has continued to be an increasingly important factor ever since.”72 Johnson believed that blacks had helped to build America in three distinct ways. First, he argued that African Americans had been the principal force “through his muscle and brawn and in his sweat” in the economic growth of the South, since “it has been and still is chiely through his labors possible for the South to exist economically.” Furthermore, he asserted, “for more than a hundred years the economic and industrial stability of the South has rested upon the broad back of the Negro, and as he has helped to develop the South and to make it prosperous, proportionally he has contributed to the development and posterity of the whole nation.” Second, Johnson identiied African Americans’ military service as unambiguous evidence of their patriotism. “From the Boston massacre on through the Battle of Argonne he has willingly shed his blood in all the nation’s wars. . . . Not in all of this stretch of history is there recorded a single instance of treason or disloyalty.” Finally, Johnson noted the spiritual and cultural contributions of blacks, particularly the git of a distinctly American music: “Out of the wealth of his emotional and artistic endowment he has contributed gits which no other group in the nation had within its power to give. he Negro has been the creator of the only things artistic that ever yet sprang from American soil and have been acknowledged as American products. . . . that is, American music.” Johnson inished his column by pointing out the number of black “individuals of genius” who had contributed to the “nation’s greatness.”73 his enumeration of black success was important, for in naming these tangible “gits,” Johnson conveyed the signiicance of black social and cultural production in the making of the United States. he black planners designed the exhibits to illustrate each of Johnson’s points and to adhere to the Daniel’s instruction for multimedia content. he “Americans of Negro Lineage” section situated blacks as historically central to American life through charts, drawings, literature, and a ilm that “visualize[d] the importance of negro labor in many big industries.” Projected onto a small screen at the exhibit booth, the ilm included clips of black men and women employed in cotton cultivation and skilled industrial work “using modern machines.”74 Works of art by Albert Alexander, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and

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Cloyd L. Boykin were displayed on the walls of the booth as evidence of black achievement.75 he exhibit booth integrated a large wall painting, a wooden pyramid, and the statue of Ethiopia as part of its design: he exhibit will be housed in a booth approximately 20 by 24 feet. . . . he statue of Ethiopia will stand at the entrance to the booth. he entire end of the booth will consist of a painting, in tropical coloring, showing that portion of the Sahara, which contains the Great Sphinx and the pyramids. Directly in front of this painting will stand a pyramid of wood and decorated to imitate one of the great pyramids. It will be divided into sections as follows: base, Labor, then above Exploration, Self Supporting Womanhood, Emancipation of Democracy, National Defense, Literature, and Music. hese are the Negro’s great contributions to America. he capstone, Music, will be gilded. he two sides of the booth will be divided, and the divisions labeled to correspond with the titles of the pyramid.76

Carpenters built tables along the length of the side walls; above the tables, painted scenes illustrated the topics, including one painting described as “representing the modern cultivation of cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar (the Labor group).” Beneath each painting, Du Bois included statistical information related to each particular heading.77 Although no photographs of the booth survive, the lengthy description of the exhibit booth suggests a structure similar to that of he Temple of Beauty for the National Emancipation Exposition of 1913. he visual representation of Egypt as a unifying motif underscored the ways in which the black exhibition designers emphatically wanted to draw historical connections to an ancient legacy. heir use of scene paintings—visual narratives of progress—emphasized the contributions of these “honorary immigrants” to the building of the nation and conveyed positive images of racial uplit. he black organizers of the “Americans of Negro Lineage” section also produced a small brochure titled “he Part Colored People Have Played in America’s Making.”78 Although Johnson, Jones, Du Bois, and others had not engaged in the public discussion in the local newspapers of “who was more American,” this promotional text emphasized the extent to which these men perceived their contributions as more signiicant than those of other immigrant groups. A tone of black cultural chauvinism pervades the text: “he colored citizens will not be outdone by any other element as their contribution has been so unique and proportionately so large that a fair representation of the services to America will compare favorably.” Participation in public

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culture was important for African Americans, according to the brochure, because it made them visible as laborers and thinkers in the grand narrative of American history. hrough labor, African Americans had been “the chief cause of the commercial importance of the four great modern crops—sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton.” hus, black labor was conceived as a civilizing force on the American land, and black workers presented as digniied and industrious; the words “slave” and “slavery” were never used. he brochure emphasized the importance of black musicians and writers, remarking that the “only real American music is Negro music,” and associating the literary achievements of black writers with the tragic history of African Americans. Under the category of social uplit, the brochure noted that African Americans were not “passive beneiciaries of emancipation” but had been agents in the abolition of slavery. Democracy would triumph in the world “because he (the African American) was found capable of participating in democratic government and was accepted by the nation as a fellow citizen.” he ith category, exploration and defense, outlined black men’s loyal military service.79 A notably well-composed articulation of the philosophy of racial uplit, the pamphlet reveals how deeply committed the black organizers were to having their achievements and eforts revealed as uniquely American. Along with the exhibits, pageants were key to the overall success of America’s Making, with each of the thirty-three groups creating and participating in their own unique performance. In the early twentieth century, pageants were large-scale public forums for the expression of history and racial ideology. According to the historian David Glassberg, such public historical imagery, “by giving recognition to various groups and individual histories, also suggests categories for understanding the scale of our social relations and the relative position of groups in our society.” Pageants allowed communities to present diverse histories, but they also perpetuated racial distinctions and narrow deinitions of belonging. Pageants functioned as popular entertainment, expressions of local pride, patriotic celebration, and civic ritual. he planners of America’s Making saw pageants as critical tools for uniting all immigrants in a collective history of the United States.80 Adapting his popular spectacle from the National Emancipation Exposition of 1913, Du Bois created a “pageant of music” titled “he Seven Gits of Ethiopia to America.” Du Bois saw the pageant as an opportunity “to teach on the one hand the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich, emotional life through a new theater, and on the other, to reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing.”81 “he Seven Gits of Ethiopia to America” illustrated contributions of African Americans to the making of America, emphasizing spirituals as a unique American musical

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form. Both Johnson and Du Bois championed spirituals as important expressions of black creativity and experience in America; Du Bois had used spirituals to frame his Souls of Black Folk, and Johnson later published an anthology titled Book of American Negro Spirituals. Du Bois did not include the popular musical idiom of the blues in his pageant, probably because of his biases against the music’s overt sexuality. Du Bois saw his pageant as a distinctively middle-class endeavor, exalting “reined” music and dance and emphasizing a message of uplit, service, and cultural regeneration. he pageant of music with tableaux depicted seven scenes—those outlined on the exhibit booth pyramid—and began with the African drum in the New World. Highlighting black music, Du Bois also centered his drama on the construction of a pyramid and the mystical igure of Ethiopia. In scene one, Estevancio—the Moroccan slave of the sixteenth-century Spaniard Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, who accompanied his master on explorations of Florida and was the irst African-born slave to traverse Texas—lands in the New World to the sound of a constant drumbeat. A veiled, silent Ethiopia follows him in his explorations and witnesses his death at the hands of American Indians. In scene 2, the “African War Dance,” four “massive” African American men carry the foundation stones of the pyramid to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Bamboula.” Inscribed on the stones were the words: cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. Under the direction of Ethiopia, the men laid the foundation of the pyramid over the grave of Estevancio and took “their place about the stage as sentinels.” In scene 3, eight women, chained to one another, sang the spiritual “You May Bury Me in the East” while carrying stones labeled service, self support, religion, and faith. he women entombed the body of Estevancio together with Ethiopia in the rising pyramid.82 he scene both celebrated the ideals of racial uplit as the quintessence of black womanhood and suggested a period of dormancy of black culture. he fourth scene portrayed important black historical and living igures, including Benjamin Banneker, Paul Cufee, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Alexander Cromwell, Frederick Douglass, John M. Langston, B. K. Bruce, Booker T. Washington, and Robert B. Elliott. he abolitionist, Sojourner Truth, was the only woman included among the notable African Americans. Singing “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” the characters carried stones marked with such phrases as “Africa for Africans,” “he Right of All to Vote,” “he Right for All to Work,” “Equality,” and “he Free Woman.” Depositing their stones on the pyramid, they positioned themselves around the stage as witnesses to the “emancipation of democracy” and to the rest of the pageant. In the ith scene, “Defense,” black soldiers, marching to music by Harry Burleigh, placed stones on the rising pyramid imprinted with “he Revolution,” the “War of 1812,” the “Civil War,” the “Spanish American War,” and “he World War” and with the numbers of

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black soldiers who fought in each war. Next, children singing “Listen to the Lambs” entered carrying books including Souls of Black Folk and Up From Slavery, which they placed as the capstone of the pyramid. At the completion of the pyramid, the children danced to Coleridge-Taylor’s “Imaginary Ballet.” For the inale, the ensemble sang Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Onaway.” One of the children from scene six lit a torch on top of the pyramid and out of the tomb emerged Ethiopia and Estevancio, followed by Egyptians and Ethiopians. he procession exited the stage to the music of Rosamond Johnson’s “Walk Together Children.”83 In “he Seven Gits of Ethiopia to America,” Du Bois created an evolutionary picture of black history, using the symbolic rebirth of Ethiopia and Estevancio to signal the heroic achievements of the black race. hrough the pageant form, Du Bois believed that he was integrating black cultural identity into American cultural identity. Du Bois’s pageant was performed on “Negro Day,” November 11, 1921, the day before the closing ceremonies of America’s Making. Matthew Henson, the irst black explorer to reach the North Pole, participated in the pageant dressed in “furs that he wore at the discovery of the pole.” he Chicago Defender hailed the pageant as a success, remarking that “attendants in the various booths who have witnessed the programs of the various races during the exhibit were unanimous in agreeing that hursday’s program surpassed that of all others.”84 At the end of the festival, many African Americans expressed satisfaction with their participation. Jones wrote to John Finley, the president of America’s Making, to express his enthusiasm: “May I take this opportunity to tell you how pleased the colored group was with the whole proceedings of ‘America’s Making.’ We felt that this was the irst time the Negroes have been given a real chance to demonstrate their ability to work out such matters in co-operation with the community as a whole and we feel that you have performed a real service to our country in this demonstration.”85 Working within the parameters of their assigned “honorary immigrant” status, James Weldon Johnson, Eugene Jones, and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that their project was a means to educate the white public about the loyal commitment of African Americans to the nation. Using a wide range of visual culture to create new self-representations, the organizers situated blacks as at the core of the American past by virtue of their economic and cultural contributions.

Conclusion In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that “the shadow of a mighty Negro past lits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.”86 his situating of the African American past on the continent of Africa reveals a

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concerted efort to assert the primacy and signiicance of black culture from ancient times. Ethiopia emerged at the nexus of African Americans’ intense interest in Egypt as well as in Ethiopia as essential ingredients in shaping racial consciousness and in creating a positive and profound history. In order to fulill the desire for a future in American society, the past had to be excavated for signs of the important position of blacks in the creation of civilization. his quest to assert African Americans’ signiicance in the larger context of world history is at the core of Fuller’s conceptualization; she engaged in the construction of a new and powerful image of blackness. A paradox is evident, however, in Fuller’s conception and exhibition of Ethiopia: the style and content of the sculpture asserted a Pan-African program while the exhibition of the work revealed the desire for blacks to prove their “Americanness” through participation in a civic nationalist event. hrough their involvement in the America’s Making Exposition, Johnson, Du Bois, and others declared and legitimized their place in the long history of those who helped to build America. hese men saw the festival, pageant, and Fuller’s sculpture as a means to rewrite the narrative of race and nation so that they could be perceived as productive citizens as well as worthy of inclusion. hey read Ethiopia as “a symbolic statue of the emancipation of a race”— emancipation not just from the literal bondage of slavery but emancipation to redeine oneself and assert one’s value to society. In the twenty-irst century, Ethiopia prevails as a powerful symbol because it importantly locates black history in time and space, and it continues to epitomize the soul and selfdetermination of the peoples of the African Diaspora.

Notes 1. Meta Warrick Fuller, transcript of interview with Sylvia G. L. Dannett, April 7 and 8, 1964, Sylvia G. L. Dannett Papers, Archives, Heritage Hall, Livingstone College, Salisbury, NC (hereater Dannett Papers); and he Book of America’s Making Exposition, 71st Regiment Armory New York, October 29–November 12, 1921 (New York: City and State Departments of Education, 1921), unpaginated. 2. David Driskell, “he Flowering of the Harlem Renaissance: he Art of Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, and William H. Johnson,” in Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, exh. cat. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem and Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 108; Judith Wilson, “Hagar’s Daughters: Social History, Cultural Heritage, and AfroU.S. Women’s Art,” in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, exh. cat. (New York: Spelman College and Rizzoli International Publications, 1996), 104–6; Richard Powell, “Re/Birth of a Nation,” in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery and the Institute of International Visual

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Arts; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 18; Pauline de Souza, “Black Awakening: Gender and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance,” in Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy Deepwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 55–69; and Stacey Williams, “Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Pan-Africanist Feminism in Ethiopia Awakening,” PART: Journal of the CUNY PhD Program in Art History, vol. 6, www.web.gc.cuny.edu/ ArtHistory/part/part6/index.html. 3. See Benjamin Brawley, he Negro Genius (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1937), 188; and Leslie King-Hammond and Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, hree Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, 1996), 21. 4. New York Evening Mail, October 29, 1921, 6. 5. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 71. See also John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 234–63; Eric Foner, he Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 185–93; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 81–127; Desmond King, “Making Americans: Immigration Meets Race,” in Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, ed. Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 143–72; and Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 85–123. 6. Ilana Abramovitch, “America’s Making Exposition and Festival (New York, 1921): Immigrant Gits on the Altar of America (Multiculturalism)” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1996), 171. 7. he race riots occurred, in part, to mounting tensions over jobs and housing between African Americans and immigrant workers in northern factories. See David W. Southern, he Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2005), 182–93; and Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: he Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), 252–75. 8. Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: he Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98. 9. 1929 Nomination Blank for William E. Harmon Awards for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes, Meta Warrick Fuller File, Harmon Foundation Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Judith Nina Kerr, “God-Given Work: he Life and Times of Sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1877–1968” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1986), 18–20 and 27–32; Winifred and Frances Kirkland, Girls Who Became Artists (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1934), 49; and H. Harrison Wayman, “Meta Vaux Warrick (Sculptress),” Colored American Magazine 6, no. 5 (March 1903): 328. 10. he 21st Annual Report of the Trustees with the List of Members for the Year Ending December 31, 1896 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts, 1897), 34; he 22nd Annual Report of the Trustees with the List of Members for the Year Ending December 31, 1897 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts, 1898),

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33; and he 23rd Annual Report of the Trustees with the List of Members for the 18 months Ending May 31, 1899 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts, 1899), 34 and 44. All citations from the Meta Warrick Fuller File, Arts and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, he New York Public Library, New York, NY (hereater Fuller File). 11. Betsy Fahlman, “he Art Spirit in the Classroom: Educating the Modern Woman Artist,” in American Women Modernists: he Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910–1945, ed. Marian Wardle (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Museum of Art in association with Rutgers University Press, 2005), 93. 12. Erica E. Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940 (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 72; Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 26–27. 13. Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late NineteenthCentury Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 70–104; Gabriel P. Weisberg, “he Women of the Académie Julian: he Power of Professional Emulation,” in Overcoming All Obstacles: he Women of the Académie Julian, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jane R. Becker (New York: Dahesh Museum in association with Rutgers University Press, 1999), 13–67; and Clive Holland, “Student Life in the Quartier Latin, Paris,” Studio 27, no. 115 (October 1902): 38–39. 14. Meta Warrick Fuller, transcript of interview with Sylvia G. L. Dannett, April 7–8, 1964, p. 14, Dannett Papers and Florence Lewis Bentley, “Meta Warrick a Promising Sculptor,” Voice of the Negro 4 (March 1907): 117. 15. Swinth, Painting Professionals, 40. 16. Katherine Solender, he American Way in Sculpture 1890–1930 (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1986), 4; Ilene Susan Fort, “he Cult of Rodin and the Birth of Modernism in America,” in he Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, ed. Ilene Susan Fort (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 1995), 23–53. 17. Wayman, “Meta Vaux Warrick (Sculptress),” 330–31. See also William Francis O’Donnell, “Meta Vaux Warrick, Sculptor of Horrors: he Negro Girl Whose Productions Are Being Compared to Rodin’s,” World To-Day 13, no. 5 (November 1907): 1139; “he Remarkable Art of a Negro Girl,” Literary Digest, November 23, 1907, n.p., Fuller File; “A Negress Sculptor’s Gruesome Art,” Current Literature 44, no. 1 (January 1908): 57; and Benjamin Brawley, “Meta Warrick Fuller,” Southern Workman 47 (January 1918): 26–28. 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, “he Talented Tenth,” in he Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day (1903; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 33–75. 19. “Negro Represented in ‘America’s Making,’” New York Age, November 5, 1921. 20. “A Proposed Exhibition and Pageant Illustrating the Part Which the American Negro Has Played in the Making of America,” undated, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (microilm) (hereater Du Bois

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Papers). His version of the sculpture was also described in the brochure “he Part Colored People Have Played in America’s Making,” see Records of the National Urban League, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, series 12, container 3 (hereater Records of the National Urban League). 21. “he Looking Glass,” Crisis 23, no. 1 (November 1921): 29. 22. Meta Warrick Fuller to Mrs. W. P. Hedden, October 5, 1921, Meta Warrick Fuller Papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY (hereater Fuller Papers). 23. he four known versions are (1) the irst sketch, with the let hand at a ninetydegree angle to the igure’s bound legs, known only from photographs; (2) a sixty-seveninch-high plaster igure at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; (3) a bronze cast in the same collection with the let hand moved lush to the igure’s side, an apparent error about which Fuller complained to the foundry, Ostercamp-Mead, in October 1927; and (4) a number of thirteen-inch-high “stone and plaster” casts made in the 1960s as gits for relations. Fuller did not date her works, and no documentation or provenance survives for the versions in the Schomburg Center collection. he earliest surviving photograph of the work appeared in he Book of the America’s Making Exposition in 1921, where she titled the work, Ethiopia. he same photograph was reproduced in the July 1923 issue of Opportunity as Ethiopia Awakening and in the March 1939 issue of Negro History Bulletin as he Awakening of Ethiopia. In 1923, Fuller also exhibited this version at the Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. For detailed discussion of the various casts, see Renée Ater, “Race, Gender, and Nation: Rethinking the Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2000), 157–62. 24. “Excavations in Ethiopia,” Crisis 2, no. 4 (August 1911): 169. See also M. D. Maclean, “African Civilization,” Crisis 1, no. 5 (March 1911): 23–25. 25. Maud Cuney Hare, “Ethiopian Art,” Crisis 22, no. 6 (October 1921): 259. 26. Scott Traton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 175–76. 27. De Souza, “Black Awakening: Gender and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance,” 64. 28. See George Hart, he Legendary Past: Egyptian Myths (Austin: University of Texas Press in co-operation with British Museum Publications, 1990), 29–37, 42–45, and Barbara S. Lesko, he Great Goddesses of Egypt (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 155–202. 29. Lesko, he Great Goddesses of Egypt, 179. 30. De Souza, “Black Awakening: Gender and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance,” 64. 31. Ibid. 32. Meta Warrick Fuller to Freeman Henry Morris Murray, February 8, 1915, Freeman Henry Morris Murray Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC (hereater Murray Papers). 33. Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Washington, DC: Murray Brothers, 1916), 137–38.

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34. Melissa Dabakis, “Ain’t I a Woman? Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and the Iconography of Emancipation,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conlict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 92. 35. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, 140. 36. “America’s Making: A Festival and Exhibit,” Flyer, Du Bois Papers; “Outline of Scope of Exhibit,” People’s Institute Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY, box 20 (hereater People’s Institute Records); and “America’s Making Inc., Financial Statement for August 31st, 1921,” John Huston Finley Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY, box 51 (hereater Finley Papers). 37. “Foreword,” in he Book of America’s Making Exposition, unpaginated. 38. Abramovitch, “America’s Making Exposition and Festival (New York, 1921),” 14–28. For information on immigrants and assimilation and the interplay between ethnic unity and national identity, see John Higham, Send hese to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 175–232; and Arthur Mann, “From Immigration to Acculturation,” in Making America: he Society and Culture of the United States, ed. Luther S. Luedtke (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 68–82. 39. “Foreword,” in he Book of America’s Making Exposition, unpaginated. 40. “Our Organization,” in he Book of America’s Making Exposition, unpaginated; and “33 Groups to Show America’s Making,” New York Times, October 9, 1921. 41. “Where America-Making is a Regular Business,” in he Book of America’s Making Exposition, unpaginated. See also “12 Schools in Pageant: America’s Making Performance to Include 2,200 Pupils,” New York Times, October 9, 1921; “33 Groups to Show America’s Making,” New York Times, October 9, 1921; and “3,000 Pupils in Pageant,” New York Times, November 8, 1921. 42. “High School Art Aids Pageant,” New York Times, October 30, 1921. 43. “America’s Making: Memorandum of Understanding with Racial Groups,” December 20, 1920; and “Financial Arrangements—America’s Making,” People’s Institute Records. 44. “America’s Making,” lyer, Finley Papers. See also Allen H. Eaton, Immigrant Gits to American Life: Some Experiments in Appreciation of the Contributions of Our Foreign-born Citizens to American Culture (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1932), 87–91. 45. John Daniels, “America’s Making: A Festival and Exhibit of hree Centuries of Immigrant Contributions to Our National Life,” 1, People’s Institute Records. 46. Ibid., 5–6. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Leona Block, ed., “Covering Industrial Motion Pictures of Educational Value. Industrial Movies at ‘America’s Making’ Exposition,” Flyer, Records of the National Urban League. 49. “Exhibit Suggestions,” America’s Making News, July 20, 1921, Records of the National Urban League. 50. Abramovitch, “America’s Making Exposition and Festival (New York, 1921),” 42. 51. “Festival Features,” America’s Making News, July 20, 1921, Records of the National Urban League; “Pageant Pictures America’s Making,” New York Times, October 30, 1921; and “Other Cities Want America’s Making,” New York Times, November 13, 1921. For a detailed description of the pageants, see Abramovitch, “America’s Making Exposition and Festival (New York, 1921),” 57–80.

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52. Daniels, “America’s Making: A Festival and Exhibit of hree Centuries of Immigrant Contributions to Our National Life,” 4–5. 53. “Schools Play Big Part in America’s Making: Pageants of People Will Form a Striking Feature of Programme of Great Civic Festival at 71st Infantry Armory,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 29, 1921. 54. “President Praises ‘America’s Making,’” New York Times, October 16, 1921. 55. “Hylan Praises the Melting Pot,” New York Times, October 21, 1921. 56. “Pageant Pictures America’s Making,” New York Times, October 30, 1921. 57. “Clash Over America’s Making,” New York Times, November 1, 1921. 58. “Old Dutch Decline 3rd Place in Show,” New York Times, October 21, 1921. 59. “Seek Funds for Pageant. Exhibitors to Show England’s Part in ‘America’s Making,’” New York Times, October 23, 1921. 60. “Our Debt to Spain,” New York Times, October 26, 1921. 61. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, “To the Editor,” New York Times, October 29, 1921. See also Kathlyne Knickerbocker Viele, “To the Editor,” New York Times, October 31, 1921. 62. Victor Daly to W. E. B. Du Bois, May 23, 1921, Du Bois Papers. 63. James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews: ‘America’s Making’ and the Colored People,” New York Age, August 20, 1921. 64. “Matt Henson and Other Artists in Historic Pageant,” Chicago Defender, November 19, 1921, 3. 65. “Lane Says Our Men Will Crush Kaiser; Tells Americanization Congress Coming Big Causality Lists Will Rouse the Nation,” New York Times, April 4, 1918; “To Ask Federal Aid in Americanization; Secretary Lane Tells Meeting of Plan to Concentrate Work in Bureau of Education,” New York Times, January 19, 1919; “Survey of Methods of Americanization,” New York Times, February 2, 1919; “Lane Again to Urge Reconstruction Bills,” New York Times, March 6, 1919; and “Americanization,” New York Times, April 20, 1919. 66. Department of the Interior, American, Americanism, Americanization: Containing Americanization Speech of Hon Franklin K. Lane at Hotel Astor, New York; Copy of SmithBankhead Americanization Bill; Americanization Extract from Annual Report of Secretary Lane (Washington, DC: Government Printing Oice, 1919), 1–19. 67. Ibid., 14; and “Americanization,” Crisis 17, no. 6 (April 1919): 292. 68. “Americanization,” Crisis 17, no. 6 (April 1919): 292. 69. For a discussion of the climate of the time, see Rayford W. Logan, he Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (1954; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997). 70. “Opinion—‘America’s Making,’” Crisis 23, no. 1 (November 1921): 11. 71. “Americans of Negro Lineage” in he Book of America’s Making Exposition, unpaginated. 72. Johnson, “Views and Reviews: ‘America’s Making’ and the Colored People.” 73. Ibid. 74. Block, “Covering Industrial Motion Pictures of Educational Value,” Records of the National Urban League. 75. “Race to Be Represented at Coming Celebration,” Chicago Defender, November 12, 1921.

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76. “Plan of the Exhibit,” Records of the National Urban League. 77. Ibid. 78. “he Part Colored People Have Played in America’s Making,” Records of the National Urban League. 79. Ibid. 80. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: he Use of Tradition in Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1, 132. 81. W. E. B. Du Bois, “he Drama among Black People,” Crisis 12, no. 4 (August 1916): 171. 82. “A Proposed Exhibition and Pageant Illustrating the Part Which the American Negro Has Played in the Making of America,” Du Bois Papers. 83. Ibid. 84. “Matt Henson and Other Artists in Historic Pageant,” Chicago Defender, November 19, 1921, 3. 85. Eugene Kinckle Jones to John Huston Finley, November 23, 1921, Finley Papers. 86. W. E. B Du Bois, Soul of Black Folks, in hree Negro Classics (1903; reprint, New York: A Discus Book, Published by Avon Books, 1965), 217.

Chapter FOur

LAURA WHEELER WARING AND THE WOMEN ILLUSTRATORS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Amy Helene Kirschke

he Harlem Renaissance era ofered unprecedented opportunities for women artists, and the new African American magazines of the time were the best prospect for women to publish their work. he Crisis magazine, founded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910, and Opportunity Magazine, founded by the Urban League in 1923, were the two largest national journals where African American women were employed as freelance illustrators. he Crisis would become the journal most open to women illustrators, largely due to its founding editor, W. E. B. Du Bois. While Opportunity also employed women illustrators, it was to a much lesser degree. Founding editor and sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson was committed to the arts, but focused more on literature than the visual arts at Opportunity. Other prominent black journals of the time, such as the weekly newspaper, the Baltimore Afro-American, which began publication in 1892, regularly included political cartoons and drawings during the Harlem Renaissance years, but did not regularly feature the work of women artists.

he Crisis W. E. B. Du Bois, founding editor of the Crisis, the irst signiicant national African American magazine, used art, drawings, cartoons, and photography—an African American visual vocabulary—to elucidate the most important issues of the day. he Crisis was an integral part of the struggle to combat 85

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American racism. Du Bois, who helped found the NAACP, came to New York in the summer of 1910 to take the position of director of publicity and research for the organization and to assume the role of editor for the journal, which debuted in November. Du Bois would remain in this position until the summer of 1934. From his irst days as editor, Du Bois employed women illustrators to help express the journal’s agenda. Under his direction, women artists played a prominent leadership role in the magazine’s eforts to bring about social justice for African Americans. Du Bois had some previous experience as an editor for the journals Moon and Horizon between 1906 and 1910. But this endeavor would be diferent. Du Bois intended to make the Crisis the principal crusading voice for civil rights on a national scale. Created at the height of the Jim Crow era, the magazine would speak to black Americans who had been disenfranchised and were struggling to improve their marginalized status. Southern blacks were still largely relegated to agricultural and service positions, with limited opportunities to receive an adequate education. Black Americans lived in a land plagued by white terror, with lynchings still common in the South and racial discrimination the pattern throughout the United States. As editor of the Crisis magazine, Du Bois would attempt to address many concerns, using the journal as a means of racial uplit—celebrating the joys and hopes of African American culture and life—and as a tool to address the injustices black Americans experienced—the sorrows of persistent discrimination and racial terror, especially the crime of lynching. he written word was not suicient—visual imagery was central to bringing the message to the homes of readers and emphasizing the importance of the cause. Some of Du Bois’s most important illustrators were African American women. Du Bois greatly admired women on an intellectual and personal level. Du Bois placed political cartoons, drawings, photographs, and prints on the covers and through the pages of the Crisis. But they were diferent from images of African Americans in other magazines. Du Bois’s images were from a black perspective, almost entirely created by black artists, who were connected to the importance of the causes addressed in the journal. he art was digniied and respectful and exuded race pride. he more tragic images were direct and graphic in their ability to express the violence that African Americans faced in daily life. Not only were women artists employed by the Crisis, but women were also oten featured on the pages of Crisis to express emotion, sorrow, the sufering experienced by the black race. Du Bois was always interested in issues of African American identity, but how would visuals aid in the development of a stronger black identity? And how could visuals in Crisis help deine a collective memory for his black readership, a memory that Du

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Bois believed had been seized and largely shaped by a white-dominated culture? Visuals, with or without text, might aid in the establishment of a greater African American identity, a collective identity that had been denied them by the ravages of slavery and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction. Du Bois, a lifelong proponent of social justice, including issues particularly important to women, not only utilized women artists and writers regularly, but also worked closely with associate editor and collaborator Jessie Fauset, to make sure that women’s issues were properly represented on the pages of the Crisis magazine. he Philadelphia-born novelist Fauset was a Cornell graduate, elected to Phi Beta Kappa and started to pen the “What to Read” section of the Crisis beginning in March 1912, among other contributions. Fauset helped run the magazine when Du Bois fell ill in summer 1916 from kidney stones. Fauset also edited Du Bois’s he Brownies’ Book, which was created for African American children, and of course, also appealed to the Crisis’s female readership. Never before had African American women been employed in the visual arts in such a politically meaningful and visible way. Women artists in the Crisis included Vivien Schuyler, the editor’s daughter Yolanda Du Bois, Hilda Wilkinson, Louise Latimer, Gwendolyn Bennett (also a contributing writer), Joyce Carrington, Celeste Smith, Billie Ellis, Eie Lee Newsome (who edited and was a contributing writer for the children’s page), Eleanor Paul, and by far the most proliic contributor, Laura Wheeler Waring. Du Bois was a strong advocate of women’s rights, including economic rights, the right to vote and reproductive rights, which he called the “right of motherhood at her own discretion.”1 Du Bois’s commitment to women went beyond that of solely African American women; as a strong advocate of the Pan-African movement, he saw the strength in all women of African descent. his commitment to women of color can be seen in Du Bois’s writings separate from the Crisis magazine. He wrote in Blackwater, published in 1920, of the oppression of women in Western societies: “Our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them . . . we have still our poverty and degradation, our lewdness and our cruel toil; but we have, too, a vast group of women of Negro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, and unselish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group of women in the civilized world. And more than that, in the great rank and ile of our ive million women we have the up-working of new revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast inluence on the thought and action of this land.”2 His writings and the art he included on the pages of the Crisis spoke to the hard work of women of African descent, their importance in the community. Du Bois, a man known for his appreciation of beautiful women, which is carefully documented in

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David Levering Lewis’s two-volume biography, noted the beauty of African American women. “I honor the women of my race. heir beauty, —their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes, crumpled hair, and sot, full-features . . . No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain.” Du Bois hoped to bring tribute to women of African origin, women he believed the white world enjoyed insulting and ridiculing, women who sufered in silence. He proclaimed, “none have I known more sweetly feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black mothers.”3 Much of Du Bois’s work addressed the need to reclaim a lost history; thus, he dealt directly with issues of identity and memory. Du Bois realized that visuals could greatly aid him in the development of his audience and in better expressing the political and social issues of the day. He used original artwork, cartoons, drawings, and photography to support editorials and essays on the questions of his day: lynching, war, education, women and children, labor, racism and prejudice, and a new relationship to Africa. He used the covers of the Crisis to entice readers to open the issue and explore the contents; visuals could tell a more poignant story to his audience. In 1903, Du Bois stated that the Negro race (like all races) “is going to be saved by its exceptional men. . . . Can the masses of the Negro people be in any way more quickly raised than by the efort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture ilters.”4 Du Bois believed that only the best and the brightest of the race could and should lead the race into the twentieth century, the “Talented Tenth,” and that part of its duty was to propagate high culture. Art in the Crisis was a part of that process, part of the expression of the “Talented Tenth,” serving to educate from the top down. “We black folk may help for we have within us as a race new stirrings; stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be; as though in this morning of group life we had awakened from some sleep that at once dimly mourns the past and dreams a splendid future; and there has come the conviction that the youth that is here today, the Negro youth, is a diferent kind of youth. With a new realization of itself, with new determination for all mankind.”5 Du Bois’s goal of helping his community remember its past took place in a social environment that was hostile to that project. As Mitch Kachun has noted, “During the generation ater the 1870s, black Americans concerned with the race’s historical memory grew increasingly frustrated by their

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inability to alter white America’s racial ideology or whites’ refusal to acknowledge the black presence in the nation’s history and culture.”6 Yet Du Bois knew that keeping memory of the past, including that of the Civil War, alive within the black community and among progressive whites was a primary tool in the ight against racism and oppression. Du Bois did not want the pain of the past to overshadow hope for the future; he wanted the lessons of the past to be applied to the harsh realities of the present. he Crisis was the primary tool for such an endeavor. Du Bois made sure that the Crisis served as a patron by ofering prizes in the visual arts both through its own contests, and by promoting other contests, such as those sponsored by the Harmon Foundation. his encouraged the creation of a black arts aesthetic. In February 1927 Du Bois listed several prizes, including an award for “cartoons” totaling $250 in prizes. his prize required that the cartoons be done in black and white, drawn on regular illustration board, and must be about banking and insurance among American Negroes. he NAACP’s Amy Spingarn also ofered prizes for Crisis covers, totaling $260 for black and white illustrations. he drawings “must have some reference to colored people—that is: they must portray colored faces or suggest allusions to the history, art or experience of colored peoples.”7 hrough the Crisis Du Bois sponsored art and literature, by supporting foundations, creating prizes with help of patrons like the Spingarns, and supporting both known and unknown artists through his extensive correspondence. Along with a select few, including Alain Locke, Du Bois became one of the great patrons of the Harlem Renaissance movement. With his patronage, Du Bois tried to control what would be included in this movement, by recommending some artists, such as Elizabeth Prophet and Richmond Barthé, and excluding others, including the sculptor Augusta Savage and poet Georgia Douglas, neither of whom, he felt, were ready yet to represent the race.8 Du Bois demanded excellence in the submissions for all these prizes. “Do not however enter carelessly and send us half-inished matter. Take it seriously and do your best. We want to eliminate in this contest the halfinterested triler who sends ill-digested, carelessly written manuscripts and thus distracts needed attention from serious artists.”9 He also stated “we trust that all entrants will remember that the prizes are the least valuable part of a prize contest. he great object of these contests is to stimulate efort, set a standard of taste and enable persons to discover in themselves capabilities . . . the renaissance of Negro art is only begun. Ater the irst wild lush of new freedom, we must settle down to laborious, thoughtful, meticulously inished work, built on a real foundation of knowledge and taste. his is the object of the Crisis prizes.”10

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Du Bois was concerned about the plight of the women artists who worked at the journal. He knew their opportunities for training and patrons were even scarcer than for their male counterparts. Most American artists who hoped for proper training during this time went to Paris to study. his was diicult for a woman to engineer. hey had few opportunities to exhibit their work or to receive payment for their art. He cited sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller as an example of an artist who had recently created a beautiful piece of work for the better of the black race, even though she was not paid for her work. With little opportunity for training and sales, the plight of the African American woman artist was a lonely one. hose who were fortunate enough to study abroad also faced discrimination; when Meta Fuller went abroad to study she was denied access to a women’s youth hostel in Paris due to her race. Artists like Fuller who ultimately combined career with motherhood (she had three children) found that society did not support a woman with a career and a family. She found her ability to sell her work a constant struggle; her health sufered working in a small space with marble dust and poor ventilation. Initially, Fuller resisted advice from Du Bois to create works about her own race, she found it too limiting. Ultimately, she turned to her race and womanhood as a primary inspiration for her career. Other artists faced similar challenges as Fuller: sculptor May Howard Jackson did not receive adequate compensation for her portrait busts. Artists like the sculptor Elizabeth Prophet, whom Du Bois spotlighted in the Crisis December 1929 issue, had sacriiced their own wealth and health for the good of these goals, to make a black art for a black audience. Prophet was so poor and frail while studying in Paris, it compromised her ability to sculpt. Prophet struggled with a lack of support from her parents, who hoped she would marry and have a family. Women illustrators in the Crisis and Opportunity did not provide political cartoons. Just like their white counterparts, political cartoons were usually created by male artists. While some women illustrators provided illustrations that dealt with more controversial issues, this occurred more frequently in radical journals such as the Masses. Issues of women’s sufrage, racism, gender discrimination, labor, and war were addressed by white women on the pages of the Masses.11

he Artists and heir Subjects Little is known about the artists who illustrated for the Crisis, although a few women artists life and body of art are well documented. Painter Laura

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Wheeler, born in Hartford, Connecticut, was Du Bois’s most frequently featured woman artist on the pages of the magazine. Laura Wheeler, who changed her name to Laura Wheeler Waring ater her marriage, was the daughter and granddaughter of ministers. Wheeler recalled that even as a young child she delighted in visiting the art galleries of Hartford, not only for the joy of an outing but also because she loved the painting, the color, the beauty of the galleries. She always loved to paint and draw, and her parents oten joined their children in these activities. Both her parents, especially her mother, had some artistic talent. Wheeler was dedicated to becoming the best artist she could possibly be and pursued that dream tenaciously. She received teacher training at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers at the State Normal School in Cheyney, Pennsylvania.12 When the family fell on hard times, Laura took responsibility for the younger children. She needed to work and this took away from her chance to paint. Summers were spent studying “the teaching of drawing” at Harvard and Columbia, among other places. In 1924 Wheeler made her second trip of three to Europe and went to France to study painting with Boutet de Monvel and Prinet at the wellrespected Academie de la Grand Chaumiere in Paris. Wheeler called this the “only period of uninterrupted life as an artist with an environment and associates that were a constant stimulus and inspiration.”13 She kept in contact with Du Bois while studying in Europe; one letter to him indicates her dissatisfaction with the low pay (and even no pay) for her work that she sent back to the Crisis from Paris. She even met Du Bois for dinner once while he visited Paris.14 Upon her return, she studied under Henry McCarty at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Ater six months of studying at the academy, Wheeler won a Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which allowed her to spend three months in Paris to “study in the great galleries of Europe.”15 In 1927, at the urging of friends, she submitted her work to the Harmon Foundation for an award and listed Henry O. Tanner as a reference on her application. She won a irst-place Harmon Foundation medal and a prize award of $400 that year, followed by a bronze medal from the Harmon Foundation in 1930. Wheeler wrote to a supporter that this was the busiest time of her life. For six months, she studied and worked on her art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, usually seven days a week. Wheeler was interested in furthering the chances of other artists to receive support and patronage from organizations such as the Harmon Foundation. She wrote to William E. Harmon in January 1928 to express her deep gratitude for the chance she had been given by the foundation. She emphasized the important impact these awards had on the artists and explained that she was writing him “only to testify that these results are real.” She explained to

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Harmon that she had spent so much time teaching to support herself that she had little opportunity to devote herself to her art. But the Harmon Foundation award had given her “this stamp of approval on my work. I have the assurance to decide to give up nearly all of my teaching next year and devote the major part of my time to painting.” Waring reassured Harmon that she planned to make a record of “interesting characters of the American Negro in paint” and that she had been invited to bring the exhibit to Paris when it was inished. She hoped to use the exhibit to “create more interest in inter-racial identity.”16 Wheeler’s work was exhibited in such notable locations as the New York Water Color Club, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the Chicago Art Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at numerous private venues. Wheeler faced the same problems that all African American artists encountered in the United States during these decades, that of inding funding and patronage to support her training and work. In a reference letter for a Guggenheim Fellowship, supporter Dr. George Haynes wrote that Waring had “become more enthusiastic about the idea of devoting more time and attention to the searching out and portrayal of Negro types” ater winning the Harmon Gold Award. Haynes explained to the committee that Waring’s main handicap was the fact that she had to spend most of her time teaching. “I believe a year or two with freedom to travel and see various Negro types, with time to devote her undivided time and energy to painting them, would give outlet to her ambition in this direction and doubtless result in some permanent contribution to the Fine Arts.”17 During Du Bois’s years as editor, Wheeler’s work appeared frequently on the pages of the Crisis, oten providing the journal portraits of women or children and drawings of African life. She also did several depictions of the holy family, the magi and Christmas-inspired covers. She did not contribute political cartoons. Some art in the Crisis stood alone; Wheeler’s art usually illustrated a particular essay or poem. Her work accompanied the writings of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Rudolph Fisher, James Weldon Johnson, and Jessie Fauset, among others and was featured on the pages of the Crisis at least twenty times on covers and inside the magazine between November 1917 and January 1932. Laura Wheeler Waring provided a drawing that accompanied a James Weldon Johnson poem, “to America” in November 1917. Wheeler’s drawing featured six youthful igures in classical chitons or togas around a statue. Such igures were typically used to symbolize white European high culture, but these igures are black. Johnson’s poem is superimposed on the image. One of her more memorable images was placed on the February 1924 cover. his cover was unusual for Wheeler and for any woman artist of the

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.. Laura Wheeler, February 1924, “Lest We Forget.”

Crisis, because it was not a piece meant to aesthetically please, it referenced lynching. Women illustrators in both journals did not provide political cartoons or illustrations that tended to address the more diicult aspects of African American life. his issue was an exception. he cover of the issue was dedicated to the memory of lynching victims. Laura Wheeler provided “Lest We Forget” (ig. 4.1). he title lanks either side of the illustration, and the lettering is meant to resemble woodblock letters in the arts and crats style. he illustration is framed in a simple black outline and contains the image of Abraham Lincoln in silhouette, shown deep in thought. Lincoln faces several Klansmen, including a crowned Ku Klux Klan member whose skeleton hands reach from his long white robe. his Klansman holds a scepter in his let hand and a small igure of a lynched black man dangles from his right hand. A woman in a black robe bends in half, overcome with grief, at the feet of Lincoln, her hands covering her face. It is the woman who is used by Wheeler to express the full sorrow of the lynching. he desire to connect Africa to America can be seen in Laura Wheeler’s “Africa in America” of June 1924 (ig. 4.2), which demonstrates her knowledge

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.. Laura Wheeler, June 1924, “Africa in America.”

of Egyptian art. She uses a torso in the Amarna style of the Eighteenth Dynasty of traditional Egyptian art as the inspiration for her shapely igure, a common prototype in New Kingdom sculpture. In typical Amarna-style sculptures, the sculpted fabric clings to the woman’s body, revealing her pubic triangle.18 In Wheeler’s cover art, the folds are not prominent, but the diaphanous garment reveals her body in the shape of the curvaceous Amarna-style sculpture, and her pubic triangle is drawn in. he numerous bracelets are not typically Egyptian, nor is her necklace, which is not the usual broad collar piece. he strands of beads around her neck are not necessarily Egyptian. Wheeler combines diferent elements of African art and is not true to one style. In her characteristic black-and-white style, with only a few details of the human form, Wheeler creates a voluptuous woman, clad with a sheer garment that reveals all the lines of her body as if she were nude, adorned with jewelry including wrist and armbands, earrings, necklaces, and a ceremonial headpiece. he

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woman carries a covered urn on her shoulder. Wheeler could have taken the woman’s position not only from a Ptolemaic statue, but from Jean Dominique Ingres’s painting La Source, completed in 1856 and available to Wheeler while she studied in Paris. he position could also have come from Roman statues of water nymphs, which provided the inspiration for Ingres’s La Source. Behind her the pattern of the swirling ocean is formed with a ship crossing in full sail, a symbol of the Middle Passage and the long and harrowing journey from Africa to slavery in the Americas. he igure is strong and erect, proud and lovely. She is a symbol of Africans brought to America against their will who still retain their African heritage.19 Wheeler’s use of the iconography of Egyptian art to represent Africa was not unusual. An interest in Egypt greatly increased with the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in November 1922. As Americans became fascinated with Egypt, Du Bois reiterated the tie between Egypt and African Americans. A pyramid, a sphinx, or an Egyptian king were a large part of the visual vocabulary of Africa, a language familiar to readers of Crisis. Du Bois would note in Black Folk: hen and Now—An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1939) that northern European scholars had slowly forced upon the study of the interaction of Greece and Africa “A racist paradigm elevating Aryan culture as the source of ancient civilization.”20 Africa, via Egypt, was the key and could be seen as the home of Western civilization. Du Bois became a revisionist historian and encouraged his artists to drive home this point. Du Bois embraced the concept of the black Athena as part of his larger mission to shape a black identity whose origins were the triumph and civilization of Egypt rather than the barbarism of slavery. Martin Bernal’s assertion that the Greek goddess Athena had black or African origins, and that Greek culture was ultimately African or Semitic, is in line with Du Bois’s assertions in the early twentieth century of the African origins of Western civilization, a view he conveyed on the pages of the Crisis.21 Wheeler’s cover also connected to a long article in which Du Bois discussed the opportunities available to black Americans who wanted to migrate to Africa. He noted that the Crisis periodically received requests from readers who sought advice concerning such migration. Here Du Bois recognized the hardships connected to emigration. He discouraged his readers from emigrating, including those who hoped for work, since Africa had an abundance of skilled and unskilled laborers. “here is a magniicent chance for pioneers but the point is, pioneering is a far diferent thing from going to work in a fully developed land,” he wrote. Liberia needed professionals—physicians, dentists, and nurses. he “spiritual harvest of practical missionary work would in the end be far greater than we can now dream.” Du Bois also noted how polite

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.. Laura Wheeler, April 1923, “Egypt-Spring.”

the “natives” were to each other, both young and old. “I have oten thought, when I see the awkward and ignorant missionaries sometimes sent to teach the heathen, that it would be an excellent thing if a few natives could be sent here to teach manners to black and white.”22 he theme of Spring was usually featured on every April cover of the Crisis. Wheeler provided several of these themed illustrations, including the covers in April of 1923, 1924, 1926, and 1927. he interest and commitment to African issues can be seen in Wheeler’s work as well. he April 1923 cover, “Egypt-Spring” features a young woman, clad from the waist down, her breasts hidden by her arms, playing a harp-like instrument (ig. 4.3). he instrument is also a piece of sculpture, the base forms the head of a igure, and the signs of spring, trees, birds, and lowers (art nouveau papyrus?) line the composition. Harpists were common in Egyptian tomb painting of the

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.. Laura Wheeler, April 1924, “Veil of Spring.”

New Kingdom, especially in banquet scenes for entertainment. he igure’s face, turned toward the viewer at an angle, is not Egyptian, not parallel to the picture plane. She appears to be a contemporary igure, and her attire is not Egyptian. he sparrows that scatter across the composition are also not Egyptian, nor is the art nouveau weeping willow that dangles above her head. he base of the harp shows a bust that wears the red crown, or deshret of Lower Egypt, and a blue lotus forms the base of the neck of the harp, which was typical in Egyptian iconography. he fragrant lotus was a typical accoutrement in the King’s palace. An Egyptian-inspired, deco border circles the composition. Wheeler’s version of Spring in Africa is focused on Egypt, by now considered interchangeable with Africa. Wheeler honors Spring again in the Crisis tradition, with her art-nouveau-inspired cover of April 1924, the “Veil of Spring.” Wheeler’s igures are

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.. Laura Wheeler, September 1924, “The Strength of Africa.”

again in black, creating a dramatic silhouette, with the delicate detail of her signature style enhancing the igure of Spring, tall, winged, and holding a crown of lowers, complete with lowers sprouting from her scalp (ig. 4.4). She holds a crown of spring foliage, emanating from lowers in the tree above, about to be placed on the awakening woman below. he strength of Africa, too, was ofered as a source of inspiration to the readers, in visuals and written form. Another deco-inspired African cover by Wheeler appeared in September 1924, “he Strength of Africa” (ig. 4.5). It shows a muscular (Nubian?) attendant, with an Egyptian-inspired headpiece, the Nemes headdress of a pharaoh, yet he appears to be acting as a servant or attendant in this piece. He sports ankle bracelets, carrying the woman’s wrap and covering and protecting her with his large peacock-feather fan or shade. Peacock feathers were not typically used in Egypt. His garment is not Egyptian. He follows behind her, as she takes her lion for a walk, an unusual scene and not Egyptian in origin. Laura Wheeler developed her own visual vocabulary

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for her composition. he woman sports a headdress derived from an Egyptian queen’s headdress. It is a vague derivation and appears to draw its symbolism from more than one goddess. It is a vulture headdress; the vulture “sits” on her head, the wings extended. here is an exotic, almost “performance” element to the cover, it features a sense of pageantry, and might be described as “Las Vegas” in contemporary terms. he wrap on her body, and her diaphanous wrap that emanates from her bustier-styled top, is not typically Egyptian. he lion is in complete silhouette, she is in proile, with a wrap on her lower body, a see-through wrap on her upper body, and a decorative headpiece in her hair. A rather exotic bustier covers her breasts. She, too, wears ankle bracelets. She again represents an exotic, primitive, decadent style, and she is clearly someone of importance, perhaps royalty. he title “he Strength of Africa” forms the base of the composition and appears to be hand lettered. Wheeler oten served as an illustrator to featured articles and short stories. She illustrated Jessie Fauset’s “Double Trouble” short story in August– September of 1923. When the Crisis ofered lengthy discussions on Africa, either historical or political in nature, Du Bois oten included visuals to accompany the text. Jessie Fauset wrote about “Dark Algiers the White” (Part 1) in the April 1925 issue. he essay was accompanied by Laura Wheeler’s drawings, including one of men and women on the streets of Algiers in traditional dress, placed directly into the text that discussed the life and culture of the country (ig. 4.6). his issue had many diferent essays on Africa, as well as one on “Arabia.” he story is Fauset’s personal account of her visit to Algiers, where she was taken by the overwhelming, washed, white feeling of the country, sun-bleached buildings and beaches, white chalky roads, and even plants covered with sand and dust that made them appear white. Waring provided several drawings for the article, including a town view of traditional Algerian houses and men and women in traditional dress. he story was a frank discussion of the people she met, the disillusion she felt when she took a more careful account of her environment. Fauset described women as “the voluminous garments of the women showed the outline of misshapen bodies, broken and distorted by neglect, abuse and much bearing of children.”23 Fauset’s careful descriptions of the mystery of the place, the preponderance of men everywhere, are echoed in Wheeler’s illustrations of men on the streets of Algiers, and in a separate drawing, women, totally shrouded by their burqas. Wheeler’s illustrations elucidate the more poignant moments of Fauset’s recounting, a visit to the Arab quarter, the poverty, the uncomfortable encounters along with the spectacular vistas. Wheeler ofered several December/January covers for the Crisis, commemorating Christmas in December and Epiphany in January.

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.. Laura Wheeler, April 1925, untitled drawing for essay “Dark Algiers the White.”

Du Bois extended his commitment to publish women illustrators to his own daughter, Yolanda, who was born in 1902. Yolanda was an amateur artist of limited talent. Du Bois included her illustrations in issues in 1922, 1924, and 1925. Her April 1922 “Spring” features a 1920s faerie-lapper contained in a triangle, giant wings that recall lower pedals, breaking out of the triangle (ig. 4.7). A small child (a kewpie doll) stands in the corner of the cover, dressed in her Sunday best. he delicate illustration follows the same style as the work of Laura Wheeler, but without the ine detail and complexity. Yolanda Du Bois provided illustrations for several stories, including one provided by Charles Chestnutt in January 1925. She also created a cover with artist Billie Ellis in April 1925.24 Ater Laura Wheeler, painter Vivian Schulyer Key was the most frequently featured woman illustrator during Du Bois’s tenure. Key was born in Hempstead, Long Island, in 1905 and graduated high school with honors, as one of two black graduates, in 1923. She attended Pratt Institute for art training at the

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.. Yolanda Du Bois, April 1922, “Spring.”

considerable sacriice of her family. Key recalled her three years at the Pratt Institute, where she commuted from Hempstead to Brooklyn every morning: “hey were very diicult years, years which I will never forget. I was the only colored person and the poorest one in my class. I was too conscious of my poor clothes and empty pocketbook. I had to forego many lunches for a brush or tube of paint. I was very retiring and very lonely. I loved the work however and did well in my classes, so I never once thought of quitting. I was encouraged by most of my instructors to keep going.”25 Evenings ater school were spent doing her homework by oil lamp, drawing and painting at the big dining-room table. Vivian spent so many sleepless nights working in the cold house that she contracted a series of colds and one severe case of bronchitis from which she never fully recovered. Vivian Schuyler married William Key in 1929. She had little opportunity to paint, although she did design textiles and painted china gits to sell her work. Her husband provided her little support for her career;

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this and her duties as a mother made her eforts to paint even more of a challenge. Key contributed several drawings and covers for Crisis and won the Amy Spingarn Art Award. he Amy Spingarn Art Award was established in 1921 by the Spingarn family and awarded through the Crisis magazine to an artist of “Negro descent, in order to encourage their aptitude for artistic expression.”26 Schuyler Key also exhibited with the Harmon Foundation, an organization that was established in 1922 by a white businessman to recognize achievements by African Americans. he foundation was the irst of its kind to ofer juried exhibitions of African American art. Du Bois saw her work ater being introduced to her by musician Minnie Brown and artist Aaron Douglas. Vivian Schuyler Key hoped to exhibit at the International House annual exhibition in 1930 and thus applied for a Harmon Award for distinguished achievement, hoping it might improve her chances.27 She noted in her International House application letter that she might not appear to be distinguished but that she was capable of doing something “very great.” Her need to make a living, her modest upbringing, and the limits in her training had hampered her eforts, but she was determined to continue. She faced discrimination against her gender and lamented that it was her “misfortune to be born a girl, a thing which I have regretted even though I have recently married.”28 She and her sisters were excellent students; her sister Elizabeth was the irst African American to graduate from Adelphi College in Brooklyn, where she was the only black. Her other sister, who wanted to be a doctor, became a nurse due to lack of funding for medical school. She noted that she and her sisters were not known; they had “worked too hard to spare the time to make ourselves known and we have done the kind of work through which no one ever becomes known.” Her greatest desire was to please her hardworking mother and to become a success in her mother’s eyes. Key was a respected artist among the small circle of illustrators working for the Crisis. She provided numerous images of children for the journal’s annual “Children’s Number” and provided covers of New Year’s, winter, illustrations for stories, and a few Africa-inspired illustrations. Perhaps her most important cover (ig. 4.8) was described by the journal as a drawing entered in the Crisis’s Krigwa contest, November 1927, Du Bois’s pet theater project, which was oten featured in the journal. he drawing is accompanied by the song “Lit Every Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson as a poem, the music provided by his brother. Part of the irst verse accompanies the art: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on ’til victory is won.

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.. Vivian Schuyler Key, November 1927, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Key’s image acknowledges the past and has hope for the future. Her central igure, a woman of African descent, holds her arms out, her hands open, while she appears to be in song. She is dressed in a gown held up by a large necklace, bare feet, her hair partially covered in a cap. Her face, sun drenched, looks forward; she is surrounded by four other igures, including a man in pants and suspenders, a woman carrying a pitcher and bowl on her head, a hooded woman and a man, possibly a shepherd. She is hope personiied. Her frontispiece, “he Library Hour” in February 1928, features two young women with books in their laps, nicely dressed with twenties cloche hats adorning their heads; one young woman is reading with great concentration, while one pauses, looks up, and smiles at the viewer, as if we have just entered the reading room at the library (ig. 4.9). Here the artist is not only

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.. Vivian Schuyler Key, September 1928, “The Library Hour.”

stressing their beauty, but they are women who are bright and their comfort in their setting, books in their laps, show that they frequent the library and enjoy reading. Similarly, Key’s “Mid-Winter” of January 1929 shows welldressed middle-class churchgoers on their way home, a woman in a clock, and pictured in the background, a husband, wife, and children, followed by other parishioners. Her work was more of a straightforward record of middle-class black life than Waring’s, whose work was more decorative and fanciful. Laura Waring wasn’t the only woman illustrator to turn to Egypt for inspiration: several of the Crisis artists also employed Egyptian iconography in their work. Among them is Joyce Carrington, whose September 1928 cover of a woman in an African setting is complete with palm tree, pyramid, and African necklace (Egypt and Africa are interchangeable here); her “Egyptian” also sports a very 1920s hairstyle and what appears to be a string of beads,

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.. Joyce Carrington, September 1928, Untitled.

typical for a “lapper’s” attire (ig. 4.10). She is a symbol of modern Africa, a universal woman of the Diaspora. Her 1920s contemporary styling makes her accessible and familiar to Crisis readers. Carrington’s work, which was printed using accents of bright jade green, was meant to entice the potential reader with an attractive image that would encourage the reader to pick up the issue and look inside. Celeste Smith includes her deco-inluenced drawing inside the January 1929 issue, “Excelsior,” which shows a nude igure, arms reaching out, balancing on the world, standing on an outline of the continent of Africa (ig. 4.11). he inluence of Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas is obvious. Smith, who is clearly aware of modernist art trends, employs cubistorphist/synthetist-inspired rays of light to accentuate the igure. Two rays of light intersect to spotlight the igure, providing bright, white light behind

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.. Celeste Smith, January 1929, “Excelsior.”

the body. he body appears with two “shadows” behind it, in three diferent shades, surely indicating the many colors of African peoples, a Pan-Africanist touch. he African American women illustrators did provide art for smaller magazines and newspapers, but their contributions were rare. Ater the Crisis, Opportunity employed the most black women illustrators.

Opportunity In 1923 the Urban League began publishing its own periodical; Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life replaced the Bulletin of the National Urban League

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and remained in publication (on a much smaller scale) until 1949. Charles S. Johnson was the founding editor. Johnson had served as the Urban League’s director of research and was the likely choice for editor, a position he held until 1928, when he accepted a teaching position in the sociology department at Fisk University, serving as department chair and eventual director of Fisk’s Race Relations Institute, eventually becoming Fisk’s irst African American president. He would be replaced at Opportunity in 1928 by the sociologist Elmer A. Carter, who would hold the position until 1937. Just as the Crisis promoted the agenda of the NAACP, so, too, did Opportunity promote the agenda of the National Urban League. Like the Crisis, Opportunity struggled during the Great Depression, but did not fare as well. It became a quarterly in 1944, and publication was ceased in 1949. he readership was considerably smaller than that of the Crisis. Johnson was considered to be one of the most important architects of the Harlem Renaissance. He was deeply committed to seeing the literature of black intellectuals published, and he considered Opportunity magazine an ideal place to achieve that goal. He was not, however, as committed to the visual arts on the pages of Opportunity as was Du Bois in the Crisis. Johnson established literary prizes in Opportunity and was the principal organizer of the famous Civic Club Dinner that would ultimately lead to the white magazine Survey Graphic, devoting an entire issue to the creative work of African Americans in March 1925.

he Women Artists of Opportunity While Opportunity was also committed to highlighting African American visual artists, the magazine did not have the same level of visual arts gracing the covers of the journal. Not only were fewer visual artists employed by Opportunity during the Harlem Renaissance years, but far fewer women artists were featured. his could be due in part to Du Bois’s unique connection to women, as well as the magazine’s emphasis on literature. Among the more important women artists at Opportunity were Mary Tarleton, Maude Tousey Fangel, Georgette Seabrook, Louise Jeferson, Jessie Housley, Natalie Eynon, Clara Cahill Park, Malvina Hofman, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Gwendolyn Bennett was better known by Opportunity readers as a contributing writer, both poet and feature writer. Bennett also was a contributing writer for the short-lived publication Fire!! as well as to the Crisis, the Messenger, and the American Mercury. While Bennett was better known in Harlem circles for her writing, she was trained in the visual arts at the prestigious

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.. Gwendolyn Bennett, December 1930, “Three Magi.”

Pratt Institute and received degrees from both Pratt and Columbia University in 1924. She then studied in Paris at the Sorbonne on a college sorority scholarship and the private Academie Julien in Paris and was hired as an assistant professor of art at Howard University. Bennett served as an assistant editor at Opportunity and was active in bringing artists together during the Harlem Renaissance, seeking a sense of community and fellowship with her colleagues in the arts, working closely with Harlem poet Langston Hughes.29 She spent one year on a fellowship at the Albert Barnes Foundation and along with artist Aaron Douglas was one of the two irst African Americans to receive a Barnes Fellowship. While studying at the Barnes Foundation, Bennett was exposed to every form of modernist European and American art. Like Laura Wheeler Waring, Bennett created several religious covers, including the December 1930 cover of the three Magi, kneeling

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.. Gwendolyn Bennett, July 1926, Untitled.

and humbly ofering their gits, the image framed by holly leaves and berries (ig. 4.12). Her work is less delicate than Wheeler’s, although still detailed. In Bennett’s January 1926 cover, she features the magi ofering gits to a standing Mary holding the Christ child; she seems art nouveau inspired, and the magi are done in a style that resembles wood block prints. Bennett’s July 1926 cover combines both the image of a 1920s lapper, sinuous and seemingly posed in mid-dance, and an element of exoticism, with silhouettes of dancers, either nude or partially clad, providing a frieze-like composition in the background (ig. 4.13). he dancers have palm trees, huts, and a decoinspired sun behind them; they could be performance artists in the milieu of Josephine Baker. Her central igure celebrates the beauty of the African American woman, with slim, curvaceous igure, full lips, a natural hairstyle, and large hoop earrings. In the same issue, Bennett penned “Lines Written

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at the Grave of Alexander Dumas,” a poem. he cover did not relate to the contents of the magazine. What Opportunity magazine lacked in visuals, they made up for in theoretical writing about the visual arts. In Opportunity, articles on the visual arts oten referred to prominent African American women artists, including an article on sculptor Augusta Savage paired with an article on Albert Alex Smith in the June 1923 issue and an article in July 1923 by Francis C. Holbrook, “A Group of Negro Artists,” which includes the work of Meta Fuller, May Howard Jackson, Laura Wheeler, Louise Latimer, and Augusta Savage. Although Opportunity featured less original art on their pages than the Crisis (utilizing text and photos for their cover page), the journal continued to publish several essays on African and African American art, including “Representations of the Emancipation in American Art” in April 1924 by Freeman H. M. Murray; “More of the Negro in Art” in December 1925 by Alain Locke; and “Negro Art, Past and Present” by Albert C. Barnes, “Primitive Negro Sculpture” by homas Munro, and “he Triumph of Ancient Negro Art” by Paul Guillaume all in May 1926. Opportunity would continue their commitment to the literary discussion of visual arts with artist Romare Bearden’s essay in December 1934, “he Negro Artist and Modern Art.” Bearden expressed his concerns about African Americans as artists and even criticized organizations that sponsored the works solely of African American artists, including the Harmon Foundation. Bearden found the Harmon Foundation’s attitude toward black artists to be of a “coddling and patronizing nature” that encouraged them to pursue art before their level of expertise was ready for exhibition. He wrote, “However praiseworthy may have been the spirit of the founders, the efect upon the Negro artist has been disastrous.”30 Bearden believed art should be judged without notice of race. He did not want his fellow black artists to look at art through the eyes of white artists and recreate it but rather to paint what they knew, to search their own world for inspiration. He considered the ideal artists of the time to be the Mexican social realist muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, who absorbed the inluences of their masters yet created something new and unique as individuals. he importance of the visual arts was also noted in Opportunity’s article, “Harlem Goes In for Art” in the April 1936 issue. Sophia Steinbach writes, “he Federal Arts Project cannot be considered a substitute for economic injustice and security in Harlem, nor is it expected to take the place of recreational and social opportunities which are sadly needed. But it does provide an opportunity for the people of that crowded area to satisfy their creative earnings and to experience the thrill of bringing new and hitherto

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, October 1928, Untitled.

unknown sources of beauty and satisfaction into their lives.”31 he article reported that before the project took efect, there were only one or two studios open in Harlem to train artists in small numbers, who could not aford art school. hrough the program, 400 adults and 1,140 children were taking a variety of classes around Harlem. Sculptor Augusta Savage participated, providing studio space for the workshops. A photograph of Augusta Savage’s Gamin was featured on the June 1929 cover of Opportunity. Savage’s work was mentioned regularly by both the Crisis and Opportunity magazines. Loïs Mailou Jones’s watercolors were included several times in Opportunity, including a stylized patterned reproduction of a watercolor in October 1928, and a precursor of her oil painting “Africa” of 1935 was used for the cover of the August 1928 issue, her signature style of a stylized, exotic version of African-inspired art typical of both Jones and the era (ig. 4.14).

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Social realist, cubist-inspired, art deco, and modernist art appeared on the pages of the Crisis and Opportunity magazines. he artists were not merely illustrators; many were fully engaged in modernist movements. Women artists subtly dealt with the subjects of racism, education, labor, war, and women’s issues. hrough the art and the written word in Crisis and Opportunity, the editors and their artists and writers continued to emphasize to their readers the need for a strong sense of identity and the need to record history accurately, to take the power of history-telling away from the white majority. Unless history was told accurately, the mistakes of the past would be repeated. As Du Bois said, “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. . . . he diiculty of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.”32 he artists of these journals undertook the telling of truth under the direction and inspiration of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson, joining readers through common hope and common sorrow in a collective African American identity and creating their own authentic historical memory. It was a singular and important achievement. As Du Bois himself put it 1921, “We Americans have settled the race problem and will not have our settlement tampered with. he truth of Art tampers. hat is its mission.”33 Women artists on the pages of Crisis and Opportunity played a strong leadership role in deining the direction and presentation of the irst national African American magazines in America. hey were leaders in truth telling and in expressing the need for social justice.

Notes 1. Irene Diggs, “Du Bois and Children,” Phylon 36, no. 4 (1976): 386–87. 2. Du Bois, “he Damnation of Women,” Darkwater: Voice from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1920; rpt., Millwood, NY: Kraus-hompson, 1975). 3. Du Bois, Darkwater, 185–86. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, he Souls of Black Folk, ed. David Blight (1903; rpt., Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 111. 5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Selections from he Crisis, vol. 1, 1911– 1925, ed. Herb Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-homson, 1983), 446. Originally published in Crisis (October 1926). 6. Mitch Kachun, “Before the Eyes of All Nations: African American Identity and Historical memory at the centennial Exposition of 1876,” Pennsylvania History 65, no. 3 (1998): 321–22.

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7. Crisis 33 (February 1927): 191–93. “Under ‘colored’ is understood black, brown, red and yellow peoples, including Negroes, mulattoes, Chinese, Japanese, Egyptians, Arabs, Indians, etc.” 8. Herbert Aptheker, Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois; Volume II. 1934–44 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976). (He said in a letter of March 1940 that Savage is a hard-working artisan but scarcely a irst-class sculptor [221].) 9. Crisis 33 (February 1927): 191–93. 10. Ibid. 11. See Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to he Masses, 1911–1917 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). 12. Laura Wheeler Waring, artist’s statement for a Guggenheim Fellowship, November 12, 1928, Harmon Foundation Papers, Box 45. 13. Ibid. 14. Waring was concerned because the pay was very low and she had not received any money for some illustrations she provided. She noted the cost of postage and paper and expressed her discomfort about telling Du Bois this information. Clearly the Crisis was working on a tight budget. Laura Wheeler Waring to W. E. B. Du Bois, October 1, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Library of Congress. 15. Laura Wheeler Waring, artist’s statement for a Guggenheim Fellowship, November 12, 1928. 16. Laura Wheeler Waring to William E. Harmon, January 26, 1928, Harmon Foundation Papers, Box 45. 17. George E. Haynes, support letter for Laura Wheeler Waring for a Guggenheim Fellowship, November 12, 1928, Harmon Foundation Papers, Box 43. 18. he Woman’s body was emphasized in the Armana period. Tightly wrapped sheer fabric outlined the shape of the body and revealed the stomach, the thighs, and the pubic area. 19. My thanks to Professor Nicholas Hudson for his assistance in assessing this image. 20. Quoted in Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis: he Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 135. From David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: he Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 457. 21. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: he Afroasiastic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). For a more detailed discussion of Du Bois’s interest in Egypt and the Black Athena, see Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 135–36. 22. “Opinion: On Migrating to Africa,” Crisis, June 1924, 58. 23. Jessie Fauset, “Dark Algiers the White,” Crisis, April 1925, 256. 24. For more information on Laura Wheeler, see Anne Caroll, Word, Image and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, “Transatlantic Collaborations: Visual Culture and African American Literature,” in he Blackwell Companion to African American Literature (London: Blackwell, 2010). Sherrard-Johnson’s essay discusses the Wheeler/Fauset collaboration in “Dark Algiers the White.”

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25. Vivien Schulyer Key, biographical statement, 1930, Harmon Foundation Papers, Box 48. 26. Milly Heyd, Mutual Relections: Jews and Black in American Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 7. 27. he International House was built by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller to foster appreciation and understanding of non-U.S. cultures. 28. Vivien Schulyer Key, biographical statement, 1930, Harmon Foundation Papers, box 48. 29. Sandra Y. Govan, “Kindred Spirits and Sympathetic Souls: Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Bennett in the Renaissance,” in Langston Hughes: he Man, His Art and His Continuing Inluence, ed. James C. Trotman (New York: Garland Press, 1995), 75–85. 30. Romare Bearden, “he Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, December 1934, 231–32. 31. Sophia Steinbach, “Harlem Goes for Art,” Opportunity Magazine, April 1936, 114–16. 32. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935), 722. 33. W. E. B. Du Bois, “he Shadow,” New Republic, February 23, 1921.

Chapter FIve

MAY HOWARD JACKSON, BEULAH ECTON WOODARD, AND SELMA BURKE Lisa E. Farrington

Oten treated tangentially in discussions of the Harlem Renaissance, May Howard Jackson, Beulah Ecton Woodard, and Selma Burke are, in fact, uniquely representative of the weltzensang of the Jazz Age. hrough their art, they embraced and exalted black beauty; they dedicated themselves to the Lockean tenet of “plastic” excellence, in the tradition of the best African sacred sculptors; and they were each exemplars of the Du Boisean “Talented Tenth”—sophisticated, well educated, aluent, and intellectual.1 Like several women artists of the Renaissance, Woodard operated on the West Coast outside of the New York hub. Burke spent most of her life in Pennsylvania; and Jackson was based in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, despite whatever distance separated them from Harlem, these three women were entirely engaged in the New Negro movement—an engagement that was best described by Woodard when she declared that her aim as an artist was to “promote a better understanding of the African with his rich historical background.”2 Perhaps the most important shared experience among these three women was the support they each received from their families, and the educational opportunities they had in their quests to become artists. Jackson, who was born in 1877 (d. 1931) to a middle-class couple, Floarda Howard and Sallie Durham, and attended J. Liberty Tadd’s art high school in Philadelphia (now the Philadelphia Industrial Art School). Tadd (1863–1917), the school’s founder, was an educational innovator whose New Methods in Education emphasized the importance of visual arts training in public schools as a vehicle to strengthen both the let and right sides of the brain. His methods 115

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.. May Howard Jackson, 1920s. Photo, Collection of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

advocated six primary and secondary school years of art instruction, making it possible for Jackson to study “drawing, designing, free-hand drawing, working designs in monochrome, modeling, wood carving, and the use and care of tools,” utilizing Tadd’s ambidextrous teaching model.3 Avant-garde art training of this type at such an early age placed Jackson in a position unique among African American women, to succeed as an artist. By 1902, Jackson had completed a course of college study at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she was awarded a tuition scholarship and had the distinction of being the irst African American woman to attend the academy. Jackson studied under renowned American impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), who founded Parsons School of Design in New York in 1896. She also took instruction from Paris-trained academic sculptors Charles Graly (1862–1929) and John Joseph Boyle (1852– 1917), the latter of whom was a student of the celebrated American realist and Pennsylvania Academy professor homas Eakins (1844–1916). he progressive schooling Jackson had received at Tadd’s was furthered at the academy, where she beneited from Eakins’s legacy of forward-thinking instruction,

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.. Beulah Ecton Woodard with her sculptures, ca. 1936. Photo: Miriam Matthews Papers, University of California Los Angeles Library Special Collections.

which was considered the most avant-garde available at the time. During the 1870s and 1880s Eakins emphasized drawing from life rather than sculptural models; and he permitted women students to draw from the nude male body. As a result of his liberalism, he was forced to resign from the academy in 1886, one year ater Jackson enrolled. (Eakins went on to found and teach at the Art Students League in both Philadelphia and New York and at Cooper Union.)4 Suice it to say, Jackson had one of the best arts educations of any African American artist of the nineteenth century. Born in 1895 (d. 1955) on an Ohio farm, Woodard (1895–1955) was the daughter of Civil War veteran and businessman William P. Ecton, who successfully patented an electric street corner signaling device in 1913.5 While the artist was still a toddler, the family relocated to Vernon, California, where Ecton attended Polytechnic High School. Founded by John H. Francis in 1897

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.. David Edstrom, April 10, 1922. Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540 USA. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-npcc-22838; Call Number: LC-F81-17829 [Prints & Photographs].

and dedicated to applied arts and sciences, the school was an ideal setting for Woodard. Francis was the school’s principal and later, in 1910, became superintendent of the Los Angeles public school system. His establishment of “junior” high schools, specialized high schools, social programs for immigrants, and the introduction of foreign language instruction to elementary schools were considered so radical that he was forced to resign in 1916. Nonetheless, Woodard proited from Francis’s reforms, receiving an exceptional early education, which included architectural drawing.6 Despite an excellent primary and secondary school education, Woodard had to work as a maid in the years immediately following her graduation. It wasn’t until her marriage to Brady Woodard in 1928 that she was able to fully realize her artistic potential. By now in her thirties, Woodard enrolled in painting and sculpture courses at the University of Southern California and at the famed Otis Art Institute (where she later taught), which had been established in 1918 by Los Angeles Times founder Harrison Gray Otis, a colleague and supporter of Francis and his LA high school reforms. At USC, Woodard’s skills developed under the tutelage of eminent ceramicist and glass sculptor Glen William Lukens (1884–1967). An honored member of the USC faculty, Lukens’s sculptural talents led to the creation of an art scholarship in his name, which is still awarded annually to students at the USC School of Fine Arts today.7

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.. Selma Hortense Burke with Self-Portrait. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, undated.

Woodard also studied with one of the founders of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Peter David Edstrom (1873–1938). Mainly a portrait sculptor of Hollywood and art world elite, when working from his imagination, Edstrom’s style leaned toward reined art deco abstraction inspired by African forms. One such example, Sphinx (1900), may have inluenced Woodard’s own work, which would soon move in the direction of Africaninspired busts. Winner of the 1900 Paris Exposition Sculpture Grand Prix, Russian prince Paul Troubetzkoy (1866–1936) was another Woodard teacher. Troubetzkoy, who maintained a California residence in the early twentieth century and worked in the lithe expressionistic style of Rodin (indeed, he created a portrait of the French sculptor in 1906 which is now in the Los Angeles County Museum), provided Woodard with yet another stylistic inluence. Like Jackson, Woodard, too, was the beneiciary of study with some of the best teachers available.8 Selma Hortense Burke was born in North Carolina in 1900 (d. 1995), the seventh of ten children of the Reverend Neal and Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Coield Burke. Her interest in becoming a sculptor was sparked by a maternal grandmother, who was a painter, and by a childhood event that took place in 1907 while Burke and her siblings were gathering white clay from a nearby

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riverbank to whitewash the ireplace in their home. As Burke recalls, “I saw the imprint of my hands [in the clay]. I found that I could make something . . . something that I alone had created . . . . It was there in 1907 that I discovered me.”9 Burke decided in that moment, at age seven, to become an artist. Her father further nurtured her interest due to his international travels. Rev. Neal Burke had worked as an ocean liner chef and had toured the globe extensively, bringing home souvenirs and art objects from the countries he visited in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean to share with his daughter.10 Two of Burke’s paternal uncles contributed to their brother’s tradition. As A.M.E. Zionist missionaries in Africa in the late nineteenth century, they were required to commandeer non-Christian sacred objects from African converts and destroy them. Instead, the Reverends Burke stored these sculptures and masks for safe keeping and, ater their deaths, the trove was returned to the Burke family home in North Carolina where they were prominently displayed and where young Selma was privileged to gaze upon them daily. For the remainder of her years, Burke was grateful for this early exposure to the beauty of African art. “I have known African art all of my life . . . . At a time when this sculpture was misunderstood and laughed at, my family had the attitude that these were beautiful objects.”11 he Mooresville, North Carolina, school district where Burke’s family lived had only a single school for African Americans, consisting of a poorly maintained one-room structure. In order to secure the best possible education for her daughter, Mrs. Burke sent Selma to a private college prep school in Washington, DC, a city where, despite segregation, the educational opportunities for blacks far outstripped those in most southern states. he National Training School for Women and Girls was founded in 1909 by educator Nannie Helen Burroughs (1883–1961) in response to a dire need for educational opportunities for African American girls. Presided over by Burroughs until her death in 1961, the school was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School in 1964 and provided an outstanding learning experience for its students over the course of the twentieth century.12 While the Burroughs school ofered solid grounding in career training, art was not considered an appropriate career for a woman and thus not ofered in the curriculum during Burke’s attendance there.13 Within a year, Burke returned to North Carolina; and from age fourteen to eighteen she was tutored privately by William Arial, superintendent of schools in Mooresville. Burke also traveled nearly ity miles each day in order to receive a high school education in Winston-Salem—the nearest town that accepted black high school students. Ater graduation, Burke relocated to WinstonSalem in order to attend what is today Winston-Salem State University

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(then, Slater Industrial and Normal School). here, she studied with school president Frances L. Atkins, son of the university’s A.M.E. Zionist founder, Simon Green Atkins. Burke also took classes with Dartmouth-educated Lester Blackwell Granger (1896–1976), a past executive secretary of the National Urban League.14 Next, at her mother’s insistence, Burke attended St. Agnes School of Nursing in Raleigh; and by 1924, she had become a registered nurse. Her mother, who was supportive of her aspirations to practice art, was nonetheless concerned that Burke be able to support herself. Nursing school, while temporarily derailing Burke’s artistic goals, ultimately turned out to be a blessing, as it allowed Burke to earn a sizable living throughout the Great Depression. By the mid-1920s, Burke had received extensive and rigorous academic training and would be well prepared to take her place beside the “Talented Tenth” of Harlem when her time came in the 1930s. Meanwhile, she shared with Jackson and Woodard the essential ingredients necessary for personal and professional achievement—the buttress of a loving and caring family and incomparable schooling.15 Despite similarities in educational and familial resources, Jackson, Woodard, and Burke had very divergent career paths and difering degrees of success. Jackson, while well known in black art circles, was unable to sell her work and bore a lifelong grudge against the art community, which she felt did not appreciate her talents. Woodard, on the other hand, exceeded all expectations when, in 1937, she became the irst African American to be given a one-person show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her career and life ended, however, under the dark cloud of the anticommunist movement. Back on the East Coast, Selma Burke accessed fame by winning a national competition to sculpt a portrait of President Franklin Roosevelt, and her proile of him became the model for the president’s portrait on the U.S. dime. She enjoyed nearly a century of commissions, professional respect, and creative activity until her death at age ninety-ive.16 Of these three artists, Jackson was the eldest—a full generation older than Woodard and Burke. As a result, her creative methods were rooted in nineteenth-century academicism which may, in part, explain why her reputation languished. Ater completing her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy, Jackson relocated to Washington, DC, newly married to William Sherman Jackson. Her husband was the uncle of Sargent Claude Johnson (1887– 1967), who would become a renowned Harlem Renaissance sculptor in his own right. Johnson came to live with the Jacksons in DC ater the deaths of his mother and father in 1897 and 1902, respectively. It is likely that the iteen-year-old was tutored in art by Jackson during his stay in Washington,

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.. May Howard Jackson. Clark Bailey: Head of a Negro Child, ca. 1916, terra cotta, 21" x 12" x 8", Location unknown. Photo courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Mary O. H. Williamson Collection, Howard University, Washington, DC.

.. Sargent Johnson. Elizabeth Gee, 1927; sculpture; stoneware with glaze, 13¹⁄₈" x 10¾" x 7½" (33.34 cm x 27.31 cm x 19.05 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Albert M. Bender Collection, Gift of Albert M. Bender.

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.. May Howard Jackson. Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1919, bronze, approx. 24" high. Collection of Dunbar High School, Washington, DC. Photo courtesy of the Newark Museum.

particularly given the ainities of form and content between certain of their works, such as Jackson’s 1916 Head of a Negro Boy (Clark Bailey) and Johnson’s Elizabeth Gee, completed nine years later. While Jackson’s sculpture adheres to academic tradition and Johnson’s embraces reductive modernism, the subject matter and the treatment of the facial features and hair are comparable. hese underlying similarities persist despite the fact that the sitters are of different ethnic origins and likely did not resemble each other in life. Jackson’s husband, meanwhile, was appointed chair of the Department of Mathematics (and later principal) at the Preparatory High School for Negro Youth in Washington, popularly known at the time as M Street High School. Founded in 1870, the school had the distinction of being the irst public high school for African Americans in the United States. In 1916, M Street High was renamed Dunbar High School ater famed black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906). Soon thereater, in 1919, Jackson completed a sensitive portrayal of the poet for Dunbar High, where the sculpture still resides. he work was executed with psychological insight and empathy, revealing, through subtlety and nuance, the sitter’s personality.17 he Dunbar bust also displays a textured impressionistic surface that allows for a lively play of light across its planes. It is reminiscent in this regard

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.. May Howard Jackson. Portrait Bust of an African, 1899, bronze, 21" x 12½" x 8". Collection of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, Los Angeles, CA.

to the sculptures of Degas and Rodin, and indicative of Jackson’s training with impressionist William Chase. Resulting from Jackson’s exceptional sculptural skill, the Dunbar portrait seems to breathe with life and certainly transcends the weight of the medium. Precisely modeled, the bust depicts a distinguished Dunbar in high collar and high-buttoned jacket. Accentuating the fullness of his mouth, his large eyes, tinged with sadness, and the distinct curl of his thick hair and brows, Jackson created a portrait of African beauty and intellect that stood in stark contrast (as did Dunbar himself, whose “pure” African blood was ot cited) to the stereotypes of sambos and mammies so ubiquitous in the years of Jim Crow.18 Exceptional in Jackson’s case is the fact that she anticipated the Harlem Renaissance by decades, having already begun, at the close of the nineteenth century, to dedicate her creative energies to venerable black portrayals. In 1899, she sculpted a bust of a black youth, now in the famed Kinsey Collection in Los Angeles. Sinewy, with high cheekbones, amply proportioned nose and mouth, thick curling hair, and expressive eyes, the face of this young man anticipates Jackson’s later portrait of Dunbar. Its striking physical allure venerates African

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physiognomy, and the face exudes a sense of self-possession and introspection that ideally suited the imminent vision of the New Negro. Working from her DC home studio during the pre-Renaissance years, Jackson was able to advance her reputation as an artist with a series of distinguished portrayals of African American literati. She also exhibited her works at a number of prominent venues including the Corcoran Gallery in 1915, the National Academy of Design in 1919 and 1928, and in 1919 at the Society of Independent Artists and the Veerhof Gallery, both of which were in New York, where she maintained a second studio. An announcement in Crisis noted: “May Howard Jackson, the well known sculptress, announces that her studio at 221 West 138th Street, New York City, will hereater be open gratis to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. . . . Mrs. Jackson will be in her studio daily from 2:00 to 4:00 P.M. and at this time will take pleasure in receiving visitors and in discussing her work with them.”19 As the Crisis notice suggests, Jackson was moving in the more privileged circles of the black community even before the 1920s. For example, her presence and that of her husband were noted at Villa Lewaro, the Hudson River mansion of millionairess and cosmetics tycoon, Madame C. J. Walker, for a 1919 Christmas party.20 Contrary to much scholarship on Jackson that asserts her inability to achieve professional acclaim, the artist had become so well known by 1922 that she was asked to join the newly formed art department at Howard University, where she taught from 1922 to 1924, and inluenced the young James Porter, who would go on to write one of the irst comprehensive surveys of African American art.21 In 1922, Jackson was also celebrated in a book of verse by Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966) entitled Bronze, which featured an introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois, who was a lifelong supporter of Jackson.22 he poem, “To May Howard Jackson, Sculptor,” reads as follows: You saw the vision in the face of clay And ixed it through the magic of a hand Obedient unto the will’s command In forms impervious to Time’s decay: Historian of bloods that interplay Confusedly within a cryptic land You’ve chiseled, and your work of art shall stand To gem the archives of a better day Alone, far from the touch of kindred mind You’ve mounted with a grim, determined zeal,

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Lisa E. Farrington Despite environment austere, unkind, Or frozen ingers clenched to your appeal You’ve held the ardor of your irst ideal Robed in a queenly majesty, resigned.

hese verses suggest that Jackson’s ot alluded to professional diiculties resulted, mainly, from her Weltanschauung or “grim” outlook on life, which was marked by a conviction that she deserved more attention and praise than she was getting. Responding empathetically to her disillusionment, Du Bois wrote in May 1922, “Mrs. May Howard Jackson, whose portrait busts are a marvelous contribution to the history of the Negro, in years of work has not received a month’s decent income.”23 his observation goes to the true heart of the matter, Jackson’s art, however appreciated, did not sell. Lack of sales, in conjunction with the occasional critical suggestion that her sculptural style was conventional as opposed to modern (modernism had been introduced to America with the “electrifying” 1913 Armory Show in New York) was more censure that Jackson could tolerate.24 Lukewarm assessments of her talents overshadowed any praise that she received, at least in her own mind. Even creditable comments about her work, such as “wellconstructed and skillfully modeled” and “forthright sculptures of forthright men” were taken by the artist as slights.25 However, as Arna and Jacqueline Bontemps have noted, critiques of this kind were, in fact, comparable to criticisms received by many academically trained artists at the time, particularly women.26 As early as 1919, Jackson’s work graced the cover of Crisis and the pages of the New York Society of Independent Artists catalogs. Nevertheless, Jackson remarked about her career, “I felt no satisfaction! Only a deep sense of injustice, something that has followed me and my eforts all my life.”27 his statement, made in 1929, completely ignored the fact that Jackson had received a coveted bronze medal and a one-hundred-dollar prize that very year from the Harmon Foundation and had exhibited ive works in the Harmon show, two of which were illustrated in the catalogue (Kelly Miller and Head of a Negro Child). Morose and cynical by nature, Jackson’s greatest handicap, according to the Bontempses’ astute analysis, was likely psychological and, as such, unappreciated by the artist. he Bontemps assert also that Jackson dealt with “the sorts of color-caste prejudices that tormented so many other near-white Black women in post-Reconstruction America” and that she “may very well have relected undercurrents of self-hatred and personal guilt symptomatic of a kind of racial schizophrenia and motivated by a powerful, perhaps irrational, assimilationist dream.”28

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.. May Howard Jackson. Mulatto Mother and Child, n.d., plaster, 24" x 17" x 13" (61 cm x 43.2 cm x 33 cm). University Archives, Virginia State University, Petersburg.

he Bontemps refer here, as did Georgia Johnson in her poem (“historian of bloods that interplay confusedly within a cryptic land”), to the artist’s biracial background and Caucasian appearance, which was a great source of distress for Jackson. he artist responded to her “near-whiteness” with works of art such as Mulatto Mother and Child (1929) and Head of a Negro Child (1916), so titled to alert viewers to the black identity of the subjects, which is not evident given the texture of the hair and the racially ambiguous features. he former work depicts a seemingly Caucasian mother and child and reiies the artist’s concerns with miscegenation. Despite antimiscegenation laws, which were enforced in more than thirty states, interracial sex was an African American fact of life. In the Antebellum period, slave owners routinely took advantage of their status to sexually abuse black women. he result was a signiicant population of slaves who bore the features and complexions of their white fathers.29 his national epidemic touched the lives of many African Americans, directly or indirectly, from the

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half dozen biracial children of President homas Jeferson and his slave mistress Sally Hemmings (1773–1835) to Frederick Douglass, whose father was likely his erstwhile white owner Aaron Anthony; and from Booker T. Washington, also the son of a white father, to the famed Quadroon (one-fourth black) Balls, which were held in New Orleans beginning in 1805 speciically to unite French landowners with beautiful “near-white” mistresses.30 For Jackson, the worst consequence of her white appearance was that, when mistaken for white, she was well treated; however, once her racial identity was ascertained, she was subjected to humiliating rebufs. he Washington Society of Fine Arts, for instance, accepted her as a member until they became aware of her heritage, at which point her membership was revoked. Another occasion involved the National Academy of Design, which had included her bust of black author and intellectual Kelly Miller in their 1919 show, but discouraged Jackson from participation in future exhibits. It would be a decade before the academy accepted another Jackson work.31 Du Bois eloquently articulated Jackson’s experiences of racial bias and her reactions to it when he wrote in 1931, With her sensitive soul she needed encouragement and contacts and delicate appreciation. Instead of this she ran into the shadows of the Color Line. . . . he contradictions and idiotic ramiications of the Color Line tore her soul asunder. It made her at once bitter and ierce with energy, cynical of praise and above all at odds with life and people. She met rebufs in her attempts to study and in her attempts at exhibition, in her chosen ideal of portraying the mulatto type; . . . she faced continual doubt as to whether it was worthwhile and what it was all for. hus the questing, unhappy soul of the Artist beat battered wings at the gates of day and wept alone. She accomplished enough to make her fame irm in our annals and yet one must, with ininite sorrow, think how much more she might have done had her spirit been free!32

Du Bois, himself a fair-skinned man, seemed to understand fully the crisis of identity with which Jackson grappled. In his pivotal literary work, he Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois stated that black artists, in particular, were ill fated to expend their eforts in “seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals”—an efort which, in his words, “has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people.”33 Referring to Jackson’s “Mulatto Mother and Child,” Du Bois was brimming with high praise. He lauded the artist’s originality; her exceptional talents as a sculptural technician; the dignity with which she portrayed her subject; and her success in personifying “the American color problem.”34 Du Bois

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.. Beulah Woodard. African Woman, ca. 1935, oil on canvas, 24" x 20". Photo courtesy Swann Galleries, New York.

was not one to lavish praise indiscriminately; yet, instead of reveling in his accolades (routinely published in Crisis), Jackson experienced a career-long sense of under-appreciation and discrimination; and she believed irmly that other African American artists—men and women alike—were consistently favored over her by black art critics and historians. “I felt no satisfaction,” she once wrote to Alain Locke, “Only a deep sense of injustice, something that has followed me and my eforts all of my life.”35 Nevertheless, her portraits of the likes of Du Bois, Dunbar, Miller, art professor and curator Alonzo Aden (1906–1961), and civil rights activist Rev. Francis Grimke (1852–1937) continue to serve as historic records of the faces of the New Negro. Beulah Woodard’s career trajectory in California, unlike that of Jackson on the East Coast, went relatively unnoticed by the Harlem literati but was, in some ways, far more successful than Jackson’s. Ater marrying, Woodard converted a room in her home into an art studio. She worked diligently in wide and varied media—terra cotta, plaster, wood, bronze, copper, oil paint— creating images of people of African descent, almost without exception. At one with the precepts of the New Negro movement, Woodard believed that the primary purpose of art making for African Americans was to “promote a better understanding of Africa with its rich historical background” and to instill pride in black heritage.36 She expressed this goal deinitively when she

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.. Beulah Ecton Woodard, African Woman, ca. 1937, glazed terra cotta, 11¼" x 10¾" x 5". Miriam Matthews Charitable Trust. Photo: Charles H. Matthews Jr., Seattle, WA.

remarked in 1944, “In the so-called ‘primitive’ African, there is much of which Negroes today should be proud. I am recording types . . . [that] are at once interesting, picturesque, dramatic, and colorful.”37 he “types” to which Woodard referred were a series of glazed terra cotta sculptures that accentuated the beauty of African physiognomy and that were based on ethnographic photographs of the Masai people of Kenya, the Ekoi of Nigeria, and the Luba and Mangbetu of the Congo. hese sculptures drew the notice of James Rodney Smith, publisher of California News, a Los Angeles African American weekly. In February 1935, Smith gave Woodard her irst opportunity to exhibit, utilizing the street-front window of the newspaper’s oices as an exhibition space. Fortuitously, the sculptures were seen by Miriam Matthews (1906–2003), who was the irst black librarian for the city of Los Angeles (and a UCLA graduate). Matthews mounted Woodard’s two subsequent shows at the Vernon Public Library and the Los Angeles Central Library.38 Woodard’s accomplishments continued to escalate. With the support of the Los Angeles Negro Art Association (of which Woodard was a founding member), in 1937 the artist mounted yet another showing of her work at

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.. La Croisière Noire: Femme d’un chef Mangbetu (Congo Belge). [Mangbetu woman Nobosodrou, wife of Mangbetu king Touba, Niangara, Belgian Congo]. Photograph by Léon Poirier and Georges Specht, 1925. Photogravure. Expédition Citroën–Centre Afrique Deuxième Mission Haardt–Audouin Dubreuil. CG-20-75. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Stendahl Art Galleries on Wilshire Boulevard, attended by over 2,500 visitors between November 14–21. Owned by restaurateur and art dealer Earl Stendahl (1887–1966), the popular exhibition venue had moved from its original location in Stendahl’s restaurant, he Black Cat, to an expansive space in the Ambassador Hotel in 1921. Stendahl exhibited California impressionists, Mexican muralists, and European modernists, including Rivera, Siquieros, Picasso, and Matisse; and his clientele included an elite coterie of Hollywood celebrities and museum curators, to which Woodard was given unprecedented access. As a consequence, that same year she received her highest tribute yet—a one-person exhibition of her African “masks” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), becoming the irst African American ever to do so and prompting local and national news coverage.39 he series of nineteen clay and papier-mâché masks with titles such as “Mangebeton Queen,” “Fulah Kunda,” and “Masai Warrior” was on display for

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.. Beulah Ecton Woodard with clay masks. Photo: Crisis 57, no. 5 (May 1950): page 282.

two months and drew thousands of spectators. he sculptures were handpainted by the artist and replete with beads and feathers to approximate Africans in traditional dress. Referred to by some critics as “bizarre artifacts,” the sculptures were seen by most as ethnographic curiosities, although Woodard’s unpretentious realism was much preferred to modernist abstraction, particularly by California socialist critics resentful of the new modernism. “Not for her the fol-de-rols of abstraction,” wrote one journalist, “What counts with her is something more worthwhile—to wit, emotion.”40 Unlike Jackson, however, Woodard seemed unafected by the press reaction to her work one way or the other. On the contrary, the interest sparked by headlines such as “Beulah Woodard Masks Gain Attention” and “Los Angeles housewife . . . makes masks of African aborigines as a hobby” were welcomed bolsters to the artist’s notoriety.41 Portrait commissions of prominent Los Angelinos such as LA county supervisor and Democratic Party activist John Anson Ford (1883–1983) and others followed.42 Perhaps Woodard’s most celebrated commissions came from sought-ater Harlem Renaissance dancer and artist’s model Maudelle Bass (1908–1989) in the late 1930s. Woodard created at least two busts of Bass. Her bronze portrait exudes power and presence and reveals the personality and physical charms of the sitter. he work compares admirably to the photograph taken of Bass in 1939 by the renowned ine arts photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958). Capturing the striking silhouette and elegant symmetry of Maudelle’s African features, Weston through light and shadow,

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.. Beulah Ecton Woodard. Maudelle, ca. 1939, bronze, 12¼" x 6½" x 8¼" Miriam Matthews Charitable Trust. Photo: Charles H. Matthews Jr., Seattle, WA.

.. Maudelle Bass Weston, photographed by Johan Hagemeyer (1884–1962), 1940, gelatin silver print; 9.5" x 7.5", Print: stamped, BANC PIC 1964.063—PIC Weston, Maudelle Bass—016, Collection and copyright of the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

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.. Diego Rivera in his Mexico studio, posing in front of his latest work, a nude painting of dancer Maudelle Bass titled Dancer in Repose, at his studio in Mexico, April 14, 1939. AP photo from article by Robert Barr (Associated Press writer) entitled “Marika Rivera, Daughter of Artist Diego Rivera, Dies in England.” Copyright: Associated Press.

and Woodard through bold and lawless modeling, present us with unforgettable portrayals. Bass and Woodard had much in common, in that both were breaking into ields which, in California at least, were nearly beret of black women— ine arts in the case of Woodard, and dance and modeling in the case of Bass. he model had moved west from Georgia to study dance in 1933. By the end of the decade, she had become the irst black person to study with Los Angeles’s famed choreographer Lester Horton. Bass, who specialized in modern, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian dance movements, became a principal

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.. Beulah Ecton Woodard. (American, 1895–1955). Maudelle. ca. 1937–38. Fired terracotta painted brown with white and green additions. (2007.40), Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, Gilbreath-McLorn Museum Fund.

in a black troupe of the American Ballet Company, and performed the lead role in Agnes DeMille’s 1940 Black Ritual—the company’s irst ballet to feature black dancers.43 Bass’s second career as a model was as successful as her irst. She posed for portraits and nudes for some of the greatest painters and photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, including Carl Van Vechten, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Diego Rivera, who described her in 1939 as “the embodiment of ideal beauty and sensuality.”44 Bass posed multiple times for Weston, who marketed and sold his nude compositions of Bass with great success. Indeed, his photos of her are still available for purchase on the Weston Family Trust website. Like Woodard, Maudelle achieved the kind of success to which few women, let alone women of color, could lay claim at the time. So popular was Bass among A-list modern artists that more than ity distinct sculptures, paintings, and photographs of her are still in circulation today.45 Capitalizing on Maudelle’s popularity and the lure of her exquisite Africanness, in her hand-painted terra cotta Maudelle (1937–38), Woodard emphasized Bass’s superb bone structure while capturing the warmth of her

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.. Luba-Tabwa-Tumbwe half igure, D. R. Congo 19th century; Wood with a profound age patina. Height 33 cm. Collection Gallery Ilunga, Brussels LC25 acquired in 2011 from a private collector Brussels. Lit. ref.: Cornette de Saint Cyr, Arts Primitifs—Drouot Richelieu, April 14, 2007, lot 31, “Le Regard d’un Plasticien Bruxellois.”

personality in the process. Woodard deliberately likened Bass to her favored African “types” by coiing Maudelle in an African-inspired hairdo consisting of braids and an elaborately twisted bun that approximated the hairstyle of Luba fertility sculptures from the Congo. Woodard’s Maudelle is consummate evidence of the artist’s dedication to the veneration of all things African, including the unique nature of black hair. Furthermore, it seems only itting that a sculpture of one empowered black woman of the Harlem Renaissance should have been created by another woman of equal empowerment. Selfpossessed, self-determining, and independent black American women who were conident of their natural gits were a rare breed in the early twentieth century. Both Maudelle and Woodard were just such women. hey went fearlessly against the grain in their career choices; both understood the power and beauty of black womanhood; and both had the strength of character to see their choices through, and to do so with integrity.

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In the 1940s and early 1950s, Woodard continued to practice her crat and win prizes for her work. Particularly notable was work she did as an illustrator, registering one of her book cover designs with the Library of Congress Copyright Oice in 1948. Beginning in 1950, Burke cofounded and directed a cooperative gallery, Eleven Associated, on South Hill Street in Los Angeles. Also worthy of note were showings of her sculptures at the Los Angeles All-City Annual Outdoor Arts Festival in 1953, where Woodard won irst prize in Sculpture; and at LA’s Raymond and Raymond Gallery in 1955. During this period, she also served as a curator for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Department, which sponsored the “All-City” festivals at ten Los Angeles parks. Determined to serve minority as well as majority neighborhoods, program director Kenneth Ross hired Woodard to organize and oversee the festival in South Park, which served the south Los Angeles communities of Crenshaw and Watts, which, at the time, were Jewish and African American neighborhoods, respectively.46 Wary of potential anti-Semitic and antiblack censure from conservative and prejudiced Los Angelinos whose tax dollars supported the Municipal Art Department, Ross was careful to advertise Woodard’s festival in the black press only—the California Eagle rather than the Los Angeles Times, where the other nine park fests were advertised. Although the All-City undertaking was widely attended and a resounding success, the onset of the anticommunist movement doomed Ross’s eforts, and his fears were realized when the LA Times harshly critiqued the various exhibits as communist. As Ross had dreaded, local organizations sent letters of complaint to their political representatives, decrying the alleged communist content of the festival’s featured art. Everything from landscapes to boating scenes were indicted, although it was more likely that Ross’s inclusion of Jews and blacks in the project was at the core of the protests.47 In response to the public outcry, the city’s Building and Safety Commission convened House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)–style hearings in October 1950, and compelled Ross and several artists and organizers to answer accusations of communist content in the festivals. he outcome of the hearings was the cessation of the Municipal Art Department’s activities. Although it is unlikely that Woodard testiied at these hearings, she would have been painfully aware of the controversy, which headlined in the local media, and she would have understood that the atmosphere for women and minority artists was changing in the United States as the socialist 1930s and the opportunities which the era had made possible for blacks became a distant memory. Not surprisingly, Woodard’s inal professional endeavor was to mount an exhibition abroad in Germany. As she geared up for this

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exhibition, Woodard made her irst foray into abstraction with a wood sculpture entitled Two Billion (Creation). Human limbs and faces representing the diferent races merge with the natural forms of the medium, connoting birth in microcosm (with fetal forms emerging as if from the womb) and macrocosm (alluded to in the work’s title, which references the world population) as a powerful organic and unrelenting certainty. Sadly, Woodard passed away in 1955 before her European show could be realized.48 As testament to the fact that there are as many ways for an artist’s career to unfold as there are artists, Selma Burke found her way to sculpture ater a long career in nursing. Upon graduation from nursing school in 1925, Burke relocated to Philadelphia to live with relatives and to ind work in her ield, but her timing could not have been worse. he 1920s marked a nationwide campaign against nurses by the male medical community, to restrict the type of services nurses could provide. One such service was the administering of anesthesia, which Burke had been trained to do at St. Agnes Nursing School in Raleigh. As early as 1917, Pennsylvania had begun to withdraw funds from hospitals that allowed nurses to function as anesthesiologists (thus earning higher incomes—as much as $5 to $25 for each patient). By 1927, when Burke arrived in Philadelphia, nurses had been edged out of this profession.49 Not easily foiled, Burke decided to attend medical school to obtain certiication as an operating room nurse. She enrolled in the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel College of Medicine) on Arch Street which, at the time of its founding in 1850, was the irst-ever all-women’s medical school. In 1929, upon completion of a two-year program of study, Burke was recommended by the president of the college, Sarah Logan Wister Starr (1873–1966), as a private nurse to an heiress of the Otis Elevator dynasty who lived in Cooperstown. Burke’s wealthy patient has been identiied by scholar Jennifer Cote as Amelia Waring, and by respected Winston-Salem journalist homas Seig as a Cooper of the Cooperstown, New York, dynasty.50 In either case, Burke’s relationship with her wealthy patient was especially beneicial for the young nurse, both inancially and socially. According to Sieg, Burke’s benefactress was a charmingly crazy white woman . . . afectionate, generous, and very rich. By the time her employer died four years later [in 1933], Miss Burke had a fantastic wardrobe, had become a regular at the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall and had an acquaintance with royalty and a nest egg.51

Between 1929 and 1933, Burke’s benefactress exposed her to New York’s most privileged social and cultural circles. At the same time, Burke was able to save enough money to realize, at last, her long-deferred dream to become an artist.52

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.. Selma Burke. Jim, 1935–9, plaster, 13½" x 8" x 9½" Schomburg Center Art and Artifacts Division, New York Public Library.

he years 1935 to 1937 were blockbusters for Burke. She moved to New York and began studying art and modeling for classes at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. She met the illustrious Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, and although their union was brief, McKay did introduce her to many of the Harlem Renaissance literary, political, and entertainment luminaries such as Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, Ethel Waters, and James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond. Burke’s unmistakable facility with portraiture was evident even at this early stage, and can be seen in her sculpture, Jim, which afords the sitter “a strong and vigorous nobility” consistent with Harlem Renaissance aims.53 In 1935, Burke was awarded a grant from the Rosenwald Fund. Founded in 1917 by Sears & Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald, the foundation was dedicated to fostering educational opportunities for African Americans. Soon thereater in 1937, Burke enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia University, where she met classmate Margot Einstein, daughter of Albert. Each of the two sculptors was awarded one of only ive honorable mentions in a juried exhibition of over 150 art students at Columbia. Mounted at University Hall in May of that year, the show featured Einstein’s head of a child and a portrait bust by Burke.54 In 1938 Burke spent a year in Europe, visiting Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. he trip was likely funded by Austrian expressionist artist Hans

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.. Hans Böhler, Freundinnen, 1938, oil on canvas, 38.2" x 52.8". im Kinsky Kunst Auktionen, Vienna, Austria.

.. Selma Burke at Work in Her Studio. Photographer: Peter A. Juley & Son Photographic Firm. Collection: Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Photograph Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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.. Aristide Maillol, Venus with a Necklace, ca. 1918–28, bronze, cast 1930, 69" x 24" x 15¾" (175.3 cm x 61.0 cm x 40.0 cm), © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Boehler (1884–1961), who, while visiting New York in 1937, met Burke through New York art dealer Hugh Stix. Burke became Boehler’s model and muse and the couple traveled together to Austria. Boehler made numerous drawings and paintings of Burke, including a Cezannesque seated portrait, and a nude charcoal drawing in the manner of Egon Schiele’s erotica (Boehler had exhibited with Schiele and other members of the Vienna Secession in 1908). According to Austrian historians Michaela and Wolfgang Bauer, Boehler’s “exhibitions in the USA, his relationship to artist Selma Burke and also the political situation were the reasons why he decided to leave Austria in 1938.”55 Boehler moved permanently to New York, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen and, although their relationship waned, Boehler and Burke remained friends for many years.56 During her stay in Vienna, Burke studied with Viennese ceramicist Michael Powolny (1871–1954), who had helped to found the celebrated Vienna Secession, and with art nouveau artist Gustave Klimt (1862–1918).57 In Paris, she trained with eminent French sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861–1944), whose

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.. Selma Burke (seated left) in Columbia University sculpture class, 1939. Photo: Wake Forest University Digital Library. Publisher: C. G. Okelly Library, Winston Salem State University.

voluptuous large-scale female nudes had a keen inluence on Burke. A comparison of sculptures by both artists reveals a strong ainity; particularly in the monumentality, impassivity, and physiognomy—small breasts, rounded bellies, and ample hips—of their nudes. In 1938, ater a year of intense study, Burke returned to the United States to begin her career in earnest. Immediately upon her arrival in New York, Burke exhibited in a threeperson show at Freiheit Gezang Farein Gallery on Fity-Seventh Street— which had become an up-scale gallery boulevard in New York City. She also resumed study in the graduate MFA program at Columbia University, where she had been ofered a scholarship before leaving for Europe. By 1941, Burke secured her graduate degree and a place in a group exhibit of African American artists at McMillen Gallery on East Fity-Eighth Street—a stage that she shared with distinguished artists such as Romare Bearden, Ernest Chrichlow, Norman Lewis, and Fred Hollingsworth. She also shared this venue with soon-to-be abstract expressionist legendaries Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who exhibited at McMillen the following year.58 Also in 1941, Burke was included in a second exhibit at Edith Halpert’s famed Downtown Gallery

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.. Selma Burke beside the plaque of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 24 July 1945, bronze, 3' 6" x 2' 6" (106.7 cm x 76.2 cm), Recorder of Deeds Building, Washington, DC. Photo: Courtesy North Carolina Arts Council.

on East Fity-First Street (which is actually in Midtown). his time, her coexhibitors were the preeminent African American artists Henry Tanner, Eldzier Cortor, Charles Sebree, Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, Richmond Barthé, William Edmonson, and Jackson’s nephew Sargent Johnson. he gallery director, Edith Halpert, told the press that her objective in mounting the show was to demonstrate to the public “the valuable contribution made by American Negro artists.” Burke’s sculptures were singled out as some of the best in the show.59 During the early 1940s, Burke also taught briely at the Harlem Community Art Center, which was funded by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project (FAP), a subsidiary program of the WPA. Ironically, within a year of the demise of the FAP (1943), Burke would meet President Roosevelt in person. Her path to the President began in 1942 when, in order to make a contribution to the war efort, Burke took a job as a civilian truck driver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. While working, she injured her back and was briely hospitalized. It was during her convalescence that she learned of the national competition sponsored by the DC Board of Commissioners to create a proile portrait of President Roosevelt. From a large pool of competitors, approximately a dozen were chosen as inalists. hree of these were African American; Burke’s submission was the winning entry. he honor caused Burke’s reputation to soar; she was even interviewed on radio station WNYC by Hugh Stix, founding director of New York’s Artists Gallery.60

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Burke’s initial research eforts to ind a photograph of the president upon which to base her portrait were frustrated by the fact that no proile photos of him appeared to exist. Undeterred, Burke wrote to Roosevelt to request a live sitting, to which the president generously agreed, scheduling the irst of two sittings on February 22, 1944, at the White House.61 Using brown butcher paper purchased en route from New York to Washington, Burke created more than half a dozen charcoal sketches of the president. While working to realize her sketches in bronze, Burke continued to participate actively in solo and group shows with prominent black artists. Between 1944 and 1945 her work was featured in a number of small Greenwich Village exhibits, as well as in “he Negro Artist Comes of Age” at the Albany Institute of History and Art with Richmond Barthé, Joseph Delaney, Allan Freelon, LoÏs Jones, James Porter, and Norman Lewis. Under the sponsorship of the American Federation of Arts, this show toured nationally. Burke also showed at Powell House on Seventeenth Street with Beauford Delaney, and she was honored with a solo exhibit consisting of eighteen sculptures at the famed Modernage on East hirty-Fourth Street.62 he centerpiece of the Modernage exhibit was, of course, Burke’s proile of Roosevelt, which was unveiled in New York before being installed in the lobby of the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, DC, where it remains today. he New York show was extolled by New York Times art critic Allen Jewell, who described Burke as “a manifestly talented Negro sculptor.” He also lavished praise on her portrait busts, calling them “eloquent,” “sensitively carved,” “vital and honest,” “emotional and deeply sincere.”63 Jewell’s comments on the Roosevelt proile were equally favorable: “She [Burke] has striven to present him [FDR] at the height of his powers . . . as she feels the future should think of him. And her task has been accomplished with marked success.”64 Burke was very proud of her design, and she was also moved by her visits with the president and by the uncanny timing of her commission. While sketching Roosevelt, she told him that she wanted the portrait to be the best work she had ever done; and later, shortly ater his death, she remarked to a reporter that “People who have seen the plaque ask why . . . I have made the President look so young and I have answered that . . . this proile was not for today only, but for tomorrow and tomorrow . . . . I did not realize then that tomorrow would come so soon and he would be gone.”65 he bronze relief of Roosevelt was unveiled a second time in Washington on September 24, 1945, at an illustrious ceremony presided over by President Harry Truman and attended by members of the Supreme Court, the presidential cabinet, and Congress.66

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.. Selma Burke. Untitled (Woman and Child), ca. 1950, painted red oak. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

he following month, Burke’s relief sculpture of Colonel William Hayward, who led the Harlem Hellighters (the 369th Regiment) in World War I, was unveiled in Harlem at regimental headquarters on 146th Street with Eleanor Roosevelt in attendance. Burke’s next notable exhibit took place in 1947 at Roko Gallery in Greenwich Village where, coincident with Negro History week, she exhibited works alongside Elizabeth Catlett and Jacob Lawrence. he year 1947 also saw the creation of a sculpture of Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the elite black private school, Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina (where the African American artist LoÏs Jones had founded the art department in 1928). Commissioned by the Council for Racial Understanding, Burke’s portrait was presented to Dr. Hawkins in June in honor of her service to the African American community.67 Dedicated as much to educating young artists as to producing art, Burke opened the Selma Burke School of Sculpture on West hird Street in

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Greenwich Village in January 1946. he atelier ofered beginner and advanced sculpture classes and boasted a stellar international teaching staf. Within a year of its founding, Burke had raised enough money to ofer $500 tuition scholarships to worthy students, who were chosen based on merit by a jury that included, among others, sculptor Richmond Barthé. Unfortunately, a real estate developer who owned several buildings on hird Street evicted his tenants in order to erect a new apartment complex, and the Burke school was closed in 1947.68 he demise of the school prompted Burke to leave the New York scene and to reconnect with her Pennsylvania roots, although she continued to exhibit in New York and to receive commendable reviews from key critics such as abstract expressionist arbiter Dore Ashton and others.69 In 1948, Burke relocated to rustic Bucks County, near the fashionable art community of New Hope. Burke thrived in Pennsylvania. She focused her energies on iconic igural works and portraits that celebrated black identity and achievement. She also began to experiment with a more expressive and abstract sculptural style that boasted robust elemental forms and textured surfaces. In 1949, Burke was included in a major show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the hird Sculpture International. Two hundred and ity works by artists from twelve countries were featured, and the exhibit was a genuine blockbuster. European and American leading lights, such as Gaston Lachaise, heodore Roszak, Isamu Noguchi, and Burke’s former teacher Maillou were shown alongside Burke, whose sculpture “Grief ” was described in the press as “moving.”70 Signiicantly, once outside of New York, Burke had at last found a place in a major exhibition that was not exclusively black. Allblack shows were part and parcel of the Harlem Renaissance scene in New York; however, Burke found the practice of segregated shows frustrating, and once remarked, “Art didn’t start black or white, it just started . . . here have been too many labels in this world: Negro, Colored, Black, African-American . . . Why do we label people with everything except ‘children of God?’”71 In September 1948, Burke married the prominent architect and politician Herman Kobbe (1885–1966), whose socialist concerns for the working class must have greatly appealed to Burke. hroughout the 1930s, Kobbe had lectured at the historic Rand School for Social Science (a New York socialist institution that served the proletariat), focusing his remarks on government-sponsored housing developments in the United States and abroad. Kobbe had studied art and architecture in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts and at the Columbia University School of Architecture, before settling in Albany to become a city planner for New York State. In 1926, he let this post and went into private practice. At the same time he began a decade-long scholarly undertaking to research and write his magnum opus, Housing and Regional Planning. Published in

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.. Selma Burke. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1980, bronze, approx. 8' high, Marshall Park, Charlotte, NC.

1941 by E. P. Dutton and illed with his own illustrations, the tome proposed a radical and sweeping restructuring of New York City government-sponsored housing, in order to improve the quality of life for city residents.72 Although utopian and impractical in scope, critics admitted that Kobbe’s grand scheme for a better New York City “stirred the imagination.”73 Burke’s new existence in Pennsylvania saw decades of increased productivity and visibility for the artist, who remained in the Bucks County and Pittsburgh areas for the rest of her life.74 She continued to receive commissions and to sculpt igural works and portraits of African American notables. Other highlights during these years included an artist’s residency at the Yaddo Foundation estate in Saratoga Springs in the 1950s; a state appointment to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in the 1960s; the founding of the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh, which she directed from 1972 to 1981; and the launching of the Bucks County Sculpture Show, which still thrives today as an annual art festival. Burke taught at Haverford, Swarthmore, and many other institutions throughout Pennsylvania, and she earned a Ph.D. from Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1970.75 Eight other universities awarded Burke honorary doctorates, including the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1977); Moore College of Art

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in Philadelphia (1979); and Winston-Salem State University (1979). Also in 1979, he Women’s Caucus for Art chose Burke (along with Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel, and Georgia O’Keefe) to receive one of its irst annual awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, presented to the artist by President Jimmy Carter. In 1980, she completed a monumental commission to sculpt Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in bronze, now located in Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1987, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation named Burke their Woman of the Year, and in 1991, four years before the artist’s death, her bronze portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck was dedicated at the Buck Historic House, not far from New Hope, to celebrate the centennial of the author’s birth. When Burke died, she was ninety-ive years old and working on a federal commission to sculpt civil rights activist Rosa Parks.76 Exploring the lives of Jackson, Woodard, and Burke is akin to assembling a puzzle without all the requisite pieces. he histories of the elder two, Jackson and Woodard, have only sketchy documentation, thus the full picture of their lives remains indistinct. In the case of Burke, where there is an abundance of material, much of it seems to have been compromised by the artist’s own penchant for obscuring the events of her life. Historian Phoebe Farris has qualiied Burke’s life story as the stuf of “artist myth,” comprising most of the ingredients so essential to the legendary, such as premonition, eccentricity, brushes with greatness leading to one’s own greatness, encounters with royalty and heads of state, reversals of fortune, risky adventure, longevity, and the attainment of magnanimous wisdom. hat Burke herself had no small hand in the creation and maintenance of her legend, only makes her all the more mythic.77

Burke’s biography is fraught with inconsistencies and ambiguities. For example, the patient for whom Burke worked as a nurse in the early 1930s has been identiied as both a Cooper and an Otis heiress.78 In addition, while Burke’s relationship with Claude McKay has been qualiied by the artist and the art historical literature as a bona ide marriage, it lacks conirmation in the McKay biographical literature, which indicates only one McKay marriage to fellow Jamaican, Eulalie Imelda Edwards, which took place in Jersey City in 1914. According to McKay biographer Wayne Cooper, McKay’s letters conirm only that he shared an apartment with Burke on West Sixty-hird Street in New York in 1935.79 Of the Boehler Foundation, which inanced the artist’s travel to Austria in 1938, there is no readily available data on its existence or operations. Nevertheless, the artist Hans Boehler has been cited by Austrian scholars as having

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a relationship with Burke in Austria and New York in 1938, implying that he was the Boehler Foundation. Also mystifying is the existence of a New York Times obituary for Burke’s husband, Herman Kobbe, which is dated 1966 (and which places him in the Caribbean and remarried at the time of his death), when all other references state that he passed away in 1955 while still married to Burke.80 Unambiguous, however, is Burke’s personal and professional success, which was undoubtedly advanced by her charisma; by an urbane savoirfaire that allowed her to persistently prevail in the male-centered art universe; and by the fact that she had the presence of mind to keep the particulars of her life, as an unconventional and self-determining woman in a pre-feminist age, private. Her formula for sustaining star status served her long and well, as did her creative drive. Seemingly Burke’s polar opposite, Jackson’s personality, wanting as it was in conidence and optimism, was by all accounts the most formidable obstacle to her professional success. Granted, Jackson was of an earlier generation than Burke and therefore faced a greater degree of race and gender bias, but one could easily argue that, given Jackson’s exhibition and citation record (including a mention in the New York Times in 1929), she’d had a laudable career.81 Jackson could boast the same advantages as Burke—sculptural talent, family support, relative aluence, and signiicant art world contacts— but, for whatever reason, Jackson did not fully recognize these assets nor did she utilize them to her advantage. It has been suggested that the only tangible obstacle to an enhanced reputation for Jackson, which might have brought her more commissions and sales, was the fact that she chose not to travel abroad to study—a decision that set her apart from virtually all other Harlem Renaissance artists, who knew instinctively that an artist’s reputation might hinge on a European “école” experience. Unfortunately, when Jackson died in 1931 at age ity-four, she could not possibly have foreseen that, only a few years later, Alain Locke would describe her contribution to the history of African American art as “pioneering and noteworthy.”82 Most enigmatic of the three is Woodard, due to the paucity of material available on her. She seems to have had the advantage of being both talented and appealing to West Coast art circles where her devotion to African subjects, considered novel in the Los Angeles area, was much appreciated. However, Woodard faced her share of discrimination, too. Her Stendahl Gallery exhibition, for example, was relegated to the rear terrace of the building rather than mounted in the gallery proper—a slight that would surely have incensed Jackson. Apparently, however, the snub had no detrimental efect on Woodard (quite the contrary). Even when faced with the looming threat of McCarthyism during her tenure with the Los Angeles Municipal Art Department,

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Woodard simply redirected her attentions to exhibiting in Europe, where she may well have been a triumph had it not been for her untimely death from cancer at age ity-nine.83 When Du Bois wrote in 1931 that May Howard Jackson’s death was “a loss to art” and described her as “a sculptor with peculiar natural gits,” he could well have been speaking of all three of these women.84 In the wake of their deaths, the real loss is in the sketchy details of their lives, which leave us with more questions than answers and which call for further investigation and scrutiny. he contributions of Jackson, Woodard, and Burke to black art history, and the examples of tenacity, individuality, and creativity which they have set for subsequent artists, particularly aspiring women artists, are a precious legacy indeed. here are lessons to be learned by continued study of these women—lessons about how to meet life’s challenges; about how to balance gender, race, and personal identity; and about what it means to be an artist. Notes 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “he Talented Tenth,” in Booker T. Washington et al., he Negro Problem: A Series Of Articles By Representative American Negroes Of Today (New York: James Pott and Company, 1903), ch. 2; Alain Locke, “he Art of the Ancestors,” Survey Graphic: Harlem Mecca of the New Negro (March 1925): 673. 2. Verna Arvey, “By Her Own Bootstraps,” Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life (January– March, 1944): 17, 42; cf. Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination: he Legacy of African American Women Artists,” in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, ed. Jontyle heresa Robinson (Atlanta, GA: Spelman College, 1996), 64. 3. J. Liberty Tadd, New Methods In Education (New York: Orange Judd, 1899); Tadd, New Methods In Education, Art, Real Manual Training, Nature Study (New York: Orange Judd, 1907); Tadd, quoted in “Training the Let Hand as Well as the Right: Remarkable Results Achieved By A New System hat Promises Ultimately To More han Double Human Power,” New York Times, January 23, 1910, SM11. 4. Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” in 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, ed. Benjamin and Leslie King-Hammons (Philadelphia, PA: Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, 1996), 20, 21; KingHammond, “Jackson, May Howard (1877–1931),” in Darlene Clark Hine et al., eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 624; Barbara Dayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase (New York, 1995); Dorothy Graly Drummond, he Sculptor’s Clay: Charles Graly, 1862–1929 (Wichita, KS: Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, 1929); “John J. Boyle; New Yorker Whose Last Work Was a Bronze of Com. Barry Dies at 66,” New York Times, February 11, 1917, 23;

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Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, sale cat. No. 2225, lot 69 (New York: Christie’s Auction House); Lloyd Goodrich, homas Eakins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1982. 5. Oicial Gazette of the U.S. Patent Oice, vol. cxci (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Oice, June 1913), 261. 6. Miriam Matthews Papers, University of California Los Angeles Library; Matthews, “Woodard, Beulah Ecton (1895–1955),” in Hine, Black Women in America, 1281–82; and “John H. Francis, Albert Shiels, Mary S. Gibson: he Tensions of Reform,” in Judith Rosenberg Raftery, Land of Fair Promise: Politics and Reform in Los Angeles Schools, 1885–1941 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 46–62. 7. Judith Wilson, “How the Invisible Woman Got Herself on the Cultural Map: Black Women Artists in California,” in Art, Women, California, 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, ed. Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 207; Catherine Parsons Smith, “Harlem Renaissance in the United States: 2— California,” in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (London: Routledge, 2004), 505; Woodard, personal statement, July 25, 1938, Harmon Foundation Files, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; cf. Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 65; Lizzetta LaFalle-Collins, “Working the Paciic Rim: Beulah Woodard and Elizabeth Catlett,” Benjamin, 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors, 38–41s; Miriam Matthews Papers, UCLA; Matthews, “Woodard, Beulah Ecton (1895–1955),” 1281–82; Greig hompson, ed., Feeling, hought and Spirit: he Ceramic Works of Glen Lukens (Columbus: University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology, 2006). 8. Miriam Matthews Papers, UCLA; Matthews, “Woodard, Beulah Ecton (1895–1955),” 1281–82; Rolf Lundén, “he Rise and Fall of a Swedish-American Sculptor: he Case of David Edström,” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (July 2003): 145–63; Jesse Willis Jeferis, “Paul and Pierre Troubetzky,” International Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art 68, no. 269 (July 1919): x–xv. 9. Selma Hortense Burke, interview by Benjamin, Pittsburgh, Pa., March 21, 1970; Benjamin, “Burke, Selma Hortense,” in Hine, Black Women in America, 191–92; Burke, quoted in James G. Spady, “hree to the Universe: Selma Burke, Roy DeCarava, Tom Feelings,” in 9 to the Universe, Black Artists (Philadelphia: Black History Museum, 1983), 18. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Darryl Lyman, Great African-American Women (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2005), 32; Lori Verderame, “he Sculptural Legacy of Selma Burke, 1900–1995,” Masters of African American Art (New York: Anyone Can Fly Foundation, 2003), 1, http://www .artsnet.org/anyonecanly/library/Verderame_on_ Burke.html (accessed June 20, 2010). 13. Burke, interview by Benjamin; Benjamin, “Burke, Selma Hortense,” 191–92; Burke, quoted in Spady, “hree to the Universe,” 18; King-Hammond, “Quest for Freedom, Identity, and Beauty: New Negro Artists Prophet, Savage, and Burke,” in Benjamin, 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors, 22–37; Benjamin, “Visual Arts: Introduction,” in Hine, ed., Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Dance, Sports, and Visual Arts (New York: Facts on File, 1997), 164; Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 73–74.

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14. Burke, interview by Benjamin; Wade Hadley et al., “Chatham County 1771–1971” (Pittsboro, NC: Chatham County Historical Association, 1971,), http://www.chathamhistory .org/atkinsarchive.html (accessed June 20, 2010); William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 1 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), ch. 1; Philip Henry and Carol Speas, eds., he Heritage of Blacks in North Carolina, vol. 1 (Cliton Park, NY: Delmar Publishing, 1990), ch. 1. 15. Burke, interview by Benjamin; Benjamin, “Burke, Selma Hortense,” 191–92; Burke, quoted in Spady, “hree to the Universe,” 18; King-Hammond, “Quest for Freedom, Identity, and Beauty,” 22–37; Hine, Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America, 164, 242; Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 73–74. 16. he National Archives and Records Administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 17. King-Hammond, “Jackson, May Howard (1877–1931),” 624; Benjamin, “Visual Arts: Introduction,” in Hine, Black Women in America, 159. 18. William Dean Howells, “Introduction,” in Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life (New York: Dodd Mead and Company, 1896), xvi. Gene Jarrett, “Entirely Black Verse from Him Would Succeed: Minstrel Realism and William Dean Howells,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature 59, no. 4 (March 2005): 494–525. 19. [W. E. B. Du Bois], “Horizon: Music and Art,” Crisis 17, no. 3 (January 1919): 137. 20. Ann Hagedorn, “Christmas at Lewaro: Christmas Day at Mme C. J. Walker’s Villa Lewaro,” Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 37. 21. James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1943). 22. Georgia Douglas Johnson, “To May Howard Jackson, Sculptor,” in Bronze: A Book of Verse by Georgia Douglas Johnson with an introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston: B. J. Brimmer, Co., 1922), 99; Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” 20, 21; KingHammond, “Jackson, May Howard (1877–1931),” 624. 23. [W. E. B. Du Bois], “Opinion: Art for Nothing,” Crisis 24, no. 1 (May 1922): 11. 24. Locke, Negro Art, Past and Present (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 30; Walt Kuhn et al., Documents of the 1913 Armory Show: he Electrifying Moment of Modern Art’s American Debut (Tucson, AZ: Hol Art Books, 2009). 25. [W. E. B. Du Bois], “Men of the Month,” Crisis (June 1912): 67; Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” 20; Arna Bontemps and Jaqueline Fonvier-Bontemps, “he Torturous Transition: Black Art in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Sage (Spring 1987): 19, and in Bontemps, Forever Free, 20. 26. Bontemps, “he Torturous Transition,” 19. 27. May Howard Jackson letter to Locke, January 14, 1929, Alain Locke Papers, box 16439, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC; cf. Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” 20. 28. Bontemps, “he Torturous Transition,” 19; “12 Negroes Honored for Achievements,” New York Times, February 13, 1929, 13; [W. E. B. Du Bois], “Horizon: Music and Art,” 137; “Harmon Prizes Go to Sixteen Negroes,” New York Times, January 9, 1928, 12.

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29. Karen Downing, Darlene Nichols, and Kelly Webster, Multiracial America: A Resource Guide on the History and Literature of Interracial Issues (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005). 30. Annette Gordon-Reed, homas Jeferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845; rpt., New York: Penguin, 1986), 48; John Davis, “Observations on the Negroes of Louisiana,” he Journal of Negro History 2 (April 1917): 164–85; Floyd D. Cheung, “Les Cenelles and Quadroon Balls: ‘Hidden Transcripts’ of Resistance and Domination in New Orleans, 1803–1845,” Southern Literary Journal 29 (1997): 5–16; Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1901); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Anti-Slavery Oice, 1845). 31. Mary Gibson Brewer, “May Howard Jackson Could Be White, Prefers Colored,” Afro-American Newspaper, November 17, 1928; cf. Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” 20. 32. Du Bois, “Postscript: May Howard Jackson,” Crisis (October 1931): 351. 33. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” he Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 3–5. 34. [Du Bois], “Horizon: Music and Art,” 137. 35. Jackson Letter to Locke; Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” 20. 36. Woodard, quoted in Arvey, “By Her Own Bootstraps,” 42; cf. Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 64. 37. Woodard, quoted in Arvey, “By Her Own Bootstraps,” 42; cf. Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 64; LaFalle-Collins, “Working from the Paciic Rim,” 39–40. 38. Wilson, “How the Invisible Woman Got Herself on the Cultural Map,” 207; Myrna Oliver, “Miriam Matthews, 97; Pioneering Librarian Was an Expert in Black History,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com /2003/jul/06/local/me-matthews6 (accessed July 4, 2010). 39. Wilson, “How the Invisible Woman Got Herself on the Cultural Map,” 207, 209; April Dammann, “Stendahl Galleries,” Exhibitionist: Earl Stendahl, Art Dealer as Impresario, online excerpt (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2010), http://stendahlgalleries.com/ (accessed June 23, 2010); “Art Exhibit Draws Huge Attendance,” California Eagle, December 2, 1937, 5-B; Woodard, personal statement; cf. Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 65; LaFalleCollins, “Working the Paciic Rim,” 39. 40. Woodard, personal statement; cf. Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 65; anonymous Citizen News critic, quoted in Arvey, “By Her Own Bootstraps,” 42. 41. Matthews, “Woodard, Beulah Ecton (1895–1955),” 1282; Benjamin, “Triumphant Determination,” 65; Woodard, personal statement; Arvey, “By Her Own Bootstraps,” 17, 42; Sarah Schrank, “Art of the City: Modernism, Censorship, and the Emergence of Los Angeles’s Postwar Art Scene,” in American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004): 667; Alma May Cook, “Beulah Woodard Masks Gain Attention,” Los Angeles Herald Express, September 9, 1935, unpaginated; Jack Austin, “Dark Laughter in American Art: A Brief Appreciation of the Negro Artists of Southern California,” in Critic of Critics (May 1931), Museum of Natural History, Los Angeles County, Scrapbook #17; Los Angeles Negro Art Association, First Annual Exhibition—Painting and Sculpture, Los Angeles (November 15–17, 1937), Anton

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Blazek Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution’s West Coast Regional Center, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; “Art Exhibit Draws Huge Attendance,” 5-B; cf. Wilson, “How the Invisible Woman Got Herself on the Cultural Map,” 209. 42. “About URC,” University Religious Conference of the University of California Los Angeles, http://www. studentgroups.ucla.edu/urcfriend/about.html (accessed June 23, 2010); Matthews, “Woodard, Beulah Ecton (1895–1955),” 1282. 43. Carla Williams, “Maudelle Bass: A Model Body,” in NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art 21 (Fall 2007): 36–46; John O. Perpener III, African-American Concert Dance: he Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 9. 44. Laurance Hurlburt, “Diego Rivera (1886–1957): A Chronology of His Art, Life and Times,” in Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, ed. Cynthia Newman Helms (New York: Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts in Association with W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), 96, 98. 45. Weston Family Trust, http://www.edward-weston.com/index.htm (accessed June 20, 2010); Diego Rivera quoted in “Maudelle: Creative Dancer,” 1959 performance lyer, George and Maudelle Weston Papers, Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; Williams, “Maudelle Bass: A Model Body,” 36–46. 46. Arthur Miller, “Los Angeles Events and Exhibitions,” Art Digest 14 (August 1, 1950): 29; Wilson, “How the Invisible Woman Got Herself on the Cultural Map,” 201–10; Marie Plummer and Clide Anne Hollmann, So You Want To Be Happy (Santa Monica, CA: M. S. Sen and Associates, 1948), 38, with cover design by Beulah E. Woodard, recorded in Catalog of Copyright Entries (Washington, DC: Library of Congress), 571; Matthews, “Woodard, Beulah Ecton (1895–1955),” 1282; Schrank, “he Art of the City,” 63–69. 47. Schrank, “he Art of the City,” 63–69. 48. Ibid. 49. Virginia S. hatcher, History of Anesthesia With Emphasis on the Nurse Specialist (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1953), 108–31; Steven J. Peitzman, A New & Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College & Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850–1998 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Burke, interview by Benjamin. 50. Selma Burke Papers, Spelman College Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Jennifer Cote, “Burke, Selma. December 3, 1900–August 25, 1995. Sculptor, art educator,” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Ware and Stacey Lorraine Braukman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 93–94; homas Richard Sieg, [“Selma Burke”] in Twin City Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), September 24, 1983. 51. Sieg, [“Selma Burke”]. 52. Cote, “Burke, Selma,” 93–94. 53. Samella S. Lewis, African American Art and Artists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 99. 54. Daniel Schulman, A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2009); Cote, “Burke, Selma,” 93–94; Benjamin, “Burke,” 191–192; “Art Prizes Given at Columbia Show,” New York Times, May 15, 1937, 17.

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55. Michaela and Wolfgang Bauer, Bel Etage: 30th Anniversary of Galerie Bel Etage (Vienna: Bel Etage Kunsthandel, 2005), 82, http://www.beletage.com/herbst05/katalog-05 .pdf (accessed July 4, 2010). 56. Charles Bertsch, Austria 1918–1938, 172; Benjamin, “Burke,” 191–92; King-Hammond, “Quest for Freedom,” 30; Martin Supper, Hans Böhler: Life and Works (Vienna, 1990), 105; im Kinsky Art Auctions Vienna, Kinsky Kunstlerindex, http://www.palais-kinsky.com/de/ suchen/?sinput=asc&show=all (accessed June 29, 2010). 57. Bertsch, Austria 1918–1938, 172; Benjamin, “Burke,” 191–92; King-Hammond, “Quest for Freedom,” 30; Supper, Hans Böhler, 105; im Kinsky Art Auctions Vienna, Kinsky Kunstlerindex, http://www.palais-kinsky.com/de/suchen/?sinput=asc&show=all (accessed June 29, 2010); Cote, “Burke, Selma,” 93–94. 58. “News of Art,” New York Times, February 24, 1939, 25; “News and Notes of Art,” New York Times, December 4, 1941, 30; Elizabeth Langhorne, “he Magus and the Alchemist: John Graham and Jackson Pollock,” American Art 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 48, 55. 59. Edward Alden Jewell, “Negro Art Display Put on Exhibition,” New York Times, December 10, 1941, 23. 60. “Roosevelt Plaque on Exhibit Here,” New York Times, July 25, 1945, 23; “Selma Burke Plaque Going to Washington,” New York Times, August 14, 1945, 17; Sara Graham, “Burke, Selma 1900–1995,” Contemporary Black Biography (1998), Encyclopedia.com, http://www .encyclopedia.com (accessed June 27, 2010); Radio Today,” New York Times, June 16, 1943, 41. 61. Graham, “Burke, Selma 1900–1995.” 62. Jewell, “Negro Art Shown in Two Exhibits,” New York Times, November 6, 1945, 26; Jewell, “Sculpture Rallies,” New York Times, June 2, 1946, X6; Jewell, “Chiely Modern in Idiom,” New York Times, June 17, 1945, X2; “Out of Town,” New York Times, December 31, 1944, X8; Jewell, “Monet Art Show to Help Children,” New York Times, April 11, 1945, 21; “Modernage to Open New Art Gallery,” New York Times, June 7, 1945, 17. 63. Jewell, “Negro Art Shown in Two Exhibits,” New York Times, November 6, 1945, 26; Jewell, “Sculpture Rallies,” New York Times, June 2, 1946, X6; Jewell, “Chiely Modern in Idiom,” New York Times, June 17, 1945, X2; “Out of Town,” New York Times, December 31, 1944, X8; Jewell, “Monet Art Show to Help Children,” New York Times, April 11, 1945, 21; “Modernage to Open New Art Gallery,” New York Times, June 7, 1945, 17. 64. “And Galleries Go On,” New York Times, July 29, 1945, X2. 65. “Roosevelt Plaque on Exhibit Here,” 23. 66. “Unveil Roosevelt Plaque Sept. 24,” New York Times, September 17, 1945, 7. 67. “Plaque to Haywood Unveiled by Widow,” New York Times, October 1, 1945, 2; Howard Devree, “By Groups and One by One,” New York Times, February 17, 1946, 52; “Choral Program Proves a Success,” New York Times, June 3, 1946, 28. 68. “Salmagundi Club Opening Exhibition,” New York Times, January 11, 1946, 19; “News of Art,” New York Times, March 20, 1947, 30; “Art by Villagers Placed on Display,” New York Times, October 25, 1947, 17; “Fate of Six Buildings in Village is Argued,” New York Times, January 23, 1948, 5. 69. Dore Ashton, “Art: he Season Wanes,” New York Times, June 14, 1958, 14.

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70. Devree, “Sculpture Survey: he hird International in Philadelphia,” New York Times, May 15, 1949, X8. 71. Harry Schwalb, “Diary: Without Color,” Art News (September 1994): 27; cf. Verderame, “he Sculptural Legacy of Selma Burke.” 72. “Sculptress Is Married,” New York Times, October 1, 1949, 11; “What Is Going On his Week,” New York Times, March 1, 1936, N12, and March 8, 1936, N9; Herman Kobbe, Housing and Regional Planning (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1941); “Herman Kobbe, 81, Was City Planner,” New York Times, July 23, 1966, 18. 73. Homer Hoyt, untitled book review, Journal of Political Economy 49, no. 6 (December 1941): 926–27. 74. “Herman Kobbe, 81, Was City Planner,” 18. 75. “Sculptor’s Will Challenged by Friends, Niece,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 23, 1995, B9; Phoebe Farris, Katherine Kramer, and Nadine Wasserman, “African American Women Artists,” in Women Artists of Color, ed. Phoebe Farris (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 241–42. 76. Farris, Kramer, and Wasserman, “African American Women Artists”; Women’s Caucus for Art Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts program for ceremonies held in Atlanta, GA, February 2005, p. 5, http://www.nationalwca.org/LAA/LAA2005.pdf (accessed July 3, 2010); Nancy Porter, “Surviving as Women Artists: Two Art History Sessions,” Women’s Studies Newsletter 7, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 13–14; “Events to Mark Pearl S. Buck 100th Birthday,” Morning Call, September 19, 1991, http://articles.mcall. com/1991-09 -19/news/2807947_1_pearl-buck-needy-children-burke-s-mother (accessed July 3, 2010); Verderame, “he Sculptural Legacy of Selma Burke.” 77. Farris, “African American Women Artists,” 243. 78. Cote, “Burke, Selma,” 93–94; Sieg, [“Selma Burke”]. 79. Wayne F. Cooper, ed., he Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912– 1948 (New York: Schoken Books, 1973), 36, 215; McKay Letter to Max Eastman (undated), McKay Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; “A Negro Poet,” Pearson’s Magazine, September 1918, 275–76. 80. Bauer, Bel Etage, 82; Bertsch, Austria 1918–1938, 172; Supper, Hans Böhler, 105; im Kinsky Art Auctions Vienna, Kinsky Kunstlerindex, http://www.palais-kinsky.com/de/ suchen/?sinput=asc&show=all (accessed June 29, 2010); Kobbe’s obituary states that he was remarried to Doris Brown and living in Kingston, Jamaica, at the time of his death at age eighty-one in July 1966; “Herman Kobbe, 81, Was City Planner,” 18. 81. “12 Negroes Honored for Achievements,” 13. 82. Locke, Negro Art Past and Present, 30; Benjamin, “May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller,” 20, 21; King-Hammond, “Jackson, May Howard (1877–1931),” 624. 83. “his Week’s Census,” obituary, Jet Magazine 3, no. 12 (July 28, 1955): 56. 84. Du Bois, “Postscript: May Howard Jackson,” 351.

Chapter SIx

MODERN DANCERS AND AFRICAN AMAZONS: AUGUSTA SAVAGE’S DARING SCULPTURES OF WOMEN, 1929–1930 Theresa Leininger-Miller

Like many African Americans who had traveled to and settled in France since the 1840s, Augusta Savage (1892–1962) (ig. 6.1) was drawn to Paris for multiple reasons—the chance to study at renowned academies, to exhibit at prestigious shows, to view masterpieces irsthand in museums and galleries, to be part of an international black community, and to experience relative freedom and racial tolerance.1 In the 1920s, additional factors increased this attraction to the City of Lights—less expensive transatlantic travel, increased fellowship opportunities, a burgeoning economy, the presence of expatriate African Americans who had fought in World War I, and the growing French appreciation of black culture in general. his was evident not only in the interest in African art irst demonstrated by cubists in the 1910s, but also in the enormous popularity of jazz music and African American performers such as Josephine Baker, who took Paris by storm in “La Revue Nègre” in 1925, and Ada “Bricktop” Smith. While the number of African Americans in Paris (most living in Montmartre or “Mo-mart,” as they called it) was less than thirty in 1924, there were several hundred throughout the city by the end of the decade.2 Some lived there for just a summer or a couple of years, and some settled in France permanently. Of the “Negro colony” in Paris between the wars, Savage was perhaps the most well connected to important igures in Harlem and had the most inancial backing for her sojourn abroad. A resident of Harlem for eight years before she went to France, Savage established her reputation as a serious artist as a teenager in Florida, when she won a prize for her sculpture at the Palm 157

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.. Photograph of Augusta Savage, ca. 1923. Source: Opportunity, June 1923.

Beach County Fair.3 Part of the Great Migration, Savage moved to New York in 1921. She published her poetry in Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, gave public readings of it at the 135th Street branch library, and completed a four-year course of study in sculpture in just three years on a full scholarship at Cooper Union. he charge of racial discrimination directed against a committee of seven white men who denied Savage the opportunity to study at the Fontainebleau School in France in 1923 catapulted the young sculptor to momentary fame and made headlines across the country.4 Several years later, W. E. B. Du Bois arranged a scholarship for her to study in Rome, but Savage could not aford the travel and living expenses.5 Finally in 1929, through the aid of the Urban League, Savage received a two-year fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation supplemented by a Carnegie grant and donations from friends, as well as African American teachers in her home state of Florida, which enabled her to set sail for France at the age of thirty-seven. By September 22, 1929, Savage had settled in an apartment in Montparnasse and found “a wonderful master in the person of M. [Félix] Benneteau[-Desgrois] at 5, rue de Bagneaux,” who agreed to let her work in his studio.6 Benneteau-Desgrois (1879–1967), professor at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, was a noted sculptor who had won the First Grand

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Prix de Rome in 1909 and who exhibited his portraits of actors and politicians regularly at the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Indépendants, and the Société des Artistes Français.7 On November 1, he wrote a progress report for the Rosenwald Foundation stating that Savage had worked conscientiously with him for six weeks and that “the results she has obtained . . . deserve the greatest encouragement.”8 Benneteau believed that Savage was “very gited, very artistic,” and had no doubts that she would be accepted in the Société des Artistes Français in May. None of her works was exhibited there that spring, however. By March 1930, Savage had let Benneteau’s studio to work on her own. She wrote: “I have lately been trying to develop an original technique . . . but I ind that the masters are not in sympathy as they all have their own deinite ideas and usually wish their pupils to follow their particular method, so I have been working alone for the past three or four months only calling in a critic for suggestions which I have found better for me if I am to develop along the line that I have decided on for myself.”9 It is diicult to date Savage’s work abroad because of a dearth of information about the pieces. Nevertheless, based on her statement in June 1930 that she was “trying to develop an original technique,” it appears that Savage’s irst sculptural eforts in Paris before that summer were probably fairly realistic igurative works in clay and plaster, like Bathing Boy, circa 1929–30, and Bust of a Woman, circa 1929–30, both known today by photographs in the Rosenwald Collection of Fisk University. Despite its title, Bathing Boy depicts only the head and bare shoulders of a young white boy who laughs with his head thrown back, his eyes and mouth open wide. It is a fairly unremarkable piece. Bust of a Woman is more expressionist and evokes the romanticism of Bourdelle and Rodin. he piece depicts the bust of a nude young white woman with long wavy hair. Her head is slightly downcast to the let, her let shoulder upraised, and her arms at her sides. She seems to be awakening and emerging from a block of rough-hewn white marble that outlines the area just above her elbows and just below her modest, irm bosom. It is the subject and title of another of Savage’s presumably early works in Paris, Terpsichore at Rest (or Reclining Figure), circa 1929–30 (ig. 6.2), that points toward her engagement with modern culture in that city. he work depicts a seated young nude woman, her let leg bent inward on the ground crossed by her bent, upraised right leg. With her let hand holding her right shin, she has her right hand pressed to the ground, head dropped. he woman’s bobbed hair cascades over her face like a loose helmet, making her racial identity diicult to discern. However, her straight locks, aquiline nose, and small mouth suggest Caucasian or ethnically mixed features. he title of the work refers to the mythical Greek muse of dancing, daughter of Jupiter and

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.. Augusta Savage, Terpsichore (Reclining Woman), ca. 1929, clay, dimensions and location unknown. Credit: Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

Mnemosyne. he name may also refer to the title of a short chapter in he Art of the Dance by the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), published posthumously in 1928. Duncan had astonished audiences in Paris, Berlin, New York, Budapest, and Moscow by dancing barefoot in a revealing, modiied Greek tunic with lowing scarves, to complex music. Her concerts, schools, and dynamic personality greatly inluenced modern dance. he display of her athletic and muscled, yet voluptuous and sinuous, body—almost apparent as nude through her diaphanous clothing in the strong stage lights—signaled a daring new kind of liberation, or modernity, for the female body. Artists whom Savage admired, particularly Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle, adored Duncan and produced numerous images of her. Savage may have emulated them by producing a work with a subject guided by Duncan’s own words. In “Terpsichore,” a chapter in he Art of the Dance, Duncan wrote: “Always the lines of a form truly beautiful suggest movement, even in repose. And always the lines that are truly beautiful suggest repose, even in the switest light. It is this quality of repose in movement that gives to movements their eternal element.”10 Savage’s Terpsichore also suggests movement in rest, as though the igure is only pausing briely. Further, the small breasts, strong limbs, and bobbed hair all echo the features of Duncan’s body. hese features are also evident in numerous representations of la femme moderne or la garçonne, the modern woman who was frequently depicted playing sports.

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.. Augusta Savage, La Citadelle—Freedom, ca. 1930, bronze, 14½" (h). Credit: Permanent Collection, Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Duncan’s inluence may be evident in another one of Savage’s igural works, La Citadelle—Freedom, circa 1930 (ig. 6.3). he small bronze igurine, little more than a foot high, depicts a young woman standing on tiptoe on her right foot, her let foot lung out behind, liting her long, diaphanous tunic in a graceful swirl. She, like the woman named Terpsichore, is of uncertain ethnicity, but her small, pointed nose, thin lips, and straight hair may indicate European ancestry. he woman appears to be saluting something with her let, upraised, arm, her right arm relaxed at her side palm forward, and her head tilted back. his lited gesture of the head, Duncan said, was “one of the commonest igures [sic] in the Bacchic dances.” She continued: “In this movement one senses immediately the Bacchic frenzy possessing the entire body. he movement underlying this gesture is in all nature. he animals, in Bacchic movement, turn back the head: in tropic countries, at night the elephants turn their heads; dogs baying at the moon, lions, tigers. It is the universal

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Dionysiac movement. he waves of the ocean form this line under a storm, the trees in a tempest.”11 With its luid movement and loose gown, the igure evokes the energy and grace of Duncan. Its arc-like silhouette, however, suggests a ship’s masthead or even, given its small size, an automobile-hood ornament. Savage was likely aware of the many stylized uses of la garçonne in modern design, particularly in art deco decorative arts. Yet, what is most intriguing about the piece is its title, which suggests the personiication of freedom—or of Paris—as a woman who represents a citadel, fortress, or refuge to Savage. In Paris, she felt relatively protected from personal and inancial hardship, at least for two years, and free to create what she wished. he work’s title, as well as the igure’s gesture and simple clothing, also evoke Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830). Rather than being a call to arms, however, Savage’s dancing igurine may express an exuberant welcome to France. Savage produced another sculpture of a dancing woman in Paris, which is now known only by its title, Danseur nu, circa 1930.12 Along with a bronze work, Nu, also now known only by its title, which Savage exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français in 1931, it may have been among the irst sculptures of nude black female bodies by an African American artist.13 Since Savage exhibited two works called Martiniquaise, or Woman of Martinique (ca. 1930) in Paris, one in black marble at the Salon d’Automne, and another, in plaster, at the Société des Artists Français in 1931, her model for the earlier nudes may have been Martinican.14 hese works appear to mark the irst time that Savage depicted non-U.S. blacks. he celebration of Josephine Baker’s body beginning in 1925 may have contributed to Savage’s desire to depict beautiful, strong black women, but it was also the availability of black models willing to pose nude that allowed her to depict them with conidence. She informed one writer in France that in New York, “people of color, and in particular black models, refused to pose for her,”15 but she did not say why. he signiicance of Baker’s success in Paris to African Americans and to the French perception of them cannot be denied. Not only was she a willing subject and participant in primitivist fantasies of Africans as carnal, sexual, and savage; her image was further distorted in an efort to capitalize on notions of desire. Witness the racist and sexist images of the performer, caged and simian-like in Paul Colin’s lithograph portfolio, Le Tumulte Noir, circa 1927. As Richard Powell points out: “An almost universal ignorance of Africa, coupled with a legacy of exploitation of African peoples, created an atmosphere in which Westerners—usually taking their cues from Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and Hollywood jungle movies—saw ‘Africa’ as either exotic and passionate or dangerous and fearsome.”16

Augusta Savage’s Daring Sculptures of Women, 1929–1930

.. Augusta Savage, Tête de jeune fille, ca. 1930, plaster (?), dimensions and location unknown. Source: La dépêche africaine, August–September, 1930.

.. Augusta Savage, The Amazon, ca. 1930, clay, dimensions and location unknown. Courtesy Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

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.. Mourning Victory, ca. 1930, clay, dimensions and location unknown. Credit: Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

Despite Baker’s fame, however, none of the African American visual artists in Paris seems to have been directly inspired by her. Virtually none of them, aside from Gwendolyn Bennett, saw her perform. hey did not meet her, did not write about her, and did not depict her. Perhaps they were uncomfortable with her public persona and her primitivist connections, or perhaps they were aware that their conservative white patrons in the United States would have deplored such immodest behavior. As a former Garveyite (or at least someone married to a prominent Garveyite leader, 1923–1924), Savage would have been aware of the United Negro Improvement Association’s movement to redeine Africa and make it a symbol of pride. he most striking works she produced abroad bespeak a strong sense of agency and strength, while incorporating primitivist elements. he three plaster pieces that I call the Amazon series are based on a single, female model of African descent.17 Tête de jeune ille (Head of a Young Girl), circa 1930, known only by a photograph published in La dépêche africaine (ig. 6.4), is the nude bust of a young woman with broad facial features and coarse, curly, short hair. Head turned to the let, she gazes intently into the distance, lips closed. Her self-contained intensity is reminiscent of busts of African

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women by nineteenth-century French Romantic sculptors, such as Nicolas Cordier’s Vénus africaine, 1851, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Pourquoi naître esclave, 1868, both of which were based on the same model, a former slave from the French colonies.18 he model of Tête also appears as he Amazon, circa 1930 (ig. 6.5), a bust of a nude female warrior holding a spear, and in Mourning Victory, circa 1930 (ig. 6.6), as a weaponless, standing nude who gazes at a severed head on the ground. he works are notable for their bold originality, their implied violence, and their signiicance for Savage’s expanding vocabulary of igural types. Although Savage’s Amazon is a fully endowed African woman, Amazons were typically thought of as mythological Greek women who cut of one breast so they could more easily throw javelins or shoot a bow and arrow. Savage may have known about Archibald Dalzel’s book, he History of Dahomey, An Inland Kingdom of Africa (1793), in which the explorer, who described the Dahomean king’s female warriors, was the irst to call them Amazons.19 he volume contains illustrations of the troops. One, titled “Armed Women, with the King at their head, going to War,” depicts the guards topless and with loose loincloths.20 he defenders of royalty and the palace existed since at least the eighteenth century.21 hey were the only thoroughly documented Amazons in world history, and irst referred to by European visitors in the late 1840s.22 he West African kingdom of Dahomey was once called a “small black Sparta” because its residents also cultivated an intense militarism and sense of collectivism.23 Like the Spartans, Dahomean women prided themselves on bodies toughened from childhood by rigorous physical exercise. Yet Spartan females were raised to breed male warriors whereas these Africans were trained to kill them. Originally elite bodyguards to the king, the Dahomeans developed into a force six-thousand strong and were granted semisacred status.24 hey fought valiantly until the kingdom’s inal defeat by France in 1892. Unlike the fantasized Amazons of antiquity, the Amazons of Dahomey never rode horses or any other animal, rarely used shields, and did not cut of their breasts. hey vowed celibacy, lived in royal palaces, and fought in an army with a male majority. Although ultimately ruled by men, the Dahomean Amazons were recognized for their ierce, intrepid battle skills.25 Savage’s Amazon is a nude half igure, truncated at the waist. Her expression is similar to that of Tête de jeune ille, and her head is turned to the let, but with chin slightly uplited. he warrior appears to be listening while standing at attention. Her breasts are full and round, but give no indication of nipples. Her let arm hangs at rest and she grasps a roughly modeled spear or pointed stick in her right hand. Dahomean Amazons mainly fought with

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muskets, clubs, and machetes, but did occasionally carry spears, lances, or assegais, which were light wooden javelins tipped with iron.26 Savage’s spearwielding warrior is a far cry from typical French allegories of Africa, such as Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère, 1872 in the Luxembourg Gardens. Here, the personiied continent—whose features are not caricatured as are those of the blacks found in most European sculpture— is distinguished from her European, Chinese, and Native American sisters by a broken chain on one ankle, a reminder of slavery as well as a signal of liberation. Savage’s Amazon never would have been a slave and Savage, an independent woman characterized by strength, boldness, perseverance, and nonreliance on men, may have identiied with the subject personally. Contemporary scholars view the Greek myth of the Amazons as an elaborate cautionary tale. In their patriarchal society, Greek men ruled, fought, hunted, farmed, and controlled marriage and reproduction. hey saw their roles as natural, orderly, and civilized. Women were expected to obey, marry, keep house, rear children, and be modest and tame. Amazon society turned the status quo upside down, and appeared unnatural, disorderly, uncivilized, barbaric—and therefore doomed. It was a warning of what could happen if gender roles and values were reversed and women took charge.27 One wonders what other aspects of West African Amazons might have intrigued Savage. Clearly, she, too, was challenging gender roles in a number of ways. She let home at an early age to pursue a career of which her father disapproved, attended college, allowed others to care for her young daughter while she traveled abroad alone as a widow, and enjoyed the company of male friends (Hale Woodruf, Palmer Hayden, Countee Cullen, and others). And she worked in sculpture, a ield largely dominated by men. Yet the artist was not as stoic as the Amazons. Mourning Victory may express Savage’s discomfort with violence, and her anguish over death and separation. By the time she came to Paris, she had lost three husbands, several siblings, an infant daughter, and her father, and she let behind her irst daughter. But the depiction of a nude woman standing in contrapposto staring down at a severed adult male head gives few clues to its identity. Could the woman in Mourning Victory represent Salome, the New Testament igure who danced for the head of John the Baptist? Or is she Judith of the Apocrypha, who saved the city of Bethulia by cutting of the head of Holofernes? Could she be an Amazon reckoning with the violence and destruction of hand-to-hand combat? One possible source for this image appears in an illustration in Frederick E. Forbes’s Dahomey and the Dahomans (London, 1851). Here a barefoot but clothed Amazon musketeer, a club and dagger tucked in her belt, holds a gun in one hand and a severed head by the hair in the other.

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.. The Call, ca. 1930, clay, dimensions and location unknown. Credit: Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

Beheading was the usual method of execution in Dahomey, and Amazons frequently decapitated and emasculated their victims with machetes or large, powerful razors. hey either presented the enemies’ heads and genitals to their leaders, or stuck the trophies on wooden stakes, iron spikes, hooks, or forks.28 Some outer palace walls were adorned with the skulls of slain enemy soldiers. he woman in Savage’s Mourning Victory does not appear to be a bloodthirsty or cruel warrior, however. She bears no arms and wears no battle gear. Head hung in apparent sorrow, she gazes at the face of the severed head, in an attitude of weariness and vulnerablity. Her shoulders are slumped, her arms hang limply, her hips are tucked under, and her right leg is bent under the weight of her body and the moment of reckoning. Was the struggle worth the sacriice? Was this truly a triumph? he Amazon series represents a signiicant aspect of West African history. Images of Amazons became widely familiar in France through Dahomean ethnographic exhibitions at the Jardin d’Acclimation in 1891 and 1893, and when “100 Dahomeans and 25 Amazons” appeared at the 1892 Casino de Paris. Given this history, it is not surprising that the French would have

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responded to Savage’s work with interest. Savage apparently received a gold medallion for an “African igure” displayed at the Colonial Exposition of 1931. However, there is no evidence that her work was exhibited in the ine arts section.29 In May 1930, Savage sent photographs of the Amazon series and another work, he Call, circa 1930 (ig. 6.7), to the Rosenwald Foundation as proof of her artistic progress. he Call portrays a young nude black man, his genital area discreetly covered by a cloth draped over his let leg between his spread thighs. Leaning forward and listening intently, hands pressed behind his hips on the boxlike seat, he stares at a distant horizon. his work appears to be a more developed version of Savage’s he New Negro (1927), another response to philosopher Alain Locke’s call for racially representative art, as outlined in his seminal anthology of the same name (1925). Pleased with the photographs of her work, George Robert Arthur, the African American associate for Negro welfare for the fund, informed Savage that the Rosenwald Foundation had decided to renew her fellowship for another year at one thousand, eight hundred dollars. He wrote to her “as brother in the bond,” on May 28, 1930, asking her to continue depicting black people: I hope you will continue to work primarily with negro [sic] models. I hope also that you will try to develop something original, born out of a deep spirituality which you, as a Negro woman, must feel in depicting modern Negro subjects. I even hope that you will not become too much imbued with European standards of technique, if they are going to kill the other something which in my opinion some Negro will eventually give to American art, maybe in sculpture, maybe in music, painting or literature. At any rate, know the culture and technique of other races, but do not simply be a copy of them at the expense of originality of your own. In my opinion there is just one ield in which the Negro has an equal chance with the white man in American life and that ield is art. If he follows standards of even the white Americans, which in turn have copied them from Europe, then the Negro can at best be but a bad copy of the copy. Maybe that is the reason why so much bad work is put out by our men.30

Savage was pleased with Arthur’s “brotherly advice,” and wrote to him that she was “glad that you are of my way of thinking.”31 But Savage also informed him that she was timid about showing her latest piece (identity unknown) because she was working in a “quite diferent” style and was concerned about its reception. Nevertheless, she considered it her “best efort so far” because several artists had been “almost unanimous in their praise.” hey urged her to

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.. Augusta Savage, Divinité nègre, ca. 1930, plaster (?), dimensions and location unknown. Source: La Dépêche Africaine, August–September 1930.

have the piece cast in bronze and exhibited. Savage explained, “It is African in feeling but modern in design, but whatever else might be said it is original.”32 Savage may have been referring to the Amazon series or to her Divinité négre, circa 1930 (ig. 6.8), a small igurine in sharp planes with a four-sided woman’s head, four folded legs that make a X, and four uplited arms sustaining a globe.33 he work may evoke an African power igure that Savage might have seen at the Musée de l’homme, but it does not seem to be a copy of a single work of African sculpture. Instead, she claimed it was “a black divinity born of an imagination nourished by legends and readings about Africans”34 (it is not known which African legends Savage had read). Aside from Palmer Hayden’s well-known painting, Fétiche et Fleurs, circa 1931–32, itself little more than an acknowledgment of the vogue for things African according to Hayden, Divinité nègre is one of the few works produced by an African American artist as a literal response to Locke’s directive to study the example of African art for inspiration.35 However, Savage would later claim that she was “opposed to the theory of critics that the American Negro should produce African art.”

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She emphasized the culture that black and white Americans shared: “For the last 300 years we have had the same cultural background, the same system, the same standard of beauty as white Americans. In art schools we draw from Greek casts. We study the small mouth, the proportions of the features and limbs. It is impossible to go back to the primitive art for our models.”36 Yet Savage added that “there are certain traits and inherent racial characteristics which occur frequently in Negro artists’ work which may approach the primitive,” including “the sense of rhythm and spontaneous imagination.”37 Divinité nègre also appears Buddha-like in the pose of the legs, and multiple limbs are typical of Hindu sculpture. It seems that Savage invented her own “African” deity using multiple sources. No doubt Savage was familiar with the work of sculptors other than Carpeaux, Rodin, and Bourdelle in Paris. Her style was more generally akin to theirs than to the cubism of Jacques Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkine, the classicism of Elie Nadelman, the art deco found in the wood carving of Chana Orlof, the modernism in the daring combination of a formal hat and gloves with a nude male torso in Oscar Miestchaninof ’s Man in a Top Hat (1922), or the sleek, aerodynamic forms of Brancusi. Yet her vision of New Negro art, while stylistically derivative of European art, was fresh and original in its depiction of black people and culture and reairmed by her personal encounters with those from the African diaspora in France. By 1931, ater two years in Paris, Savage had run out of grant money. hrough the aid of Frederick Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation, she received the position of teacher of sculpture at the Boykin Art School in Greenwich Village. She would sustain herself in various teaching jobs through the 1930s—as founder and director of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crats; instructor for an adult education project of the State University of New York; assistant supervisor for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project in the Uptown Art Laboratory; and director of the Harlem Community Art Center. Many of her students would become well-known artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Norman Lewis, William Artis, and Ernest Crichlow. In 1934, she was the irst African American elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Savage continued to exhibit her work, too, at various galleries and museums in New York and New Jersey, and she received a commission to sculpt a sixteen-foot-tall plaster piece for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. his sculpture, named ater the “Negro national anthem,” honored the git of African American music to the world by depicting a row of choir singers whose robes make up the strings of a harp, standing behind a genulecting man who humbly presents a bar of music of the hymn. Seen by over ive million visitors

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to the fair, Lit Every Voice and Sing gained Savage wide renown and was the high point of her career. Stylistically conservative, its message of humility, dignity, and community was pleasing to both blacks and whites. he same could not be said of the body of work Savage produced in Paris. In 1940, African American art historian James A. Porter wrote: “From 1929 to 1932 there occurred a leveling of in her production. his was the result of the inluence of studies abroad when she set aside her own convictions to learn techniques and to carve subjects that communicate a certain joie de vivre—but which also happen to be trivial. Not until she returned from Europe did she recapture the moods in which she created ‘Gamin’ and the remarkable head of W. E. B. Du Bois, now in the 135th Street New York Public Library—two productions that are truly masterful.”38 Since the only works that seem to express this “certain joie de vivre” are the Bathing Boy, La Citadelle—Freedom, and the bookends Savage made for Cullen, it seems as though Porter was unaware of the remarkable strength and diversity of the other work Savage made abroad. In France, Savage’s sculpture became more expressionistic and modern, and her subject matter included genre works, anonymous portrait busts, African-inspired igures of black men and women, a nude Amazon-woman series, exotic animals, modern dancers, and igures symbolic of emotional and physical states of being. In the images of women that Savage produced in Paris, particularly her modern dancers and African Amazons, she explored the boundaries of race, gender, and culture in sophisticated ways that may have confounded both black and white viewers who did not know how to deal with them. Rather than acknowledge the cultural content, symbolism, and deeply contemplative, serious expressions of the pieces, many ignored them ater Savage’s return to New York. Perhaps disheartened by both the lack of attention to her most original work and the ready support of her more conventional sculpture, Savage retired to a life of obscurity in Saugerties, New York, in 1945. African American artists faced complex and oten contradictory directives about racial imagery from black and white jurors, critics, and patrons, both in France and in the United States, and many responded in ways that they thought would strike a chord with their various audiences. While Savage wrestled with those issues, she also seems to have been more willing to take a chance on creating unique images that broke conventions and were not immediately or easily “read.” She did something radically diferent from her peers. Some of Savage’s colleagues depicted heads of African women identiied only by the name of their people (e.g., Nancy Elizabeth Prophet’s Congolais or Congolaise, ca. 1931, and Richmond Barthé’s Mangbetu, n.d.). Yet Savage was the only one of her generation—and perhaps even of all twentieth-century

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African American artists—to experiment with depictions of African women’s bodies; that is, the Dahomean Amazon. Living in Paris gave her the freedom and milieu in which to explore artistic directions that she likely would not have considered in the United States. For Savage, the City of Light was irresistible, as an unequivocal muse and as a place of pivotal signiicance. Notes 1. For broad studies of African Americans in Paris, see Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Milin, 1996). 2. Stovall, Paris Noir, 39, 46. 3. Eric D. Walrond, “Florida Girl Shows Amazing Git for Sculpture,” publication unknown (ca. 1922): page unknown. Schomburg Center, clipping ile. 4. See, for example, Cleveland G. Allen, “Our Young Negro Artists,” Opportunity 1 (January 1923): 16; William A. Byrd, “he Color-Line in Art” (letter to editor), New York World, April 30, 1923, page unknown; “Famous Artists Draw Color Line Against Student,” Negro World, Saturday, May 5, 1923, 3; “Harding Asked to Intercede in Exclusion Case,” New York World, May 10, 1923, page unknown; and Augusta Savage, “Augusta Savage on Negro Ideals” (letter to the editor), New York World, May 20, 1923, page unknown, SCRBC clipping ile. 5. See “Negro Artist Fight Moves to France,” New York World, May 12, 1926, page unknown, and Lester A. Walton, “Negro Girl Gets Fund to Study Art Abroad,” publisher unknown (1926): page unknown. SCRBC clipping ile. 6. “Negro Artist,” page unknown. 7. E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintures, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et des tous les pays par un groupe d’écrivains spécialistes français et étrangers (Paris: Librairie Gründ, 1976), 627. 8. Benneteau[-Desgrois] to Rosenwald Foundation (November 1, 1929), RA/FU. 9. Savage to Arthur (June 15, 1930), RA/FU. he critic was Monsieur Brunaleski (further identity unknown). Savage was never able to study with Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929), as she had hoped, because the sculptor had passed away on October 1, 1929, just weeks ater she arrived in Paris. Savage also later stated that she had worked for one year privately under the direction of Charles Despiau (1874–1946) and Madame Hadjii (life dates unknown) at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Savage did not indicate the nature of the relationship, and since the school does not have records from this time, it is not possible to verify the information. Savage, Rosenwald review form (March 18, 1936), RA/FU. 10. Isadora Duncan, he Art of the Dance (New York: heatre Arts Books, 1977), 90. 11. Duncan, Art of the Dance, 91. 12. Paulette Nardal, “Une femme sculpteur noire,” La dépêche africaine (August–September 1930): 4. If this work depicted a woman, however, the title should have been Danseuse Nu. his piece may be the same one as Nu.

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13. Danseur nu, #3963. Catalogue du Salon, Société des Artistes Français (Paris: Imprimerie Georges Lang, 1931), 204. 14. While no reproductions of these sculptures seem to exist and both are now missing, Savage’s portrait study of a Martinican boy’s head in black Belgian marble (ca. 1930, location unknown), may give an indication of what they looked like. See a reproduction of the head in Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 180. 15. Nardal, “Une femme sculpteur noire,” 3. My translation. 16. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, 59–60. 17. Nardal, “Une femme sculpteur noire,” wrote that “Augusta Savage dealt in the round with a series of busts of the Amazons [the people], with whom history seems obsessed,” 4. My translation. 18. Hugh Honour, he Image of the Black in Western Art IV, 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 166. 19. “he rear he composed of a great number of women, armed like soldiers, having their proper oicers, and furnished like regular troops, with drums, colours, and umbrellas, making at a distance a very formidable appearance.” Archibald Dalzel, he History of Dahomy, An Inland Kingdom of Africa, Compiled From Authentic Memoirs (1793) (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1967), 55. 20. Dalzel, History of Dahomey, reprint London, 1967, opp. p. 54. 21. Dalzel, History of Dahomey, 27. 22. Stanley B. Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta: he Women Warriors of Dahomey (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 11. 23. Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey, ed. C. W. Newbury (New York: Praeger, 1966), 111, quoted in Alpern, Amazons, 37. 24. Alpern, Amazons, 47, 73. 25. Alpern, Amazons, 11, 12. 26. Alpern, Amazons, 12, 68. 27. Alpern, Amazons, 8. 28. Alpern, Amazons, 34. For further documentation of beheadings, see also 45, 65, 77, 103, 107, 172, 177, 194, 195. 29. Using an elusive article from the Chicago Whip as their source, several authors write that Savage executed an African igure in conjunction with the exposition (possibly a work from the Amazon series), but disagree on whether the piece received a medallion itself or whether it was selected for medallion reproduction. Hope Finkelstein, “Augusta Savage: Sculpting the African American Identity” (M.A. thesis, City University of New York, 1990), 21, and Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 172. Most likely, the sculpture, if included in the exposition, was part of a natural history diorama. Could one of Savage’s “Amazons” conveniently have been viewed as generically African for the purposes of the exhibition? Or had Savage brought along her now-lost sculpture, African Savage, which she had created in New York in the mid-1920s, in the hopes of exhibiting it in Paris? 30. Arthur to Savage (May 28, 1930), RA/FU. 31. Savage to Arthur (June 15, 1930), RA/FU.

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32. Savage to Arthur (June 15, 1930). 33. Published in Nardal, “Une femme sculpteur noire,” 3. 34. Nardal, “Une femme sculpteur noire,” 3. 35. Locke, “he Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” he New Negro, 267. 36. “Noted Sculptress Expects Distinct, But Not Diferent, Racial Art,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 29, 1936, 1:5. 37. “Noted Sculptress.” 38. James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 138–39.

Chapter SeveN

THE WIDE-RANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF LOÏS MAILOU JONES Susan Earle

Loïs Mailou Jones looms large in the pantheon of artists whose roots are traced to the Harlem Renaissance. Her vision and accomplishments placed her in a special position, as did her innovative approach and her range of artistic talents—even if she rarely received proper recognition, especially early on. In the face of the inherent challenge to obtain an education and be able to work as an African American, and a woman, in an oten hostile, whitedominated world, Loïs Jones remained unlinching and undeterred; she was deeply motivated to create and to make art, starting at a young age. Her career took various paths in response to her environment and the interests she was able to develop, despite the doors that were closed to her. Her background was more forgiving and fortunate than that of several of her African American peers, and yet she still struggled simply due to being a black body in a white world. Although she never felt satisied, she managed to achieve a tremendous amount, and she also kept pace with the times. he works that she created in Harlem in 1934, and before and ater, inspired by the ideas of the New Negro arts movement or the Harlem Renaissance, hold an important place in the history of twentieth-century art. he career of Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was distinctive for several reasons, including the variety of her artistic output, the places she lived, the people she met, and her willingness to adapt her visual approach to the content or subject at hand. he reach and extent of her achievements would be impressive for any artist, but especially for one who had to contend with what Jones did as a result of her race and gender. Her success was due in part to the 175

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, Sedalia, North Carolina, 1929, watercolor on paper, 13¾" x 19¾"; Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina. Promised gift of Drs. Chris and Marilyn Chapman. Photography by David Ramsey.

range of work that she produced, beginning with clothing and textile design and ending with bold and emblematic paintings based on African motifs, with considerable variety in between. Jones inspired artists and others with the versatility of her work: from modern dance costumes to watercolors portraying her various environments (see ig. 7.1) to upholstery fabrics carried by top design irms to paintings of Haitian children, and, inally, to images derived from her travels in France, Haiti, and Africa that inluenced the international black arts movement in the 1960s and 1970s (see also ig. 7.8). his essay will consider several topics related to Jones’s work and her involvement with the New Negro arts movement, or the Harlem Renaissance, with a focus on her early activities including her textile designs and illustrations; her artistic and intellectual sources; her roots in Boston and Oak Blufs; her time in Harlem; her work with choreographers in the context of African design; and her connections with other artists. Jones was particularly important for melding diferent aspects of her training into a unique and varied whole and for responding to the cultural needs of her time, which she did in part through the versatility of her artistic style. My aim is to consider aspects of her work that have been less well studied and to aid in the process of claiming the place in the history of art that Loïs Jones deserves.1

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Jones’s work developed out of a unique set of circumstances and hardwon accomplishments, marked by a strong commitment to education and an enduring engagement with African motifs and aesthetics. Like the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West, who would become Jones’s good friend, Loïs Mailou Jones was born and raised in Boston. Eventually her father, homas Vreeland Jones, earned a law degree at night, which may have boosted her family’s opportunities. he family lived on the top loor of a commercial building in downtown Boston that Loïs’s father supervised, at 28 School Street across from City Hall. he immediate environment was relentlessly urban: the roof of the building was Loïs Jones’s childhood playground, surrounded by the city’s smoke and grittiness.2 Her parents, especially her mother, Carolyn Dorinda Adams Jones, encouraged her interest in art from an early age. “As a child, I was always drawing,” Loïs Jones said. “I loved color.”3 She attended the High School for the Practical Arts in Boston from 1919 to 1923, majoring in art.4 Her talents in drawing were so marked that, every day ater high school ended and on many Saturdays, Jones supplemented her studies by taking vocational drawing classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. According to Jones, her work in these drawing classes combined with her portfolio from high school led to her earning a four-year scholarship to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts or the Museum School, as it is also called, for her bachelor of ine arts degree. here she continued her classes in drawing and decided to major in design. As the only African American student at the Museum School, Jones did not have an easy time. he scholarship carried prestige but also exacted a demeaning price, requiring her to clean the classrooms in exchange. Despite these challenges, however, Jones excelled in all areas. While attending the Museum School, she took evening classes in vocational drawing at the Massachusetts Normal School, now called the Massachusetts College of Art. She earned a bachelor of ine arts degree with honors from the Museum School and a certiicate from the Massachusetts Normal School in the same year, 1927, having juggled both programs concurrently. She received the Nathaniel hayer Prize for excellence in design. Jones enjoyed early success as an artist and designer. While she was still in high school, her talent was such that, on top of her studies, she was singled out to apprentice under Grace Ripley, who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and ran her own design studio. At Ripley Studio, Jones designed costumes and masks for the cuttingedge Ted Shawn School of Dance, also called the Denishawn Dance Company. he Ted Shawn School of Dance was founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by Boston-born Ruth St. Denis and Kansas City native Ted Shawn. Both Shawn

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and St. Denis were pioneers of modern dance: Shawn created an all-male dance troupe, and St. Denis developed the idea of matching the forms of the dance to the sounds of the music, or music visualization. Both dancers were inspired by ideas and forms from other cultures. Shawn even wrote a book on North African folk dances.5 Perhaps Jones connected with Shawn over shared ideas. he project for the dance company provided a formative experience for Jones, and she cited Ripley as a mentor as a result. Jones helped to design costumes and especially masks for Denishawn dance performances, creating work that would be generative within her output for years to come. For inspiration and sources, she looked to African masks and other traditional African forms. his was her irst serious study of such material and a pivotal step in her art. Jones’s use of African masks and motifs in this context allowed her to immediately apply this research, in combination with design principles, directly to live-action masks and costumes, laying a crucial foundation for her subsequent work and thought. According to Jones, her work with masks at this juncture also aided in the later creation of her cover image for Opportunity magazine in 1928; her painting Les Fétiches of 1937, painted while she was in Paris; and the enduring and important presence of the African mask in many of her subsequent paintings.6 he mask form and its appropriation into painting would become one of her most important contributions, especially within the realms of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement.7 Unfortunately, there do not seem to be photographs that identify the costumes that Jones and Ripley created for Shawn.8 Jones’s work with Ripley and for Ted Shawn during high school nurtured an interest in clothing and textile design. In 1926, while a student at the Boston Museum School, Jones won a ity-dollar prize for the most artistic and original design for a dress in rayon. his is quite an accomplishment, as she was not only still a student, but rayon was also a brand-new material to work with—not to mention the fact that none of this would have happened had the judges known that Jones was African American. he prize was juried by judges from the Shepherd Stores in Boston and the Rayon Institute of America in New York, who together sponsored the competition.9 Perhaps someday Jones’s rayon dress design will surface and we will be able to study this part of her work more thoroughly.10 In a diferent track from the textile designs, Jones created an interesting body of drawings and paintings while at the Museum School that developed from a course that she took on “museum research.” It is not clear what her fellow students produced from the assignments or overall course content, but Loïs Jones generated some fascinating works, such as Buddha (1927,

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watercolor, 30½ x 27 inches, collection Mr. and Mrs. Daniel L. Bailey). his watercolor painting portrays a textile or wallpaper design that could be an original by Jones, covering the wall behind a sculpture of a Buddha. he Buddha, lanked by various small jars, is seated on a patterned rug that forms another sculptural presence, a wedge shape that draws us in to the space. Together these objects combine into a kind of still-life portrait that is quiet and contemplative. At the same time the grouping of diferent objects and forms seems to be a study in or meditation on museum collecting. he various forms, cultures, textures, and materials are blended into a balanced and cohesive whole in a sophisticated structure. Bridging the institutional and the personal, the painting acknowledges the strengths of the Museum of Fine Arts collections and the Museum School curriculum while also conveying a strong aesthetic and a distinctive and innovative approach. A complexity of composition and a layering of objects in space would become a hallmark of Jones’s work as it developed. he sense of pattern manipulation in this watercolor could stem from Jones’s training in textile design—and it is on a par with some of the top textile designs of the day. he patterns may also be a metaphor for the kind of personal (or institutional) interior decorating that had become more common for African American families by the 1920s. An increase in the capacity to decorate one’s home environment paralleled a shit, within (artistic) representation, toward still-life painting and interior scenes among African American artists, who sought to create and portray their domestic spaces for the irst time, according to recent research by Lowery Sims.11 Horace Pippin, William H. Johnson, and others produced various sorts of still-life paintings in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. One still-life by Johnson from the early 1920s, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, took a somewhat traditional approach, although Johnson would develop more unconventional and stylized still-life paintings later.12 he setting of Jones’s painting is intriguing, as it suggests an art museum rather than a domestic interior. he planar structure and mixing of patterns is quite striking. In this work and others, Jones reinvents the still-life tradition by infusing it with fresh ideas from her design training and from an astute sense of the ways that objects (and humans) interrelate. She was impressively undeterred by the generally all-white museum world. And although she would soon depart from her design background, in her desire to gain greater recognition by being a painter and thus ailiated with “high” art, in this and other works that she created based on her contact with objects in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, she found a concept and composition that was rich with ideas and potential new directions. Jones would loosen up her compositional structure for still-life paintings within a decade, especially in

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works from her irst year in Paris such as Les Pommes Vertes and Les Fétiches. Still-life painting would remain important to her throughout her career, as evidenced by an exhibition of works in still-life that she had just two years before she died, in 1996.13 In 1927, just months ater graduating from college, Jones had an exhibition of her textile designs at La Bohème Tea Room on West hirteenth Street in New York City, sponsored by Mrs. J. Mardo Brown. What an impressive accomplishment at that juncture, and an indication of the strength of her talent. he fact that she showed her textile samples and designs in a New York venue at this early point in her career suggests both Jones’s precociousness and the signiicance of her work within its immediate milieu. In 1927 and 1928, Jones went on to complete graduate work in the Boston area, at the Designers Art School under textile designer Ludwig Frank, followed by study at Harvard University.14 Apparently well known in his day, Frank had come to the United States from his native Germany to teach design, following a somewhat similar path to that of Winold Reiss, a German designer who founded a school in New York that the African American artist Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) attended in the mid-1920s. Undaunted by racial barriers or prejudice, Jones enrolled in the summer session at Harvard University in 1928, another indicator of her conidence, her growing reputation, her relentless quest for learning, and her ambition. Jones studied European modernist textiles under Frank and learned how to make pattern designs that were eventually sold all over the country. Among the textile designs that she created at this time was a Cretonne called Totem Poles (1928, tempera on paper, 17 x 17 inches, Estate of Loïs Jones; ig. 7.2), along with numerous other notable patterns. Totem Poles shows a dense, rhythmic design that combines several totem pole motifs with other printed elements, including a mother and child standing or walking, and abstract, headdress-like forms decorated with concentric zigzag lines. he colors are bold yet carefully harmonized, and include red, orange, yellow, black, green, pink, and purple. he layering efect suggests music, and hints of pictorial narratives, all skillfully subsumed into a packed yet readable design. he blending of patterns with strong forms places this design at the center of modernist textile eforts and art deco themes. he totem pole motifs may relect Jones’s interest in Native American designs and African patterns. hey may also indicate her “self-conscious involvement with attempts to establish an ‘American’ design vocabulary,” according to design historians Pat Kirkham and Shauna Stallworth.15 Another textile design, with a red bird motif, is notable for its alternating rhythm of an avian motif with large leaf forms. he red birds are strong and

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, Totem Poles, 1928, tempera, 17" x 17"; Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.

fanciful, with a plumage Mohawk on their heads and wings edged with a scalloped border in white and black. he artfully integrated curving forms that envelop bird and leaf are punctuated with various stripes and lines to form an alluring whole, set against a pale-pink background. What a colorist indeed Loïs Jones was. One can see why so many books about her work refer to her life “in color.” And what a striking pattern this is, even among the wealth of wonderful modern or art deco designs of the 1920s and 1930s.

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he patterns that Jones created were at the forefront of art deco textile design (the term art deco derives from the historic exhibition of decorative arts in Paris in 1925). Like Jones, many of the most innovative textile designers were also painters or “ine” artists, and their work imaginatively integrated recent artistic landmarks such as cubism. heir patterns incorporated everything from looping rollercoasters to exotic birds to everyday items like moth balls, in glowing color and layered with pattern, all to rich and impressive efect.16 he upsurge of interest in fabric design and interior decoration within the broader context of modernism and art deco produced a powerful synchronicity, with Jones’s designs claiming a place in this creative vortex. Her printed textiles of the 1920s connect with art deco ideas and are in line with cutting-edge trends in Europe and the United States in textile design— and yet her name has been essentially erased from this history. None of the books consulted on these topics have included any reference to Loïs Jones. And yet her designs are right at home with all the others and even surpass quite a few in their complexity and ambition. Jones likely absorbed ideas from the still-dominant French designers while creating compositions that were very much her own: boldly conceived; layered in ideas, forms, and motifs; and distinctive in their nuanced command of color and pattern. Jones’s patterns have some commonality with designs by the renowned Parisian couturier Paul Poiret (1879–1944), although Poiret’s are more decorative and based on repetition of a single motif. Perhaps Jones had seen his work, which was shown in department stores in New York and Boston in the 1920s. he American painter Charles Burchield created wallpaper designs in the 1920s that have some ainities with Jones’s textile designs. In an interesting twist on the near-narrative content of some modernist and art deco textile designs, some of Jones’s textiles may have carried subtle, hidden messages, just like her masterful illustrations for children’s books (see igs. 7.5 and 7.6). For example, in Totem Poles, the repeating, small motif of a mother and child walking depicts igures with dark skin color. Perhaps this was one of the ways in which Jones worked, visually, to integrate and normalize the concept of people of color being portrayed and included in everyday American life, creatively helping to dislodge the persistent idea that “white” or no color was the norm. he possible messages and subtle racial politics suggested in this textile and in her many children’s book illustrations perhaps serve as (unwitting?) metaphors for integration. hese images naturalize the role of black skin in society and in visual representation in all media, including fabric designs and poetry books intended for children of all colors. At the time that she made these textile patterns, from about 1927 to 1935, Jones was working as a freelance designer, invisibly and without her name

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attached, for two prominent design houses: F. A. Foster in Boston and F. Schumacher and Company in New York. She sold her Ganges pattern to the New York branch of the F. A. Foster Company. In doing so, she broke with expectations that such work was reserved for white designers. However, she likely never told the design houses that she was African American. She hid her identity in order to get work accepted and was also understandably frustrated that her name was always erased from her designs. When Jones won the 1926 prize for her rayon dress, did the judges have any idea that the designer was a twenty-one-year-old African American college girl from Boston? Probably not. Already Jones was learning that textile and fashion design forced anonymity. A double-edged sword, as Lowery Stokes Sims recently called it, anonymity allowed designers relative ease of access to the ield, but this oten also meant a lack of individual recognition. Generally, female designers of the day remained unnamed, and they seldom succeeded at getting their names attached to their work—only the pattern name if they were lucky. his was very diferent for men, such as Poiret, whose name was always associated with his work.17 Poiret positioned himself, at least in part, through his connections with the (male) world of avantgarde art. He had the artist Raoul Dufy contribute to his designs, and he had Edward Steichen photograph them. (Steichen himself made photographs during the 1920s that were made into textile designs, many for the Stehli Silks Corporation.)18 Did the anonymity of design open it to women and women of color? Anonymity itself makes it hard to answer this question. At least one other African American woman, Anna Russell Jones, also created textile designs at this time. But Loïs Jones’s patterns tended to be more ambitious and drew from a range of sources while asserting a strong originality. Even the work of higher-proile African American female fashion designers has oten gone unrecognized, despite the importance of their contributions. hese include not only the wealth of their dress designs intended for African American buyers, but also their work for white clients. How many people know that the silk wedding gown for Jacqueline Bouvier’s wedding to John F. Kennedy in 1953 was the creation of an African American designer, Ann Lowe?19 Or, similarly, that almost a hundred years earlier, a former slave named Elizabeth Hobbs Kechley designed beautiful velvet gowns for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln in 1863?20 Jones told the story of seeing Ganges or another one of her patterns in a shop window. She was thrilled with this exposure but also frustrated that she was not credited by name as the designer. Anonymity was a standard practice, as the designer’s name was never published with the design. But this did not

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sit well with Jones. She went inside the shop to remark on this, only to be greeted with incredulity that she could possibly be the designer, as a “colored girl.” She wanted her name to go down in history, as she stated several times. She therefore decided that she would have to be a painter instead, in order to become known. Nonetheless, fashion design (along with textile design) became an important part of Jones’s creative output, and one that might have helped her earn a living, had she kept it up. ✦

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he intellectual and artistic sources that contributed to Jones’s development were various. hese sources included her sojourns in Harlem during the 1930s and 1940s; her Boston origins; her seminal year in Paris in 1937; her exposure to the writings and theories of scholar Alain Locke (who, among other things, taught at Howard University as did Jones); and her many visits to Haiti to teach, study, and paint, with and without her Haitian-born husband, Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël. Some of these inluences on Jones’s development are well known, like her year in Paris; others have been less carefully considered. Her Boston origins distinguish Jones, and they had a signiicant impact on her work in various ways. Jones’s skills and interest in textile design may have stemmed in part from the strong tradition and prominence of textile production in Boston, which provided both roots and contemporary context to Jones’s work in textiles. Boston had been the center of the U.S. textile industry since the early 1800s when Francis Cabot Lowell had smuggled details of textile factory engineering out of Britain. Mills dotted riversides in factory towns throughout New England, their machines manned mostly by rural farm girls seeking better lives. Although alternative energy sources freed the mills from water power and began the disbursement of the industry in the early 1900s, it was not until the depression of the 1930s that New England textile manufacturing was fatally crippled. he Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a great resource for Jones growing up, has a strong textile collection, begun when the city was at the center of U.S. textile production. Boston, which over the years had been a center for whaling, shipping, and other industries that thrived on its maritime location, was cosmopolitan and well connected with the rest of the world, especially Europe and East Asia. his contact with the world brought the city wealth, sophistication, and luxury goods, such as art objects and other collectibles. he Museum of Fine Arts, which housed the art school Jones attended, was among the top handful of U.S. art museums, giving Jones access to a rich visual archive. She describes spending time there looking at paintings by John Singer Sargent and Winslow

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Homer, among others. Also in Boston, Jones probably had some opportunities to see and study African art, including in private collections and at an exhibition of African art displayed at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in 1934. Boston may have had a more elitist and stratiied social structure than many other cities. But somehow the social milieu of Boston did not totally hamper Loïs Jones, despite the constant challenges of racial prejudice. For Jones, Boston was the site of important friendships, such as the lifelong one that she formed with writer Dorothy West. Jones and West shared many things, including their Boston origins, attending college in Boston, and family summer homes next door to each other on nearby Martha’s Vineyard.21 Both women would eventually be counted as the longest living women of the Harlem Renaissance, and they died within months of each other in their nineties, in 1998. While a number of artists and writers working in Harlem in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s came from small or distant towns—like Aaron Douglas from Topeka, Kansas, and Zora Neale Hurston from Eatonville, Florida—Jones and Dorothy West were among the only key igures from a place as cosmopolitan as Boston. From the list of exhibiting artists published in the catalogue for the exhibition of the work of Negro Artists organized by the Harmon Foundation in 1931, for example, Loïs Jones was the only artist from Boston.22 Jones participated in one or more clubs in Boston that provided intellectual and social forums. One club, the Pierrettes, consisted of a group of young women of high school or college age. A photograph of club members standing on the steps of a Boston building from circa 1923 shows Jones front row center holding the banner for the group. he club likely provided a way for black women to freely associate, outside of the restrictions that a racially segregated and white-dominated society would have placed on them. he group may have originated as a “mystic” or secret society.23 In another example of her wide interests and scholarly acumen, Jones was also involved with the Quill Club, a literary salon for African American intellectuals that existed in Boston in the late 1920s and produced a well-regarded periodical, he Saturday Evening Quill Club, which published stories, poems, plays, and essays. he vigorous Boston group seems to have included Dorothy West and Loïs Jones, with Eugene Gordon likely the leader of the Club.24 Jones also noted the importance of a forum on Sundays in Boston, held at a community center on Massachusetts Avenue called simply “464.” Here, important black scholars from all over the country, including Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, came to lecture, to the delight of young college students and others.25 Boston was also the place where Jones had her irst major solo exhibition, shortly ater returning from her irst trip to Paris, held at a community center in 1939, and then in a somewhat reduced form at the venerable

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Robert C. Vose Galleries in Boston. hese are truly major achievements for an African American woman at that time, especially in a city like Boston that is oten considered elitist and impenetrable even for whites. For a young African American person growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century, however, this New England city was a mixed bag, with a strongly racist past but also an abolitionist history. Some social spaces would have been racially segregated, and Loïs Jones faced racial prejudice all the time, as she has mentioned. Especially in the public imagination, Boston was not generally associated with African American artists or writers per se, despite the fact that several key igures, including Jones, West, and Fuller, lived there. he exclusivity of Boston resulted in more obstacles and placed even greater demands on Jones than might have been true had she lived in New York or Chicago. he fact that she earned such a good education in that city, and had numerous other successes, is quite astonishing given what she was up against. Her training there may have helped her position in navigating through the white-dominated world in Boston and beyond, and the fact that she grew up in Boston may have provided some access to various inaccessible realms. Jones felt at home enough in Boston that she wanted to stay on there as an adult—or at least until her own alma mater rejected her proposition to teach there. She went to the director of the Boston Museum School and asked if there was any opportunity for her to teach at the school. When he replied that there were no openings and instead suggested that Loïs “go South to help your people,” she felt shocked. As she later stated, “here I was a young Boston lady exposed to Radclife and Simmons and Harvard and Tuts and all of the big schools. And here I was being told to go down South and help my people.”26 Forming a powerful alliance with her Boston education and upbringing was Jones’s experience of spending summers on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, of the coast of Massachusetts—a place that she also portrayed in paint (watercolor, ca. 1924, collection of Carol Holland-Kocher; ig. 7.3). She started going there with her family in 1906, while still a baby. Some of Jones’s happiest, and most inluential, lifelong memories were of her summertime exit from the grime of downtown Boston for the sea and light and air that constituted Martha’s Vineyard. She loved everything about it, and later stated: “I can’t tell you what it meant to get away from that smoky downtown city of Boston and go to Martha’s Vineyard. What a beautiful island: beautiful lowers, ields of daisies and buttercups, the ocean so blue, the lovely beaches, and the white sand. All of these things were inspiring.”27 It was due in part to the intelligence and good fortune of her grandmother Phoebe that Loïs was able to spend time on Martha’s Vineyard, as

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, Vineyard Haven Harbor, 1924, watercolor, 16" x 13"; Collection of Carol Holland-Kocher.

Phoebe had made herself indispensible to a white family there and managed to bring her own children and grandchildren along with her when she worked for this family in the summers. Soon, Loïs and her family were able to get a house of their own there, along with Phoebe. he Jones family home was at 25 Paciic Avenue; it included an upper loor and a wrap-around porch. It remains in the family still today. Part of what made this possible in 1906 was the recent development of Oak Blufs, Martha’s Vineyard, an island village that was almost entirely African American. he phenomenon of Oak Blufs traced its roots to the prior creation of Cottage City by Methodist preachers who were former slaves and who founded the immensely popular Wesleyan Grove Camp Meeting there in 1835. Visitors locked to the Camp Meetings while also enjoying other pastimes on the island, and African American families began to rent or purchase cottages, although at various times they were also refused admission to the Camp Meetings. he area that had been Cottage City, arrayed with densely laid-out cottage housing that had been developed for tourism, was renamed Oak Blufs in 1907, right around the time that Jones and her family started going there.28 For Loïs Jones and her development as an artist, the two most formative and important aspects of Martha’s Vineyard were the island’s natural beauty

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and its inclusive social structure. Here she was as a young girl, able to spend time in a thriving community of African Americans located in a summer resort area by the sea. he island gave Jones the ability to move about and to cherish the colors and sights and smells that the seashore and landscape ofered. his proved so thrilling for Jones that she credits the experience with the inception of her art making. She also associated painting the island’s charms with the use of watercolor, which she cited throughout her life as her favorite medium for making art. Oak Blufs was an art-loving community, and Jones was very inspired by the freedom and proximity to nature that it aforded. Jones’s capacity to enjoy and learn from nature, and to then incorporate what she saw and absorbed into her art, may have been a radical approach and idea. For an African American artist to do this in the early twentieth century was signiicant, because these acts symbolized freedom. To fully experience nature meant that you were free. For Jones to bring this freedom into her art thus constituted an audacious act and a bold stance. Martha’s Vineyard provided a more inclusive social structure than anywhere else Jones would live, except Paris. Oak Blufs and other parts of the island were reportedly un-segregated by race and instead were marked by integration of whites and blacks in free association and gatherings. he island as a whole and Oak Blufs especially ofered a kind of freedom and expansiveness that attracted African Americans for over a century.29 Oak Blufs was in the news when Barack Obama, the irst African American United States president, visited it in the summer of 2010.30 For Loïs Jones, the looser social structure had many beneits, including the access that it aforded her to inluential artists, writers, musicians, and others who also summered on the island, mainly African Americans but also some whites. Most importantly, as a teenager on Martha’s Vineyard, Loïs Jones met two people who would inluence her greatly: sculptor Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller and composer Harry hacker Burleigh, both of whom became intellectual mentors for Jones. Meta Fuller, who had also moved to Boston from Philadelphia in 1909, would aid and shape Jones’s career in important ways. Meta Fuller (1877–1968) helped create opportunities for Jones as a result of their sustained direct contact, which made a huge diference in the ways that Jones utilized Fuller’s ideas. Jones called Meta Fuller—the subject of a previous chapter in this volume—her inspiration. Among other things, she (along with Harry Burleigh) advised Jones to go to Paris to study, as France was much more open to artists of all colors. Meta Fuller bolstered the hopes of many Harlem Renaissance artists and others with her powerful sculpture Ethiopia of 1914, which envisioned both the inheritance and the legacy of Africa as the cradle of civilization.

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Harry hacker Burleigh was important for bringing music and Negro spirituals into the conversation. He also impressed Jones early on with the strength of his devotion to the outdoor beauty of Martha’s Vineyard. “He would go to Martha’s Vineyard because the blue of the ocean was like the blue of the lakes of Switzerland,” Jones said. “I will always remember that, because the island meant so much to him as an inspiration.”31 As a child and growing up, Loïs mixed freely among whites as well as blacks on Martha’s Vineyard, in much the same way that the black children do in many of Jones’s book illustrations, such as those in Gladiola Garden of 1944 (see igs. 7.6 and 7.7). On the island she also met several white people who helped her in various ways, including artist Jonas Lie, who was president of the National Academy of Design in New York, an institution at which Jones would exhibit her work numerous times in the 1940s. But life was not fair or easy for her, nor would it ever be (except perhaps when she lived in Paris, a city that seemed free of racial prejudice and provided equal opportunities for artists of color). As her white friends were awarded teaching jobs in Boston, Loïs Jones was instead told to “go South” to teach “her people.” Unlike her white peers, she was turned down for a job at her alma mater. New York design irms did not believe her when she walked into their shops and informed them that she had made the designs they were displaying in their store windows. Seeking a more open environment, Jones considered moving to New York in 1928. But around that time, she decided to accept a teaching position at the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, a preparatory school for young black women modeled on Wellesley College in Boston, and soon ater at Howard University in Washington, DC, beginning in 1930. Both of these moves and experiences proved to be important for Jones, especially the position at Howard, where she joined many other distinguished African American faculty members. She helped develop an impressive art program at Howard, staying there until she retired, forty-seven years later. Her mobility was also restricted, when she did “go south” to teach: the “snappy” little sports car that she had bought for the move to Sedalia, North Carolina, from Boston was whisked away from her by Palmer Institute director Charlotte Perkins Brown, to keep Jones from looking too sporty or from going of campus to neighboring schools or football games. While at Palmer in 1929, despite this curtailing of her movement and no use of her car, Jones painted several watercolors of people and places in the town, including the very notable Sedalia, North Carolina (ig. 7.1; watercolor on paper, 1929; he Mint Museum, promised git of Drs. Christopher and Marilyn Chapman), which shows a woman and child seated in front of a house surrounded by

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trees. he scene portrayed has a quiet feel, as the mother and infant sit together, and a light illuminates a window in the two-story house. Using an economy of means and a lawless watercolor technique, the painting reveals an impressive command of the diicult medium of watercolor, and Jones’s great ability to capture both the environment and the people that it contains. Possible hardships endured on the part of the mother and child are not immediately evident, as the painting instead emphasizes a sot light everywhere and range of green tones in this leafy setting. he cubistically rendered landscape demonstrates Jones’s great sense of color, her wizardry with watercolor, and her ability to convey both an intimate human interaction and a stylized portrayal of nature. Her life was further restricted by never submitting her artwork in person, lest the exhibition organizers know that she was black and turn her work down as a result. Jones did spend time in New York and especially in Harlem throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with a concentrated period of time living there in 1934. Her summer and more in Harlem in 1934 and subsequent frequent visits formed a critical part of her development. She met key igures of the New Negro arts movement, including Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage. She also met her future husband, Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël. Her primary focus was to study African art, both on her own and by attending Columbia University Summer School. his further study of African art helped to cement the seminal work she had done in using African mask designs for choreographer Ted Shawn in Boston in the early 1920s. In New York, she had more exposure and combined it with furthering her education. Her timing was perfect, as the Museum of Modern Art was in the midst of organizing an important exhibition of African art that would open the following year, in 1935. Her study of African art in New York that summer dovetailed with the work she was doing in designing the headdresses and costumes for dancer Asadata Dafora’s Kykunkor African dance opera, which debuted in May 1934. his pivotal work portraying an African witch doctor combined opera and dance: Dafora began as a singer and used African and African American dancers to convey an African story. his dramatic and energetic work caused quite a stir and ended with a three-month sold-out run. While Jones would later, in the 1960s and 1970s, travel to Africa and also Haiti many times, teaching and conducting extensive research, at this juncture, in Harlem in 1934, at the age of only twenty-nine, she had already amassed enough knowledge and expertise in the portrayal of African motifs that she would be chosen to create Dafora’s dance designs and costumes. Loïs Jones was fortunate to receive the commission to design the costumes for Kykunkor, especially since the show turned out to be such a hit.

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.. Dancer and choreographer Asadata Dafora with Musu Esami (Frances Atkins), as the bridegroom and bride, in his dance-musical production Kykunkor, 1934; costumes designed by Loïs Mailou Jones. Gelatin silver print; photographer unknown. The Joe Nash Black Dance Collection, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Her designs were essential to the presentation of the concert dance-opera: the costumes were a key part of conveying the themes and ideas as well as the African context (ig. 7.4). he skirt for Dafora possessed wonderful form, and the fabric was rich with nuance and mixing of patterns, all in keeping with the theme. Other costumes combined fur, feathers, beads, and various printed textiles, some in lowing or longer drapes, and others pieced together using small pieces of velvet or fur to cover only the dancer’s midsection, leaving a lot of skin exposed, as in the costumes for the slave girls.32 With accessories matched to the costumes, the combined efect created a strong aesthetic presence to relect the dance and the narrative. But as with the textile designs that Jones sent to the big design irms, her name has not always been linked to this

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work. Perhaps some dance historians simply bypass references to the costume design for a given dance performance. Many texts on Kykunkor or dance of the period make no mention of Jones as the costume designer. Again, this results in a kind of erasure or disappearance of Jones from the history.33 he costumes for Kykunkor put Jones’s work more in to the public eye, as did the illustrations that she published. Her illustrations appeared in several books and journals and thus helped disseminate her work.34 She may have created images for Challenge, a journal that Dorothy West inaugurated in Harlem in 1934, the year Jones spent several months there. Jones also developed friendships with Arthur Schomburg and Carter Godwin Woodson. She illustrated Woodson’s African Heroes and Heroines in 1937 and would illustrate several other texts, including journals, for him. Jones had her work accepted into the Harmon Foundation exhibitions of Negro art, which provided additional exposure for her paintings and drawings in New York and later elsewhere, although not without some reservations, as the white Harmon Foundation had speciic expectations regarding works of art by African Americans. Among the artists whom Jones met in Harlem was Aaron Douglas, whose ideas had already been inluential for Jones in her creation of seminal paintings such as he Ascent of Ethiopia in 1932 (now in the Milwaukee Art Museum). his painting, a tribute to Jones’s mentor Meta Fuller, was a response to the work of Douglas and to ideas of the New Negro arts movement or Renaissance. As in many of her strongest works, Jones adapted the style of the work to the content. Douglas had had a very diferent upbringing from Jones: he was born to laborer parents in Kansas; she came from a middle-class Boston family that spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard. However, the two artists shared a background in design and an interest in creating new forms based on African motifs. In 1934, when they were both in Harlem, Douglas was at work on Aspects of Negro Life, his important WPA murals painted for the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Jones never moved to Harlem, so she may have been somewhat more on the fringe.35 At about this time Douglas also painted he Founding of Chicago (ca. 1933; Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas; ig. 7.5), which bears comparison to Jones’s art. While Douglas’s painting utilizes grays and monochrome and a collage-like layering of transparent concentric circles, the boldness of the forms and igures has some ainities with Jones’s work. Both artists call upon collective memory, of Africa but also of histories and memories in the United States, such as the founding of Chicago by a black man. Douglas’s painting, and his appropriation of African motifs, is more symbolic,

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.. Aaron Douglas, The Founding of Chicago, ca. 1930, gouache on paper board, 14¾" x 123/8" (37.5 cm x 31.4 cm); Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Art Acquisition Fund, 2006.0027.

stylized, and abstract, employing strong silhouettes of bold black bodies and framing images of plant forms. Jones develops her own bold forms, as seen in her various still-life paintings; her paintings of Haiti, in works such as Les Clochards, Montmartre of 1947 (Smithsonian American Art Museum); and in her later emblematic paintings based on African masks, such as Ubi Girl from Tai Region of 1972 (Boston Museum of Fine Arts), among others. For Jones, the use of African motifs and decoration was more rooted in actual threedimensional objects and two-dimensional design; for Douglas, it was more generalized and symbolic. Both Jones and Douglas were revered by their many students as great teachers. Douglas taught for decades at Fisk University in Nashville, while Jones taught for forty-seven years at Howard University in Washington, DC. Douglas was clearly more isolated in Nashville, whereas Jones in Washington,

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, illustration for Children Know from Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers by Eie Lee Newsome; Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1944.

DC, was embedded in a relatively thriving network of artists, including African American artists.36 he less cosmopolitan city of Nashville may have been a more diicult place to live and work for Douglas. Even today, Nashville residents seem to know relatively little of Douglas’s work and his contributions to the history of art, much less his series of murals aixed to the walls of Cravath Hall on the Fisk campus. By contrast, the city of Washington, DC, which had a black majority as of about 1960, seems to maintain awareness of Loïs Jones and her work and legacy, having honored her several times at the White House and even declaring a Loïs Jones day on July 29, 1984. A striking Self-portrait by Jones from 1940 (Smithsonian American Art Museum) shows her as a conident artist who invoked the modernist ideas of the day, incorporating

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, illustration for Autumn from Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers by Eie Lee Newsome; Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1944.

African sculptures while also experimenting with scale and spatial disjunctures. Douglas has recently received considerable attention through both a book by Amy Kirschke, published in 1995, and a major multiauthor book and touring exhibition in 2007 organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.37 Jones and Douglas both excelled at book illustrations, and the Harlem Renaissance provided ample opportunities to produce images for the many texts that were generated. Loïs Jones created many exceptional illustrations and seemed to have a particular lourish for embellishing books designed for children or young readers. For example, Jones created outstanding illustrations for a wonderful book of poems for children by Eie Lee Newsome called

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Gladiola Garden, published in 1944 by the Associated Publishers (igs. 7.6 and 7.7). Associated Publishers supported African American literary endeavors of all sorts and published the Negro History Bulletin and many of Carter Woodson’s books and other texts with African American authors. While the green cover of Gladiola Garden shows two children with brown-colored skin, all of the illustrations inside the book are done in black and white, and are notable for the frequent presence of black-skinned children, and black-skinned and white-skinned children shown together. As in the work of Aaron Douglas, the style of Jones’s portrayal becomes integral to the content. In the case of Douglas, his use of black igures in silhouette created a powerful presence for these beautiful forms, at the same time that it naturalized the blackness of the igures. All igures or images are black when done in silhouette, so that the (naturally) black igures become the norm. Utilizing a diferent style from Aaron Douglas’s but a somewhat similar concept, Loïs Jones drew a sophisticated decorative scheme in black and white. he content merges with the form, making the skin color, in either black or white, become part of the aesthetic structure, like other famous illustrators have done, such as art nouveau artist Aubrey Beardsley. he black and white of the igures becomes synonymous with the black and white of the illustrations, which has the efect of making everything seem just as it should be, in nature—growing with the gladiolas! Even the drawing of a pair of trees on one page, showing one tree portrayed with a white trunk and one with a black trunk, parallels this idea and seems to echo the metaphor of black and white together (ig. 7.7). Metaphoric, visual integration of black and white furnishes part of the structure and concept behind Jones’s painting Les Clochards, Montmartre, Paris, created in gouache in Paris in 1947. his painting departs from the impressionist style of many of Jones’s earlier paintings, which had been created outdoors in Paris and elsewhere. his opaque watercolor, or gouache, was painted in a very diferent style, and looks more like the lat, outlined forms of the late nineteenth-century French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, rather than the Impressionists. he latness of the composition relates to Jones’s illustrations and to works like Buddha, rather than to her other Paris scenes that use sketchier brushwork and receding space. Here, two light-skinned women ill much of the space, seated or reclining on a green bench. he back of this bench provides a strong, lat form in the center of the painting that serves to link the two seated women to the posters on the wall behind them. he posters portray a seated dark-skinned man drinking a glass of Dubonnet wine. he way that the posters lank the igures of the tired-looking, seated women, and the jaunty look of the wine-drinking man portrayed, make the Dubonnet

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.. Loïs Mailou Jones, Challenge-America, 1964, photomechanical reproduction, acrylic, and paper on canvas, 391/8" x 301/8" (99.2 cm x 76.6 cm); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Museum Purchase, 1977. Photography by Lee Stalsworth.

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posters and the man depicted in them an essential, equal part of the painting. In yet a new way, Jones seems to be integrating black and white igures, mixing races and colors in her work. he outlining style of this painting is distinctive and points to Jones’s ability to change her approach, to learn new things on this Paris trip, ten years ater her irst visit there. Jones was socially committed throughout her career—although she insisted on her right to paint what she wanted, a right that Faith Ringgold acknowledged in her award speech for Loïs Jones for the Women’s Caucus for Art in the 1980s. In keeping pace with the times, in 1964 Jones created an acrylic and paper collage that channels the collage aesthetic of Romare Bearden and airms the central importance of the civil rights movement in a dense composition like no other in her oeuvre. Challenge-America (1964; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; ig. 7.8) is a memorable melding of media images and civil rights leaders that makes a strong visual statement at the same time that it conveys a powerful message— and does so in a whole new style for Jones that is perfectly adapted to the content of the work. Here she has brought together so many ideas and individuals and allowed their combined presence to make a bold artistic statement, one that stands out in an impressive oeuvre. Jones believed in the theories of Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, for an art of propaganda for African Americans, but she also wanted to be recognized for who she was and for what her work did irst and foremost. She provided a kind of bridge between the theories of Locke and those of James Porter, both of whom she taught alongside at Howard University. She did not want to be known primarily as a black artist and did not want the pressure to convey only black themes and thus resisted some of Locke’s persuasive arguments. As Edmund Barry Gaither has recently stated, “She wanted to escape categories, and enjoy her success without adjectives or modiiers. Loïs did not trust American art history to assess her contribution justly, perhaps because she had traversed decades of injustice and invisibility based on racial and gender prejudices. Such bias was endemic to the socio-cultural environment into which she was born and in which she had to evolve strategies for her own success.”38 Her textile designs from the 1920s circle back around into her paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, which are strongly symbolic and emblematic. In paintings such as Ubi Girl from Tai Region of 1972, Jones layers three different concepts of masks over boldly patterned textile shapes or forms, with an actual human face, masked, as the top layer. he collage-like and layering sensibility provides a striking format, bringing together African sculpture in proile, transparent outline masks, and a loating human face that seems both

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intensely real and otherworldly at the same time. he bold forms and geometric designs seem far removed from pictorial conventions, using a strong sense of design and form to convey ideas. hese late works certainly relect the PanAfrican and black arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and Jones taught with Afri-Cobra artist Jef Donaldson at Howard. he masks portrayed can serve as “intermediaries between us and the unknown,” while also shielding us from nature’s horrors, according to a recent article on Jones and this painting in a medical journal.39 Loïs Mailou Jones set high expectations for herself, but never really felt that she met them. Perhaps this is inevitably true in such a circumstance. Among other issues, she felt that she did not earn adequate recognition for her work during her lifetime, despite the fact that she lived so long. In 1973, her friend Edmund Barry Gaither organized a major exhibition of her work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. his project was important not only because it was the irst solo exhibition of an African American artist at the Boston Museum, but also because it was organized by an African American curator. Also, for Loïs, it was gratifying because it was held in her hometown and at her old school, as Barry Gaither has observed. his powerful pairing had many ripples, in Boston and nationally.40 In her last decade, at the age of eighty-ive, Jones inally lived to see a major touring retrospective of her work organized and widely circulated.41 his was a tremendous success and satisfaction. By that point, she had been awarded honorary doctorates and she had been honored by U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Moreover, Jones became the subject of a major biography, published in 1994 by Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, and of another retrospective touring exhibition, organized by the Loïs Jones Trust and the Mint Museum of Art in 2009.42 In September 2010 her great talents and contributions were recognized in front of the New York State House of Representatives by the Honorable Charles B. Rangel. Loïs Jones had earned respect throughout her life, and much more recognition than many, which, again adds to the measure of her accomplishment. But she faced many trials in the process, including the fact that for years she always submitted her paintings to exhibitions by mail or via white friends, so the organizers would not know that she was black. Loïs Jones died with some means and not forgotten, which is more than one can say about Aaron Douglas, who died in poverty at age eighty, having had a tremendous impact in the New Negro arts movement and in Harlem, Chicago, and elsewhere in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, but who was in many ways forgotten by the time of his death in 1979. In this rare instance of a black female artist gaining greater recognition than a male counterpart, one

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suspects that the diferent geographies that the two artists inhabited, plus the more supportive environment of Jones’s youth, aided her in earning the fame that she did. However, Jones noted the greatly diminished struggles of white women artists, like Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel, both of whom became well known. Jones remarked that “My career in painting hasn’t been easy. I’ve had to work awfully hard . . . doubly as hard as some of the other women artists here in America—e.g. take Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel; I can go on and on. hese white women made it. I should have made it also, but because of my color and the racial situation, it just wasn’t possible.”43 he strength of her work is selfevident and powerful, and yet her blackness constantly kept her from gaining the recognition she overwhelmingly deserved. Jones wanted to be able to paint the harbors of Martha’s Vineyard if that was what compelled her. Her versatility has been an inspiration to many artists, even if relatively few artists came from the supportive, nature-loving background that she did. Her career was so impressive that it is sometimes hard to remember the many trials that she faced throughout her life. In discussing the decisive importance of Jones’s year in Paris in 1937–38, Catherine Bernard wrote, “In her larger-than-life approach to artistic identity, by weaving the many sources of her experience into her painting she proved to be a Postmodern artist long before the term entered our vocabulary. And so she is more of a contemporary artist than ever, a model because of her achievement and tenacity; her attitude as a libre-penseuse (“independent of mind”), and her generosity in sharing with us through her paintings so many moments of her life.”44

Notes he author would like to thank the following individuals for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this essay: Dr. Chris Chapman and the Loïs Jones Pierre-Noël Trust, Dr. Edmund Barry Gaither, Loïs Jones’s grandniece Carol Holland-Kocher, Brittany Conge, Dr. Amy H. Kirschke, Dr. Tritobia Hayes Benjaman, Dr. Tricia Henry Young, Carla M. Hanzal, Rebecca Tilghman, Anne M. Earle, Chassica Kirchhof, John Pultz, Virginia Mecklenburg, the two outside peer reviewers for this book, and Ian, Noah, and Eliza. 1. Scholar Alvia Wardlaw states in an interview conducted in 2005 that there is still not enough written on African American women artists such as Alma homas and Loïs Mailou Jones. Wardlaw says she had met Jones and “just loved being in her company because she was always in command of her life. And that was just a beautiful thing to see, such a

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beautiful thing to see for a woman artist, an inspiration to all of us.” Alvia Wardlaw, “An Interview with Alvia Wardlaw” by Charles Henry Rowell, Callaloo 32, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 273. here have, however, been several important books and exhibitions of her work in recent years, including Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, he Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones (San Francisco: Pomegranate Books, 1994); Chris Chapman, Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Color (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corp., 2007); and Carla M. Hanzal, ed., Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color (Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum of Art, 2009). 2. See Loïs Mailou Jones, “An Interview with Loïs Mailou Jones” by Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo 12, no. 2 (1989): 358. 3. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 357. 4. he High School of Practical Arts in Boston is indicated as the author of a publication, presumably a periodical, called he Shuttle [no date]. I have not found other sources on this school. 5. See Ted Shawn, Gods Who Dance (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., c. 1929). My thanks to Chassica Kirchhof for inding this reference. 6. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 358. 7. For a recent study of the role of the mask in Jones’s work, see Cheryl Finley’s essay, “he Mask as Muse: he Inluence of African Art on the Life and Career of Loïs Mailou Jones,” in Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color, ed. Carla M. Hanzal, 50–73. 8. Many Ted Shawn costumes are housed and catalogued within the School of Dance at Florida State University. he collection curator, Dr. Tricia Henry Young, has been generous and helpful in aiding my search for Jones’s costume designs for Shawn; I am grateful for her assistance. 9. For a fascinating study of the early history of rayon, see Emma L. Fetta, Molecules to Modes: Sources and Uses of Rayon (New York: Rayon Institute of America, 1929). Unfortunately, Jones’s winning design does not appear in Fetta’s book or elsewhere that I have yet found. Designers’ names were oten erased from the records unless they were already well known. 10. he recent donation by Joyce Bailey to the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Black Fashion Museum collection assembled by her late mother, Lois Alexander Lane, may aford new ways of searching for Jones’s prize-winning rayon dress design, among other treasures. 11. See Lowery Stokes Sims, “Loïs Mailou Jones: From Designer to Artist,” 38–39, in Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color. My thanks go to the Sloane Art Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for lending me this book through interlibrary loan in the summer of 2010, and to Carla Hanzal for later sending me a copy of the book. 12. For an image of Johnson’s still-life of 1921–26, now at the Smithsonian and a git of the Harmon Foundation, see Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Studio Museum in Harlem and Abradale Press, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1987), plate 17. 13. On this exhibition, which was held at the Bill Hedges Gallery in midtown, New York City, see Laura Andrews, “Loïs Mailou Jones: Invisible, Black and Very Successful Against All Odds,” Amsterdam News 87, no. 45 (November 9, 1996), 25–26.

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14. here is little information on this Ludwig Frank or on the Designers Art School, although the school appears to have published a journal called Prospectus (no copy of it yet found). 15. Pat Kirkham and Shauna Stallworth, “‘hree Strikes Against Me’: African American Women Designers,” in Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Diference, ed. Pat Kirkham (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York, 2000), 125. 16. For two recent studies of textile designs from this period, see Charlotte Samuels, Art Deco Textiles (London: Victoria & Albert Publications; New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2003), and Alain-René Hardy, Art Deco Textiles: he French Designers (London: hames & Hudson, 2003). Both books have many great color illustrations. For a more indepth analysis of the issues, see Virginia Gardner Troy, he Modernist Textile: Europe and America 1890–1940 (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2006). None of these texts makes any mention of Loïs Jones, alas. 17. here are many books on Paul Poiret. For a recent oversized volume, see Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton et al., Poiret (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). While searching for textile samples in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I received kind and generous assistance from Rebecca Tilghman in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. Poiret’s name and fame were big enough to allow him to open an experimental art school and atelier, called La Maison Martine, to bring in the talents of untrained workingclass young girls. he girls were asked to sketch animals and plants at local zoos and parks, with the goal of furnishing Poiret with fresh ideas for his textile designs. Poiret bought the best of their drawings, which were adapted for use by Atelier Martine; Jared Goss, object label text for textile sample by Paul Poiret and La Maison Martine, on display in the exhibition Masterpieces of French Art Deco at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; thank you to Rebecca Tilghman for forwarding this label text. 18. See, for example, his Moth Balls and Sugar Cubes, dress fabric, printed silk crêpe de Chine made from a photograph of moth balls and sugar cubes lit from diferent angles; plate 67 in Samuels, Art Deco Textiles. 19. For a photograph of the wedding gown and more on Ann Lowe, see Kirkham and Stallworth, “African American Women Designers,” in Women Designers in the USA, 1900– 2000: Diversity and Diference, ed. Pat Kirkham, 128–29. 20. For an image of this gown and more on Kechley, see Lisa E. Farrington, Creating heir Own Image: he History of African American Women Artists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43. 21. In an oblique and oten satirical way, West portrayed African American middleclass life in Boston in her novel he Living Is Easy of 1948. 22. Loïs Jones won an honorable mention for her exhibited charcoal drawing, Negro Youth, of 1929. 23. Several other “Pierrettes” groups were high-school based, such as those in New Orleans, and they may have been secret “mystic societies.” For example, a “Pierrettes” mystic society of “non-parading women” was founded in Mobile, Alabama, in 1947. Dr. Tritobia

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Hayes Benjamin says she has also heard of a Pierrettes group in Baltimore, so there may have been Pierrettes in several diferent cities; e-mail to the author, September 2010. 24. See, for example, Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell, “Eugene Gordon, Dorothy West, and the Saturday Evening Quill Club,” College Language Association Journal 52, no. 4 (June 2009): 393–408. 25. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 359–60. 26. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 359. 27. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 358. 28. For a recent account of memories and lives lived in Oak Blufs and beyond, including Spike Lee and others, see Jill Nelson, Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island (New York: Doubleday, 2005). For a more historical treatment of Cottage City and the Camp Meetings, see Ellen Weiss, City in the Woods: he Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 29. For an important novel based in Oak Blufs that portrays African American life and aspects of integration with whites, see Dorothy West, he Wedding (New York: Doubleday, 1995), which was published only late in West’s life, and due in part to the eforts of her friend on the island, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis. See also Nelson, Finding Martha’s Vineyard. 30. See, for example, Jackie Calmes, “Revisiting Black History on Martha’s Vineyard,” New York Times, August 29, 2010. 31. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 358. 32. A photograph of the slave girls and other dancers in Kykunkor can be found in the Photographs and Prints Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. he Schomburg Center also houses the Papers of Asadata Dafora. 33. For example, a recent article illustrates many scenes from Kykunkor but fails to mention Jones as the costume designer; see Maureen Needham, “Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman: An African Opera in America, 1934,” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, ed. homas F. DeFrantz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 238–66. 34. For more on women and illustration in this period, see Amy Helene Kirschke, “Laura Wheeler Waring and the Women Illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance,” chapter 4 in this volume. 35. Among other connections between Aaron Douglas and Loïs Mailou Jones is the fact that the Legacy of Leadership Collection at Howard University features two founding prints by these two artists. he collection began in 1997 with the commission of two silkscreen prints by Douglas and Mailou Jones. Master printmaker Lou Stovall, of Workshop Inc., pulled these works for Legacy of Leadership, both of which can be seen here: http://www .howard.edu/huhlegacy/art.htm. 36. Artist and art historian David C. Driskell studied with Jones and has written about her work. For a statement by Professor Driskell on the importance of Jones’s work, ideas, and teaching, see David C. Driskell, “Foreword: he Salient Vision of Loïs Mailou Jones,” in Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, Art and Life of Loïs Mailou Jones, vii. 37. See Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995); and Susan Earle, ed., Aaron Douglas: African

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American Modernist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Spencer Museum of Art, 2007). 38. Edmund Barry Gaither, “Loïs Mailou Jones: Relections on a Friendship,” in Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color, 32. 39. Polyxeni Potter, “ . . . Myself hat I Remake,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 15, no. 2 (February 2009): 362. 40. See, for example, Gaither’s recent essay about the 1973 exhibition, which was titled Relective Moments, and related ideas in his “Loïs Mailou Jones: Relections on a Friendship,” in Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color, ed. Hanzal, 13–33. 41. he exhibition was called he World of Loïs Mailou Jones and it was organized by Meridian House International, Washington, DC, January 28–March 18, 1990. he exhibition toured to many venues and was accompanied by a forty-page catalogue that included an artist’s statement and texts by Edmund Barry Gaither, Floyd Coleman, and guest curator Tritobia H. Benjamin. 42. Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, he Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones; and Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color, ed. Hanzal. 43. Loïs Jones, interview with Rowell, Callaloo, 362–63. 44. Catherine Bernard, “Preface, 1937–1938: Loïs Mailou Jones in Paris,” in Benjamin, he Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones, x.

Chapter eIght

ELIZABETH CATLETT: INHERITING THE LEGACY Melanie Anne Herzog In 1926, Langston Hughes wrote that “within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world.”1 he art of Elizabeth Catlett (April 15, 1915–April 2, 2012), the most renowned African American woman artist of the generation that emerged from the Harlem Renaissance, embodies Hughes’s foretelling. For more than sixty years, working in the United States and in Mexico, Catlett continued to illumine “the beauty of dark faces” in eloquent and impassioned visual statements against race, class, and gender inequities, against imperialism and other forms of injustice, as she said, “for liberation and for life.”2 he legacy of the Harlem Renaissance is manifested in her ongoing commitment to education, in her dedication to producing and promoting art as a form of community empowerment and an assertion of individual and collective agency, and in the paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings in which she powerfully represented the experiences of women, both ordinary and extraordinary, and the hopes, sorrows, struggles, and achievements of African Americans and oppressed peoples throughout the world.

Education From an early age Elizabeth Catlett was instilled with a strong commitment to education that was inextricably bound with her awareness of the All works of art by Elizabeth Catlett are © Catlett Mora Family Trust/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Mexico City, 1964–65. Photograph by Mark Rogovin, courtesy of Mark Rogovin.

oppression of African Americans and a ierce sense of justice.3 She grew up hearing stories of her grandmother’s grandmother, who was pregnant when she was kidnapped on the beach in Madagascar and brought to the United States as a slave, her grandmother’s memories of enslavement, and how her grandparents learned to read and write.4 Her father, who died several months before her birth, had been a professor of mathematics at the Tuskegee Institute and had taught in the public school system in Washington, DC (he was also an accomplished musician and woodcarver). Her mother, also educated as a teacher, worked as a truant oicer in order to support her three children. As a young girl growing up in Washington, Catlett knew she wanted to be an artist. his aspiration—at a time when few African American women were practicing artists, and art museums in the South were closed to African Americans—is a testament to her family’s support and the quality of her early education. Following her graduation from Washington’s Dunbar High School in 1931, Catlett entered Howard University, where she earned her bachelor of science in art, cum laude, in 1935. Howard, however, was not her school of choice; she had applied to study art at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, but was denied admission on the basis of race despite having received praise for

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her work throughout the weeklong entrance examinations. he Howard University Art Department, the irst art department at a historically black university, was established in 1921 by the artist and art historian James Herring. Art faculty included Herring, with whom Catlett studied art history; James Porter; James Lesnesne Wells; and Loïs Mailou Jones, with whom Catlett studied design before changing her major to painting. Catlett studied painting and life drawing with James Porter and printmaking with James Wells, both of whom she admired immensely, and she credited Porter with introducing her to the discipline necessary to be an artist.5 he Howard University Art Gallery, founded by Herring and directed by Alonzo Aden, exhibited the work of important African American and European American artists as well as European modernists; it was here that Catlett was introduced to African art.6 hough Herring, Porter, and Locke disagreed, oten vehemently, on issues of aesthetics, deinition of artistic standards, and the sources to which African American artists should rightfully look for artistic inspiration, their debate on African American art theory and practice placed Howard University at the forefront of such discussion in the 1930s; thus Catlett was immersed in the constellation of ideas that formed the core of Harlem Renaissance thought. hrough her work with Porter and Wells, Catlett irst became aware of the work of the Mexican muralists who would play a key part in her decision to visit and then move to Mexico in the following decade. In Porter’s library she encountered the work of Diego Rivera through photographic reproductions of his murals; she became more familiar with the Mexican muralists through her short-lived participation in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) that Porter and Wells arranged for her during her third year at Howard. Her sense of discipline had not yet fully taken hold; she was ired from the PWAP because she didn’t do the work she was supposed to do. Catlett did not study with Alain Locke, the philosopher and guiding spirit of the Harlem Renaissance who was a professor of philosophy at Howard, and insisted, “I never got anything from Alain Locke. Mr. Herring and Dr. Locke were sworn enemies, and hated each other tremendously.”7 Porter, like Herring, maintained an adversarial relationship with Locke and his ideas. In contrast to Locke’s prescriptive emphasis on “racialism” in art, Porter downplayed the notion of a culturally distinct form of artistic expression in favor of a more pluralistic approach to the question of what forms artistic inspiration might take for African American artists. Although her choice of African American subjects and her attraction to African art suggest the inluence of Locke’s writings and teaching, Catlett airmed the alignment of her ainities with Porter and Herring as she noted the prevalence of such imagery in the work of African American artists during the 1930s and early 1940s;

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she stressed that “it wasn’t Dr. Locke so much as everybody was doing black subjects.”8 Ater her graduation from Howard, Catlett taught art for two years in the public schools in Durham, North Carolina. However, she had little time for her own artwork, so to advance her professional standing she decided to attend graduate school in art at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City.9 Iowa was quite a change from what she had experienced in the segregated black communities of Washington and Durham; she was one of only two black students in the art department. Her roommate in of-campus housing, where she lived because, as she was informed upon arriving in Iowa City, African American students were not welcome in the dorms, was writer Margaret Walker, who remained her lifelong friend and artistic colleague. Catlett went to Iowa to study painting with Grant Wood, but soon became interested in sculpture. Nonetheless, Wood was undoubtedly the most signiicant igure for her at the University of Iowa. His disciplined, methodical process of working and reworking an image remained vital to her own approach, as did his encouragement, reinforced by his own example, that she take as her subject that which she knew best. With Wood’s support, Catlett received the irst master of ine arts degree earned in sculpture at the University of Iowa. he centerpiece of her 1940 University of Iowa exhibition was a carving that was required for the degree, the limestone Negro Mother and Child, now missing from the University of Iowa collection. She introduced this piece in her written thesis statement, titled “Sculpture in Stone: Negro Mother and Child”: To create a composition of two igures, one smaller than the other, so interlaced as to be expressive of maternity, and so compact as to be suitable to stone, seemed quite a desirable problem. he implications of motherhood, especially Negro motherhood, are quite important to me, as I am a Negro as well as a woman.10

Her thesis statement is an early articulation of her lifelong attention to her medium as a means of expression, and her understanding of the importance of careful observation of her subject. his compact and solid igural group conveys the feeling of the physical and emotional interconnectedness of the mother and child that Catlett sought to express. Its simpliication, with the removal of all extraneous details that are evident in an earlier clay model, gives this surprisingly small carving a feeling of monumentality. Negro Mother and Child won the First Award in Sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in the summer of 1940. According to Newsweek magazine, Catlett’s sculpture was “one of the most popular pieces” at the exposition.11 With this prizewinning work as their focus, Catlett was

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Negro Mother and Child, 1940. Limestone, 35" h. Location unknown. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett.

consistently lauded by the Howard University faculty as a promising young artist.12 In Modern Negro Art of 1943, James Porter praised her as “one of the brilliant graduates of the Department of Art of Howard University” and wrote of her Negro Mother and Child: “he simple, round massiveness of the work exempliies good taste and soberly thoughtful execution . . . . he Negroid quality in ‘Mother and Child’ is undeniable, and the work has poise and a profound structure.”13 Catlett spoke throughout her career of the importance of the theme of the mother and child that appears repeatedly in her sculpture, and of the predominance of images of women in her work. She said, “Because I am a woman and know how a woman feels in body and mind I sculpt, draw and print women, generally Black women. Many of my sculptures and prints deal with maternity for I am a mother and a grandmother.”14 It was important to her that these were images of black women and children; they speak of a protective love that is simultaneously tender and ierce, of intergenerational continuity, and the determination of these strong women to hold their families together.

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In the fall of 1940 Catlett began teaching at Dillard University in New Orleans. For two years she taught drawing (she introduced the practice of working from a nude model, a controversial irst for Dillard), painting, and printmaking, as well as art history. Determined that her students see a major Picasso retrospective at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art), located in City Park where African Americans were not allowed, she collaborated with a faculty member at Sophie Newcomb College to have her students bused directly to the door of the art museum for a visit on a Monday when it was closed to the (white) public. Most of her students had never been to an art museum: [We] took about 160 students in buses, and we came in . . . . Inside in the lobby they had twice life-size plaster casts, copies, of Greek sculpture . . . . and in the middle of all this was the Guernica mural . . . . his teacher from Sophie Newcomb was standing on the staircase, and he talked to them about having open minds when they looked at art, and art was not a copy of nature, and things like that, and then he talked a little about the mural and what had happened in Guernica, and that this was Picasso’s reaction to it. hen he let them loose, and they went upstairs, and on the balcony all around there were Picassos . . . . here was nobody that was bored, either they heartily disliked it, or they liked it. It just hit them. hey would be running from one room to the other, saying, “Come look at this,” and “Did you see the rooster?” and “Look, this is the woman in the mirror, see, here she is and here’s the mirror” . . . . I asked Samella Lewis, she was one of the students, “Have you ever been to a museum before?” and she said no.15

Community: Chicago Between her irst and second year at Dillard, Catlett spent the summer of 1941 in Chicago. She lived with Margaret Burroughs (then Margaret Goss), who was among the founders of the Works Progress Administration-funded South Side Community Art Center that had opened earlier that year. She studied ceramics at the Art Institute and lithography at the South Side Community Art Center, and resumed her work in sculpture. She also came to know Charles White, whom she had met on a previous visit; Catlett and White married in December of that year. he South Side Community Art Center was rapidly becoming the focus of artistic production and interaction for Chicago’s black artists, continuing the earlier work of Chicago’s Art Crats Guild, in which many young African

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American artists had participated, and following the model of the Harlem Community Art Center.16 his was the period of the “Chicago Renaissance” in the literary and visual arts, characterized by writers-poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Catlett’s Iowa roommate Margaret Walker, dancer and writer Katherine Dunham, novelist Richard Wright, and visual artists Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, Charles Sebree, Charles White, and others, who came together on Chicago’s South Side to produce incisive, socially critical forms of cultural expression for a predominantly African American audience.17 hese artists, lauded by Alain Locke as having the potential to produce a “school of Negro art, something that even the older but looser associations of the Harlem group of artists have not yet produced,” were indebted to the trailblazing eforts of Chicago’s previous generation of black artists, including Archibald Motley, Charles Dawson, Richmond Barthé, and George E. Neal, who had taught art classes at Chicago’s South Side Settlement House.18 Catlett recalled this dynamic milieu: “It was a solid group of creative people. We would meet at each others’ houses and we would get together socially and discuss things and talk about creative things and people would read things and we would look at each others’ work. It was something like what I found in New York . . . with Ernie Crichlow, Bob Blackburn, Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence.”19 Literary historian and writer Arna Bontemps, who lived in Chicago from 1935 until 1943, compared Harlem’s and Chicago’s literary movements: “Chicago was deinitely the center of the second phase of Negro literary awakening . . . . Harlem got its renaissance in the middle ’twenties, centering around the Opportunity contests and the Fith Avenue Awards Dinners. Ten years later Chicago reenacted it on WPA without inger bowls but with increased power.”20 A statement by artist Bernard Goss in a 1940 article in Opportunity magazine titled “Negro Art in Chicago” conveys the aims of the more political artists in the group: “I want to do murals and paintings, to inluence people. I might be called a revolutionary painter. I’m not satisied with social and economic conditions. My aim is to do something about them.”21 Charles White is also quoted as saying, “Paint is the only weapon I have with which to ight what I resent. If I could write I would write about it. If I could talk I would talk about it. Since I paint, I must paint about it.”22 he conviction that art could be a weapon in revolutionary struggle was engendered by the broad social consciousness that took hold in the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s as a response to the material conditions brought about by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. his consciousness is fundamental to the diferences between the Chicago Renaissance and the earlier Harlem Renaissance. Many African Americans understood their plight to be based in class as well as racial oppression, and much of

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the art of the black Chicago artists overtly presented socially critical imagery based in the intersection of these oppressions. Integral to the African American arts community that Catlett was part of in Chicago and then in New York were artists for whom the socialist ideals put forth by the Communist Party ofered a solution to the race and class inequities they saw afecting so many people in the United States during this time of economic desperation. Some joined the Communist Party; many more were sympathetic to its aims, and numerous artists were involved in the multitude of cultural organizations that had more or less formal ties to the Communist Party, especially ater the shit of the party’s organizational focus in 1935 to the Popular Front against fascism.23 In these organizations artists were thought of not as peripheral, but as cultural workers whose role was to make art for a mass popular audience and for the betterment of society. he idea that art was meant to speak to a broad audience beyond the conines of the art world was reinforced by the employment of thousands of artists by the Works Progress Administration and other federal projects that began with the establishment of the Public Works of Art Project in December 1933 and lasted until the demise of the WPA in 1943. his government support was crucial for African American artists, whose economic circumstances have always been more tenuous than those of European-American artists. hus, while the Harlem Renaissance saw the rise of “race consciousness” in the portrayal of African American subjects by African American artists, the gains of this period were consolidated during the 1930s and early 1940s, particularly during the years of signiicant government support for the arts. Art historian Patricia Hills writes of this period in New York: “Especially afected by the hard times, African American artists living in Harlem welcomed the relief programs that ofered employment in the arts. While still laying claim to the legacy of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and inspired by their writers, poets, and musicians, the visual artists in Harlem came into their own during the 1930s.”24 Similarly, the Chicago artists with whom Catlett associated were supported by the WPA-funded Illinois Art Project that employed artists working in a variety of media. Not only did these artists share in the economic beneits of the WPA, they had also been prepared by the ideological underpinnings of the Harlem Renaissance for the WPA mandate to portray scenes of American life. In Chicago, Catlett experienced for the irst time a community of socially committed, politically active artists who thrived on social, artistic, and political interaction. For these artists, art could be an active means of revolutionary change. Crucial to her subsequent art practice, this was her introduction to the energetic, sometimes contentious process of participation in a community of

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socially engaged artists, committed to producing art for social change, which she extended and built upon in Mexico among the similarly engaged and spirited group of artists at the Taller de Gráica Popular.

Into Harlem: he George Washington Carver School In 1942, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White moved to New York, where they met and worked with leading African American artists, musicians, and progressive intellectuals. Catlett remembered her introduction to this vibrant artists’ community: Ernie [Crichlow] took us up to stay with Dorothy and Kenneth Spencer . . . He [Spencer] was a singer, with a beautiful bass baritone voice, and later a movie star . . . While we stayed with them Charles went to the Art Students’ League, and I saw in the Art News that Ossip Zadkine was taking students for ity dollars a month. I had ity dollars, so I went to see him, and he said he didn’t have any students yet. I was his irst student. It turned out I was his only student, at least for about three or four months. . . . [We lived at] 409 Edgecombe . . . Langston Hughes would come from time to time to tell us about his new songs for the war efort that he was writing ... hrough Ernie we began to meet the artists, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis, and Gwendolyn Bennett, the black artists.25

During her irst summer in New York Catlett worked with modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine, who had recently arrived in New York as a refugee from the Nazi occupation of France. His example encouraged her to experiment with abstraction as a distillation of form, and he also inspired her to look at African art as a means of learning about abstraction in the representation of the human igure. But Catlett oten stated that she disagreed with Zadkine’s insistence that art be “international,” convinced instead that her work must be rooted in her own cultural speciicity. Contrary to Zadkine she believed that her intended audience would relate only to images in which they could see something of themselves. “I used to argue with him,” she recalled. “I was doing a black mother and child, in terracotta, and he said, ‘Why is it a black mother and child?’ and I said, ‘Because I’m a black woman,’ and he said, ‘Well, if you just did a mother and child then black people would relate to it,’ and I said, ‘No, they wouldn’t.’ . . . So he said, ‘Well, why does it have to be anything?’ and I said, ‘Why are your people French people?’ and he

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would’ve said, ‘hey’re not French people, they’re international people,’ and I would say, ‘But they are white.’”26 Most important for Catlett during her years in New York was what she learned from her students at the George Washington Carver School, a community school for the working people of Harlem to which she devoted much of her energy from 1944 until her departure for Mexico in 1946. he Carver School curriculum was designed to meet the interests and needs of the school’s students, who worked during the day as domestic workers, cooks, janitors, and elevator operators, or in the garment industry, and promoted the development of political education and class consciousness throughout its oferings. Gwendolyn Bennett, the widely recognized Harlem Renaissance writer, painter, and illustrator who was a leading member of the Harlem Artists Guild, an instructor at the WPA-funded Harlem Community Art Center and then, following Augusta Savage, the center’s director until her removal in 1941 because of her political beliefs, was the director of the Carver School.27 Catlett served as “promotion director” and also taught sculpture and sewing: In my “How to Make a Dress” class, I told them, “You always buy coats and dresses to last, to wear with anything, so you buy black and brown and grey, and this is something you’re going to make, and it’s going to come out cheaper, so let’s buy something that you look nice in.” So we would hold reds and turquoise blues up to our faces, to see how we looked. And they made their dresses, I took my little sewing machine up, and we had a fashion show. here was another class, “How to Make a Hat,” that our secretary, Edith Roberts, taught, because she knew how to make hats. I remember one lady with a turquoise blue velveteen dress and hat, and she was really something. . . We tried to bring some culture, something diferent, into the lives of the students.28

Catlett’s students, in turn, taught her how their economic circumstances shaped their existence as black women, and she came to realize how her middle-class upbringing had circumscribed her understanding of the hardships endured by working-class and poor people. She invoked “a lesson that began a change in my life’s direction”: About 350 of us were squeezed into a small room, sweating on a hot June night, with the windows and the shades drawn [because of the World War II blackout]—most uncomfortable, listening to Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. A professor from the Juilliard Music School had come to play this tape for our students . . . When the irst movement ended the professor explained that since the second movement was very long we would take a break to refresh ourselves

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with some cold punch. Our students politely refused. hey said no, the break can wait. We want to hear it all together. Now, ignorant me! I had thought they weren’t interested in classical music.29

his recognition of her students’ “cultural hunger” was a pivotal moment for Catlett. Of her work at the Carver School she said, It gave me a basis for what I wanted to do . . . . I always had a superior feeling to these people. I felt superior to my grandmother who had been a house slave; I thought she should have been a ield slave. And I felt superior to my other grandmother who sewed sacks at the post oice in Washington, because she had never gone to school. She was a slave also as a little girl, and when they brought her to Washington her uncle had somebody teach her to read and write . . . I realized that my grandmother and my grandfather had been the same as their grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather looked like his father, who was his master, and so his northern wife taught my grandfather to read and write, which is why he could get a job on the railroads ater emancipation, and earn enough money to buy a farm. Because he had learned to read and write, it was so important to him that he send his children to school. And I realized that I had a debt that I hadn’t paid . . . I’d had privileges that they hadn’t had, and that didn’t make me superior, it made me luckier.30

Inspired by her students at the Carver School, Catlett sought a Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to produce a series of prints, paintings, and sculpture on the subject of “he Negro Woman.”31 During the irst year of her Rosenwald Fellowship she continued work at the Carver School and made little progress on her project. When her grant was renewed for a second year she realized she would have to leave New York in order to complete her proposed series. With an interest in the murals and graphic art produced in the atermath of the Mexican Revolution, and thinking as well that the trip might help her failing marriage, she and White went to Mexico in 1946.

Mexico Many African American artists shared this interest in revolutionary Mexican art. Harlem Renaissance artists found inspiration in the Mexican muralists’ visual articulation of an indigenous mexicanidad fused with folk art as they looked to the “ancestral arts” of Africa and expressed pride in their African American heritage and identity. During the 1930s and early 1940s the class consciousness of Mexican muralists and graphic artists resonated

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.. Elizabeth Catlett working in sculpture studio, Mexico City, ca. 1947. Photograph by Bernice Kolko, courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett.

most strongly with the politics of the Chicago Renaissance artists and other socially engaged artists in the United States.32 Catlett found inspiration in the Mexican artists’ social commitment, direct engagement with the experiences of ordinary people, deliberately accessible style, and consciousness of their centrality in the formation of a liberatory Mexican identity—all of which mattered to her as she took as her subject the lives and experiences of African American women. Catlett went to Mexico City committed to making art that was visually accessible and that would speak for and to the black audience with whom she so strongly identiied. he legacy of the Harlem Renaissance—and the Chicago Renaissance—was clear. Porter, Herring, and Wells had introduced her to the critical debate among African American artists and scholars regarding how to position oneself as an African American artist—encompassing sources of inspiration, appropriate subject matter, and style. In Chicago she had honed her

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political and social consciousness in the context of an active artists’ community. Her years in Harlem at the Carver School solidiied her determination that her art must speak to and for the people from whom she derived inspiration, the working and poor African Americans she had come to know so intimately, and deepened her awareness of the privileges aforded her by her education and class. hese were the foundations upon which she built as an artist, activist, and educator for more than half a century in Mexico. She intended to spend a year in Mexico City studying sculpture at “La Esmeralda,” the government-run art school, where she worked with noted Mexican sculptor Francisco Zúñiga, and making prints as a guest artist at Mexico’s internationally recognized Taller de Gráica Popular (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop). Instead, ater several months she returned to the United States to end her marriage, and then went back to Mexico in 1947 to establish permanent residence. Catlett’s decision to make her home in Mexico was in part a response to the U.S. Government’s increasingly vicious attacks on progressive artists, intellectuals, and activists following the end of World War II. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began holding hearings on the threat of communist subversion within in the United States; along with members of the Communist Party, people suspected of communist sympathies came under intensive scrutiny.33 In Mexico she also found relief from the daily occurrences of racism that she had experienced in the United States. She found a community of artists at the Taller de Gráica Popular (TGP) whose aims were in accord with her own, and she fell in love with one of the workshop’s members, painter and printmaker Francisco Mora (1922–2002). Catlett and Mora married in 1947. Together they maintained membership in the TGP until 1966, and remained artistic and life partners until Mora’s death. By the time Catlett arrived in Mexico, members of the TGP had produced literally thousands of linoleum cuts, woodcuts, and lithographs that celebrated Mexican people’s history; supported unions, agricultural workers, national literacy programs, and movements for social justice; and condemned fascism through immediately recognizable imagery. Many were printed in unnumbered editions on cheap, newsprint-quality paper.34 In 1946, workshop members were hard at work on Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana, a portfolio of eighty-ive linocuts with narrative titles and explanatory text that commemorates the revolutionary fervor, courageous acts, and tragic martyrdom of everyday people as heroes of the Mexican Revolution.35 his portfolio served as a model for Catlett as she envisioned her own epic historical narrative that acknowledges the harsh reality of black women’s labor, honors renowned historical heroines, and renders visible the fears, struggles, and achievements of ordinary African American women.

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he Negro Woman of 1946–47 comprises iteen linoleum cuts, accompanied by captions that prescribe the order of their viewing: “I am the Negro woman. I have always worked hard in America . . . . In the ields . . . . In other folks’ homes . . . . I have given the world my songs. In Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes. In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom. In Phillis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery. My role has been important in the struggle to organize the unorganized. I have studied in ever increasing numbers. My reward has been bars between me and the rest of the land. I have special reservations . . . . Special houses . . . . And a special fear for my loved ones. My right is a future of equality with other Americans.”36 Intimately scaled, and cut with sharp, angular strokes that manifest Catlett’s strong sense of design and attentiveness to the textural possibilities of linoleum as a print medium, these powerful prints draw the viewer in close. Composition reinforces meaning: the vast spatial recession of “In the ields” signiies the sharecropper’s unending labor. In this print Catlett follows the TGP’s practice of using immediately recognizable photographs as sources; the igure and her surroundings are derived from a detail of one of Dorothea Lange’s Farm Security Administration photographs that document rural life in the U.S. South, A Negro tenant farmer and several members of his family hoeing cotton on their farm in Alabama of 1936 (the image is reversed in the printing process). Catlett may well have encountered this photograph, captioned “We chop cotton” in Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, published in 1941, the year Catlett and Wright met in Chicago.37 Photographs in 12 Million Black Voices are evident sources for other images in this print series as well. In “I have given the world my songs” (also titled Blues when exhibited separately from the rest of the series) the monumental seated igure is compressed by the composition’s frame. he reason for her sorrow song is made clear, as the background of the image, printed in blue, depicts a burning cross and a lynching. he series’ historical igures are based on iconic and frequently reproduced engravings: “Sojourner Truth,” whose celebrated “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at an 1851 women’s rights convention ofered an eloquent analysis of race, gender, and black women’s experience; “Harriet Tubman,” who guided many to freedom and inspired countless others; “Phillis Wheatley,” the enslaved poet who wrote of freedom, in an image derived from an eighteenth-century engraving that is Wheatley’s only known contemporary portrait. he Negro Woman also invokes the steadfast endurance and courageous activism of ordinary African American women: women who hunger for education in “I have studied in ever increasing numbers”; working women

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, “I have given the world my songs,” or Blues, from The Negro Woman, 1946–47. Color linocut, 7½" x 5". Collection of Elizabeth Catlett. Photograph by Melanie Herzog.

of the U.S. south whose lives were made immensely more diicult by segregation in “I have special reservations”; exhausted women in New York, Chicago, and other northern U. S. cities who faced overcrowded living conditions in “Special houses”; women, whose presence is implied in “And a special fear for my loved ones,” terrorized by the pervasive fear of lynching. Like the sorrow songs of her ancestors, the spirituals and later the blues, the inal image of the series transforms sadness and struggle to a vision of hope, for “a future of equality with other Americans.” With he Negro Woman, Catlett claimed for black women’s lives the historical importance accorded the Mexican Revolution in the TGP’s Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana. She was also inspired by German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz’s powerfully expressionistic images of women, their large,

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strong hands connoting their working-class status. his series was indebted as well to the example of her African American contemporaries, especially her friend Jacob Lawrence’s series of paintings of historical heroes and events: Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture (1936–38); renowned antislavery writer and orator Frederick Douglass (1938–39); legendary Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman (1939–40); and the epic he Migration of the Negro (1940–41), in which, as art historian Daniel Schulman writes, “Lawrence managed to harmonize what were oten seen as mutually exclusive concerns: a signature style of modernist abstraction in the service of clearly recognizable subject matter organized in a narrative fashion.”38 Catlett wrote of Lawrence’s Migration series, “One cannot look at these seemingly simple portrayals of the startling lack of the bare necessities of life, the frustrations and complexities of daily struggle, and the determined mass movement towards democratic equality, of these Negroes without a decided self examination . . . here are no fripperies, no supericialities, no unnecessary additions. He strips his material to the bone and you understand him.”39 In contrast to the third-person voice that Lawrence employed in the captions for these series, and the collective “we” that resonates throughout Richard Wright’s text in 12 Million Black Voices, Catlett asserts the singular irst-person “I am” through he Negro Woman. Wright concludes 12 Million Black Voices with these words: “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. he hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall be with them.”40 hus, as we read the narrative that accompanies Catlett’s images, each of us is summoned to participate as well in her identiication with her subject and, countering Wright’s masculinist “we,” her radical claim to agency as a black woman. As art historian Richard J. Powell writes, “Catlett invites everyone— women, men, blacks, whites, whomever—to act as surrogate ‘Negro women,’ if only via the stating of each title.”41 When she decided to make her home in Mexico, Catlett immersed herself in Mexican life and culture and in the activities of the Taller. She embraced the workshop’s collective process, depicting subjects consistent with those of other workshop members and taking their audience as her own. By the early 1950s, the vigorous, sometimes harsh angularity of Catlett’s early prints had given way to a rounder, more intricately textured handling of linocuts and lithographs. Detly cut into linoleum and drawn with grease crayon on lithography stones, her igures are modeled with the subtle range of tonality seen in the work of the TGP’s most technically accomplished printmakers. While raising three sons—Francisco, born in 1947; Juan, born in 1949; and David, born in 1951—the Taller de Gráica Popular was her primary community. She

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Leopoldo Méndez, and Pablo O’Higgins, poster for the families of the miners of Nueva Rosita and Cloete, ca. 1950. Color serigraph, 37½" x 27½". Collection of Elizabeth Catlett. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett.

made prints at the workshop in the evenings and always tried to attend the Friday night collective meetings to which members of other organizations oten came with requests for graphic images in support of their work. A four-color serigraph poster that Catlett and fellow TGP members Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins produced in 1950 or early 1951 in response to the plight of striking Mexican miners and their families exempliies the collaborative spirit and political will of the TGP. In 1950 the Mexican government declared a miner’s strike in the north of Mexico illegal. Leaders of the strike were jailed, and many miners lost their jobs. he Taller de Gráica Popular supported the miners with posters and booklets illustrating the strike, the miners’ 1200-kilometer march to the nation’s capital, and their encampment in Mexico City plazas as they sought a resolution. With Kollwitz’s

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Cosechadora de algodón, or Sharecropper, ca. 1952. Linoleum cut on white wove paper, 173⁄₈" x 16¼". Collection of Belverd and Marian Needles. Photograph courtesy of Belverd and Marian Needles.

images of protective and grieving mothers in mind, Catlett drew with forceful and deliberate roughness the image of a woman mourning a dead child. Reinforcing its visual message is the poster’s text: “he death rate of children from hunger and disease in Rosita and Cloete is great. We must help those who remain.” hough the handscreening process is tedious, the three artists used a silkscreen that Catlett had brought with her from the United States to print a large number of posters and get them onto the walls of Mexico City as quickly as possible. In Mexico, Catlett also pursued her commitment to African American subjects in prints such as her iconic Sharecropper, initially a black-and-white linoleum cut of the early 1950s (some early proofs also include experiments with color).42 Sharecropper’s subtly varied, closely spaced hatchings demarcating contour, pattern, material, and texture relect the luency she developed as

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a printmaker at the TGP. At the same time, the expressionistic angularity of the woman’s careworn face marks Sharecropper as kin to many of Catlett’s depictions of African American women workers. Characteristic of Catlett’s portrayal throughout her career of strong, digniied black women, and inlected with the visual language she adopted in Mexico, Sharecropper’s authoritative compositional focus and carefully delineated forms are emblematic of the attention and respect Catlett felt her subject deserved. Catlett’s adoption of the graphic style of the TGP is emblematic of her growing understanding of the meaning of mestizaje, the blending of indigenous, Spanish, and African ancestries shared by many in Mexico, and of her recognition of commonalities and convergences among African American and Mexican peoples’ histories and experiences. Richard J. Powell writes of her prints: “When one is face to face with Elizabeth Catlett’s graphic work, ater celebrating her technical accomplishments and eye for eloquence, one must acknowledge, then marvel at, the inclusive, international dimensions of her subjects’ blackness, femaleness, and mejicanismo.”43 She was determined that her graphic images of working women, urban laborers and campesinos, children working and caring for smaller children, homeless children in the city, indigenous children in the country; and African American mothers, workers, ordinary people, and historical heroines speak clearly to her various audiences, African American and Mexican. In 1959 Catlett became the irst woman sculpture professor in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she taught until 1975. he collaborative and interactive approach to printmaking that Catlett experienced at the Taller was unparalleled in her work as a sculptor. As well, she said, “I’m thinking diferently in the two mediums. In the printmaking I’m thinking about something social or political, and in the sculpture I’m thinking about form. But I’m also thinking about women, black women.”44 Catlett loved form, and the way that materials can be manipulated and inished to enhance form and to celebrate their substantive nature. She exploited the elasticity of clay as she created ceramic forms that appear to swell and breathe from within, and incorporated into the elegant curves and angular planes of her carvings the patterns of wood grain, and the roughness, sheen, or translucency of diferent types of stone. Because she wished her sculpture to speak to ordinary people, she was committed to the visual accessibility of realism. But the eloquence of her most efective sculpture comes from her abstraction of form to a powerful, focused essence. As art critic Michael Brenson notes, critical attention to Catlett’s work has most oten focused on her politics. “However,” he argues, “while her artistic vision cannot be understood apart from her political beliefs, it cannot be

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fully appreciated within the language of ideology alone.”45 Noting its evident relationship to “modernist organic abstraction,” Brenson explores Catlett’s sculptural aesthetics as grounded in a fusion of African, pre-Hispanic, and modernist sources.46 Catlett’s modernist distillation of form oten simultaneously invokes multiple artistic traditions, as she borrowed without concern for cultural particularity the forms that she felt would best express the intended meaning of a particular piece. She emphasized her admiration for both African and pre-Hispanic sculpture because both use abstract form as a means of expression, and both also carry symbolic weight as embodiments of the cultural legacies that Catlett claimed as her artistic heritage.47 Richard J. Powell places Catlett among her predecessors Aaron Douglas and Sargent Johnson, artists of the Harlem Renaissance who “consciously fused cubism with African forms” in what he characterizes as a “shrewd undercutting of cubism’s position as an essentially Eurocentric colonizer of non-western art forms.”48 Indeed, Catlett’s discovery of abstraction as a way to convey feeling came through looking simultaneously at African art and at Zadkine’s cubistderived sculpture as inspired by African sculpture. For Catlett, African art validated modernist experimentation—not, as was the case in modernist thought, the reverse. “Ater all,” she said, “abstract art was born in Africa.”49 Catlett’s sculptural representations of women take their place in the lineage of African American women sculptors she admired: May Howard Jackson, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, whose Pan-Africanist Ethiopia Awakening (ca. 1914–20), writes art historian heresa Leininger-Miller, “symbolized the strength of womanhood, the emergence of nationhood, and the birth of what Alain Locke would three years later call the ‘New Negro,’”50 and Augusta Savage, whose work as a sculptor and an arts educator was well known to Catlett during her years in Harlem. Leininger-Miller notes Savage’s 1931 Paris exhibition of a sculpture now known only by its title, Nu, which “may have been among the irst sculptures of nude black female bodies by an African American artist.”51 Most likely because of the history of exploitation of the bodies of people of African descent in America and the pervasiveness in Western art history of colonizing images of the fetishized black female body, few African American artists portrayed the black female nude prior to the 1960s; art historian Judith Wilson thus asserts, “As both image and idea, the black body has long been a contested site.” Artists who have taken the black nude as their subject, Wilson contends, confront “the charge of its aesthetic unworthiness.”52 Art historian Michael D. Harris similarly maintains that “he presentation of the body in African-American art functions as an act of reclamation, selfdeinition, and self-assertion.”53 Catlett’s nudes (and clothed igures in which clothing does not obscure the body) recuperate the female body as a signiier

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of agency—of self-deinition and self-assertion. She emphasized that she was moved by “black beauty, not the female nudes of the European artists, but the women of the African wood carvers and the Prehispanic stone carvers.” In addition, she stated, “I am a black woman. I use my own body in working. When I am bathing or dressing, I see and feel how my body looks and moves. I never do sculpture from a nude model. . . Mostly I watch women.”54

“My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples” In the climate of the Cold War in the United States, the politics and social realist style of the Taller de Gráica Popular were suspect (the TGP was labeled a “Communist Front organization” by the U.S. attorney general) and Catlett’s ailiation with the workshop fueled her harassment by the United States embassy in Mexico throughout the 1950s.55 In 1962 she became a Mexican citizen and was subsequently denied entry to the United States until 1971, when she was granted a visa to attend the opening of her solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, her irst in this country since she exhibited her Negro Woman series in 1947–48.56 hough barred from the United States, during the 1960s Catlett turned her attention to the civil rights and black power struggles in her country of origin. In January 1970 her work was featured in Ebony magazine in an article titled “My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples,” bringing her increased visibility and numerous invitations to exhibit her work in the United States.57 Catlett’s simultaneous identiication with Mexican and African American peoples’ struggles is underscored throughout; she is quoted as saying, “I am inspired by black people and Mexican people, my two peoples.”58 At the same time, the article emphasized the primacy of her bond to the ideology of black liberation and her allegiance to the black arts movement. One photo caption reads, “Armed with power tools and chisels, Miss Catlett begins the liberation of another of her igurative black sisters imprisoned in a log.”59 As the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, black power, and other movements brought the politics of solidarity and liberation to the streets, Catlett manifested the ainity she felt for the black arts movement’s visual expression of identity, pride in African ancestry, and the revolutionary promise of black nationalism in prints and sculpture.60 Iconic works such as her cedar sculpture Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1969) declare her solidarity with black nationalist aims—here the igure’s upthrust arm and clenched ist make legible the abstracted concave and convex forms that allude to but do not describe the anatomical female body—and demand witness for women’s

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Target, 1970. Bronze, 20" x 14" x 22". Collection of the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photograph courtesy of the Amistad Research Center.

role in movements for black liberation.61 She responded with fury against the police brutality directed at African American men in Target of 1970, in which she recontextualized a man’s head she had modeled in clay in the late 1950s. With the addition of a graphically linear form representing a rile sight, this solemn and digniied head, elegantly modeled with physiognomic accuracy accented with sharply angular planes and now cast in bronze, became an emblem of resistance and a call to action. Catlett’s work became less militant in the decades subsequent to the turmoil and revolutionary fervor of the 1960s and early 1970s. Her retirement from teaching in 1975 meant that she could devote much more time to her art. She continued to proclaim her solidarity with antifascist and anticolonial struggles throughout Latin America in linoleum cuts that recall the TGP’s most politically outspoken work. As well, in lithographs, serigraphs,

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.. Elizabeth Catlett working in sculpture studio, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1997. Photograph by Juan Mora Catlett, courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett.

and monoprints she experimented with various printmaking processes that incorporate the colors and patterns of found materials and drew upon her deep understanding of the material properties of her mediums. Her sculpture manifests her command of form and her evident love for the tactile substance of the wood, stone, and clay that she variously employed along a continuum of realism to abstraction. Across national borders, her art continued to emphasize her commitment to making visible the experiences of African American women and children, and to calling for justice for African Americans and other oppressed peoples. In 1992 Catlett produced a series of ofset lithographs in collaboration with Margaret Walker Alexander, her graduate school roommate and longtime friend.62 Published as a limited edition portfolio, Catlett’s prints illustrate and accompany the text of Walker’s epic poem For My People that reads in part: For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly. . . For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years. . . For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play . . .

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Children Playing, 1992. Color lithograph, 15¾" x 13½". Artist’s proof, for Margaret Walker, For My People, with lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1992). Collection of Melanie Herzog. Photograph by Melanie Herzog.

Naming the hardships and sorrows sufered by generations, Walker’s poem concludes with hope: Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born . . .

Fity years ater the poem’s initial publication, Walker’s For My People and Catlett’s print images embody the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Like Catlett’s Negro Woman series, by this time renamed he Black Woman, this poem and these images resonate with the passion and the breadth of vision evident in so much of the writing and visual art produced half a century earlier that mourns the losses, chronicles the endurance, and celebrates the survival of African Americans, and looks to a future of liberation and justice.

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Young Woman, 2002. Graphite on paper, 11" x 8". Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Catlett received major commissions, several honorary degrees, and numerous honors, and her work is now included in the collections of important museums in the United States. So that her art would be accessible to “ordinary people,” she maintained her commitment to exhibit in community centers, public libraries, and historically black colleges and universities as well as major museums and galleries. Her U.S. citizenship was restored in 2002, and she spent her last years as a citizen of both the United States and Mexico. In the prints, drawings, and sculpture she produced during these years (assisted with her sculpture by her youngest son, David), she continued to draw upon the consummate mastery of graphic techniques she developed at the Taller de Gráica Popular and the sensitivity to three-dimensional form and materials that accrued throughout her lifetime of practice as a sculptor. he women Catlett sculpted, in wood, stone, marble, and clay, sometimes cast in bronze, are passionate, determined, resilient, and celebratory women of agency—mothers, workers, and survivors. For many years, Catlett said, she had wanted to make a sculpture of Mahalia Jackson.63 On April 28, 2010, two weeks ater her ninety-ith birthday, Catlett celebrated the unveiling of

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.. Elizabeth Catlett, Mahalia Jackson, 2010. Bronze, approx. 10' h. Louis Armstrong Park, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photograph by Melanie Herzog.

her ten-foot-high bronze sculpture of the legendary gospel singer in New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong Park.64 he substantial and voluptuous Mahalia Jackson, her arms held high and her radiant face upturned, embodies the authoritative power of voice, singing her songs of sorrow and of hope. In her 1961 keynote address to the hird Annual Meeting of the National Conference of Negro Artists in Washington, DC, Catlett had issued this call: “Are we here to communicate? Are we here for cultural interchange? hen let us not be narrow. Let us not be small or selish. Let us aspire to be as great in our communication as the forefathers of our people whose struggles made our being here possible.”65 Neither small nor selish, Catlett’s Mahalia stands as a monumental and commanding assertion of the ongoing legacy of “the expressions of the soul-world” that Langston Hughes had envisioned nearly a century before.

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Notes 1. Langston Hughes, “he Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, June 23, 1926, 694. 2. Elizabeth Catlett, quoted in Forever Free: Art by African-American Women, 1862– 1980, ed. Arna Alexander Bontemps and Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps (Normal: Center for the Visual Arts Gallery, Illinois State University, 1980), 68. 3. For a fuller treatment of Elizabeth Catlett’s life and work than is possible in the present essay, see Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). Also see Samella Lewis, he Art of Elizabeth Catlett (Claremont, CA: Hancrat Studios, 1984), Lewis’s art historically important homage to her colleague, friend, and former teacher. 4. Catlett recounted her grandmothers’ stories in several interviews, including those conducted by Glory Van Scott (1981, recording in collection of Elizabeth Catlett, transcript published in Artist and Inluence 1991, vol. 10, ed. James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian [New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1991]), Cliton Johnson (1984, recording in Elizabeth Catlett Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans), Camille Billops (1989, recording in collection of Elizabeth Catlett), and Melanie Herzog (1991 and 1993, recordings in collection of the author). 5. Interview with Melanie Herzog, June 14, 1991; also interview with Glory Van Scott, December 8, 1981, in Artist and Inluence 1991, 2. 6. See Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, “An Aesthetic of Survival: he Visionary Art of Elizabeth Catlett,” in Struggle and Serenity: he Visionary Art of Elizabeth Catlett (New York: Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center, 1996), 15–16. In 1943 Herring and Aden established the Barnett-Aden Gallery, where Catlett had her irst major one-person exhibition in 1947–48. 7. Tape-recorded interview with Glory Van Scott, December 8, 1981. Exemplifying this adversarial relationship, in 1940 Herring wrote in the Howard University Gallery Tenth Anniversary Exhibition catalogue, “Our policy has been to leave discovery of racial and national artists to our chauvinistic friends. We have preferred to exhibit the works of all schools and trends regardless of ideology or any designated sphere.” Quoted in Keith Morrison, Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1985), 14. 8. Interview with Melanie Herzog, June 14, 1991; also unrecorded conversation January 18, 1994, Cuernavaca, Mexico. 9. he State University of Iowa is now the University of Iowa. 10. A. Elizabeth Catlett, introduction to “Sculpture in Stone: Negro Mother and Child” (Master of Fine Arts hesis, Department of Graphic and Plastic Arts, State University of Iowa, 1940), 1. 11. One of the requirements for the master of ine arts degree at Iowa was that the student show work in a national exhibition. When Catlett was challenged on this point by department chair Lester Longman, she was able to assure him that she had sent a photograph of her carving to the American Negro Exposition and that it had been accepted;

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interview with Cliton Johnson, January 5, 1984. She won irst place in sculpture; Richmond Barthé won second place and Sargent Johnson won third place. See Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro (1851 to 1940), assembled by the American Negro Exposition, July 4–September 2, 1940, Tanner Art Galleries (Chicago: American Negro Exposition, 1940) n.p. An illustration of Catlett’s sculpture on display at the American Negro Exposition appeared in Newsweek, September 9, 1940, 20. 12. Locke, who had chaired the Art Committee for the American Negro Exposition, included Catlett’s Negro Girl, 1939, and Negro Mother and Child, 1940, among the numerous illustrations in he Negro in Art; see Alain Locke, he Negro in Art. A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artists and of the Negro heme in Art (New York: Hacker Books, 1968 [Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940]). Brief biographical notes appear on page 131. Herring listed Catlett as one of the contemporary sculptors “whose works today are seriously considered” in his survey of African American sculpture; see James V. Herring, “he Negro Sculptor,” Crisis 49, no. 8 (August 1942): 262. Catlett’s Negro Mother and Child is illustrated here as well. 13. James Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), 142. Catlett’s Negro Mother and Child is illustrated on page 257. 14. Elizabeth Catlett, handwritten manuscript for slide presentation at the New Orleans Museum of Art, October 15, 1983. She later became a great-grandmother as well. 15. Interview with Cliton Johnson, January 5, 1984. 16. On Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, see Alain Locke, “Chicago’s New Southside Art Center,” Magazine of Art 34, no. 7 (August–September 1941): 370–74; Willard F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” Opportunity 18, no. 1 (January 1940): 19–22 and 28–31; Anna M. Tyler, “Planting and Maintaining a `Perennial Garden’: Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 4 (1994): 31–37; and Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage, he Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). I thank Richard Courage for sharing portions of this manuscript with me in advance of its publication. On the Art Crats Guild, see Lucinda Gedeon, “he Introduction of the Artist Charles W. White (1918–1979): A Catalogue Raisonné” (Master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1981), 8–9, and he Muse in Bronzeville, 141–45. On Charles White’s association with other politically engaged Chicago artists, see Daniel Schulman, “African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund,” in A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Schulman (Chicago: Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, and Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 64–67. 17. See Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage, he Muse in Bronzeville; Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and he Black Chicago Renaissance, edited by Darlene Clark Hine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Also see Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). On the literary Renaissance in Chicago, see Robert Bone, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” Callaloo 28 (Summer 1986): 446–68; also Craig Werner, “Harlem Renaissance,” in he Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 1995), 375–78, and “Literary History: Early Twentieth Century,” in he Oxford Companion to African American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 453–56. 18. Alain Locke, “Chicago’s New Southside Art Center,” 370. Also see Willard F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago.” 19. Interview with Camille Billops, October 1, 1989, in Artist and Inluence 1991, 20. 20. Arna Bontemps, “Famous WPA Authors,” Negro Digest (June 1950): 46–47; quoted in Robert Bone, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” 447. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage ofer an extended comparison of the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance; see he Muse in Bronzeville, 1–2, 161, and throughout these authors’ reappraisal of this crucial period in African American cultural history. 21. Quoted in Willard F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” Opportunity 18, no. 1 (January 1940): 21. 22. Quoted in Willard F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” 22. 23. On African Americans and the Communist Party, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Mark I. Solomon, Red and Black: Communism and Afro-Americans, 1929–1935 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988); Harold Cruse, he Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1967); and Loren Baritz, ed. he American Let: Radical Political hought in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1971), in particular “he Black Beginning,” 271–92. On the relationship of black artists to the Communist Party, see Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage, he Muse in Bronzeville; also Cruse, he Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 215–18, and Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: he Art of Jacob Lawrence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 2–3. 24. Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 2. 25. Interview with Cliton Johnson, January 7, 1984. Patricia Hills explores what she calls the “thick context” of Harlem in the 1930s, a context that extends into the early 1940s; see her chapter “Harlem’s Artistic Community in the 1930s,” in Painting Harlem Modern, 9–31. 26. Interview with Melanie Herzog, June 14, 1991. 27. On Gwendolyn Bennett, see Sandra Y. Govan, “Ater the Renaissance: Gwendolyn Bennett and the WPA Years,” MAWA Review, quarterly publication of the Middle Atlantic Writers Association, 3, no. 2 (December 1988): 27–31; also Jerry Langley and Sandra Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: he Richest Colors on Her Palette, Beauty and Truth,” International Review of African American Art, vol. 23, no. 1 (2010): 6–15; James Porter, Modern Negro Art, 130; and Arna Alexander Bontemps and Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps, “African-American Art History: he Feminine Dimension,” in Forever Free, 32–33. On the Harlem Community Art Center and the Harlem Artists Guild, see Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 173– 75. On the demise of the Harlem Community Art Center, see Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 52–53. A photograph of the women who ran the Carver School is reproduced in Samella Lewis, he Art of Elizabeth Catlett, with the caption “Members of the Carver School

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in 1945. Let to right: Maymie Brown, Liz Branson, E.C., Gwendolyn Bennett, Edith Roberts, Hermine Dumont,” 18, and in Jerry Langley and Sandra Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett,” 14. 28. Interview with Cliton Johnson, January 7, 1984. Members of the Board of Trustees of the Carver School included Benjamin Davis, who was on the National Central Committee of the Communist Party and an elected city council member, and the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, minister of the largest black church in the world and later a congressional representative. 29. From a lecture by Catlett at Wooster College, Ohio, November 10, 1981; handwritten manuscript in Elizabeth Catlett archives, Amistad Research Center; quoted in halia Gouma-Peterson, “Elizabeth Catlett: ‘he Power of Human Feeling and of Art,’” Woman’s Art Journal 4, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1983): 50. Also see Elizabeth Catlett, “Responding to Cultural Hunger,” in Reimaging America: he Arts of Social Change, ed. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990), 244. 30. Interview with Melanie Herzog, June 14, 1991. 31. Daniel Schulman writes of the critical importance of the Rosenwald Fund for African American artists of this period, “Inspired by the literary and artistic successes of the Harlem Renaissance . . . the Julius Rosenwald Fund embarked on a major program of support for what it called ‘negro creative workers’”; see Schulman, “African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund,” 51–80. 32. See Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Shifra M. Goldman, In the Spirit of Resistance: African-American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School/En el espíritu de la resistencia: Los modernistas africanoamericanos y la Escuela Muralista Mexicana (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1996), particularly Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, “African-American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School/Los modernistas africanoamericanos y la Escuela Muralista Mexicana,” 27–67. Also see Alison Cameron, “Buenos Vecinos: African-American Printmaking and the Taller de Gráica Popular,” Print Quarterly 16, no. 4 (December 1999): 353–67; and Alison McClean, “Committed to Print: Printmaking and Politics in Mexico and Beyond, 1934–1960,” in Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints 1910–1950, ed. Dawn Adès and Alison McClean (London: British Museum Press, 2009), 27–42. 33. By the mid-1950s, hundreds of groups were named on the attorney general’s list; see Ellen Schrecker, he Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 151–53. HUAC drew broad public attention beginning in 1947 with its investigations of presumed communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry; see Allan M. Winkler, “Hollywood and HUAC,” in he Cold War: A History in Documents, ed. Winkler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46–50. On anticommunism in the United States, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, Perennial Classics, [1980] 2003), 425–37; also Winkler, particularly his chapter “he Anti-Communist Crusade,” 45–69. 34. On the Taller de Gráica Popular, see Helga Prignitz, TGP Ein Graiker-Kollektiv in Mexico von 1937–1977 (Berlin: Verlag-Seitz and Co., 1981), also published in Spanish as El Taller de Gráica Popular en México 1937–1977, trans. Elizabeth Siefer (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1992). Also see TGP Mexico: El Taller de Gráica Popular: Doce años

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de obra artistica colectiva/he Workshop for Popular Graphic Art: A Record of Twelve Years of Collective Work, ed. Hannes Meyer (Mexico City: La Estampa Mexicana, 1949); Dawn Adès, “he Taller de Gráica Popular,” in her Art in Latin America: he Modern Era, 1820–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 181–93; and Alison McClean, “Committed to Print,” 29–42. 35. Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana, 85 grabados de los artistas del Taller de Gráica Popular (Mexico City: La Estampa Mexicana, 1947). his portfolio consists of original prints by the sixteen members of the Taller de Gráica Popular. A numbered edition of ive hundred was printed for international distribution; an additional ity numbered with Roman numerals I through L were not for sale. 36. See Paintings, Sculpture, and Prints of he Negro Woman by Elizabeth Catlett (Washington, DC: Barnett-Aden Gallery, 1947), the catalogue for Catlett’s initial exhibition of her Rosenwald project that was published as a single folded sheet, with a foreword by Gwendolyn Bennett. Later exhibitions, and prints from this series titled by Catlett in subsequent decades, display some variations, notably the use of “Black” instead of “Negro.” For a fuller discussion of this series, see Daniel Schulman, “African American Art and the Rosenwald Fund,” 68–69 and 120–27; also Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico, 56–66; and Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 9–27. 37. See 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, text by Richard Wright and photo-direction by Edwin Rosskam (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 52. Lange’s photograph is here designated as Hoeing Cotton. See Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Oice of War Information Black-andWhite Negatives, available online at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/, Library of Congress call number LC-USF34-009541-C. Catlett’s linocut Survivor of 1983 derives from another of Lange’s Alabama photographs from 1937–38, Ex-slave with a Long Memory. 38. Daniel Schulman, “African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund,” 63. On Lawrence’s several series celebrating historical black igures, also see Over the Line: he Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, ed. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle Du Bois (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Jacob Lawrence: he Migration Series, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Washington, DC: Rappahannock Press in association with he Phillips Collection, 1993); and Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern. Hills considers the concordance of Lawrence’s historically grounded captions for his Harriet Tubman series with the conventions of slave narratives; see Painting Harlem Modern, 76–77. On Lawrence’s representation of “not just the phenomenon of people on the move but also the economic and social forces underlying that movement” in he Migration of the Negro, see Painting Harlem Modern, 97–133. 39. Elizabeth Catlett, “Artist with a Message,” People’s Voice, July 1, 1944, 14. 40. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 147. he photograph that accompanies these words is Carl Mydans’s Back Yard of Alley Dwelling, Washington, DC, circa 1940, in which a man looks upward into the sun, his face framed by the shadowed doorway from which he has emerged.

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41. Richard J. Powell, “Face to Face: Elizabeth Catlett’s Graphic Work,” in Elizabeth Catlett: Works on Paper, 1944–1992, ed. Jeanne Zeidler (Hampton, VA: Hampton University Museum, 1993), 52. 42. Sharecropper (titled at the time Negro Woman) won the second-place award for prints at the Atlanta University Art Annual in 1952 and was published in 1957 as Cosechadora de algodón in a special edition of the journal Artes de México commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the TGP. Artes de México 3, no. 18 (July/August 1957) was devoted entirely to the history and work of the Taller de Gráica Popular, including a transcript compiled by Raquel Tibol from conversations with members of the workshop. 43. Richard J. Powell, “Face to Face,” 53. 44. Interview with Mary Gibbons, 1989, tape-recording in collection of Elizabeth Catlett. 45. Michael Brenson, “Elizabeth Catlett’s Sculptural Aesthetics,” in Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fity-Year Retrospective (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, 1998), 27. 46. Michael Brenson, “Elizabeth Catlett’s Sculptural Aesthetics,” 36. 47. David Driskell refers to the “heritable sensibilities” of African art for African American artists; see David C. Driskell, “Black Aesthetic Directions: Without Critical Portfolio,” in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black Americans, 1925–1985, ed. Arna Alexander Bontemps (Washington, DC: Museum Press, 1986), 14. 48. Richard J. Powell, “Face to Face,” 51. 49. Quoted in Samella Lewis, he Art of Elizabeth Catlett, 95. Catlett also made this point in numerous interviews. 50. heresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 10. On Fuller, also see Lisa E. Farrington, Creating heir Own Image: he History of AfricanAmerican Women Artists (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 65–71. 51. heresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris, 185. On Augusta Savage, see Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris, 162–201; also Lisa E. Farrington, Creating heir Own Image, 100–107 and 110. 52. Judith Wilson, “Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of Pornography and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-U.S. Art,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 113 and 116. 53. Michael D. Harris, “Ritual Bodies—Sexual Bodies: he Role and Presentation of the Body in African-American Art,” hird Text 12 (Autumn 1990): 95. Harris argues that Locke’s call to African American artists to look to African art as a source of stylistic inspiration became not only a “reclamation project of cultural origins, but, more importantly, it has become a signiier for the theoretical, physical, and political reclamation of the black body for black people,” 92. 54. From an untitled and undated handwritten manuscript for a presentation about her work, in Elizabeth Catlett iles, Cuernavaca.

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55. See Karl M. Schmitt, Communism in Mexico: An Exercise in Political Frustration (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 140–42; and Helga Prignitz, El Taller de Gráica Popular en México, 142. Prignitz cites conversations with various TGP artists who were denied entry to the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. 56. On Catlett’s exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, see Elizabeth Catlett: Prints and Sculpture, foreword by Elton Fax, commentary by Jef Donaldson (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1971). 57. Marc Crawford, “My Art Speaks For Both My Peoples,” Ebony 25, no. 3 (January 1970): 94–101. A similar article appeared several months later in Mexico; see Marcos Martínez, “Elizabeth Catlett: Manos que dan vida a la materia,” Gente 103 (April 16, 1970): 38–39. 58. Marc Crawford, “My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples,” 94. 59. Marc Crawford, “My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples,” 95. 60. On Catlett and the black arts movement, see Mary Schmidt Campbell, “Part I: he Civil Rights Movement—An Awakening,” and “Part II: A Turbulent Decade,” in Tradition and Conlict: Images of a Turbulent Decade 1963–1973 (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1985). 61. See Freida High Tesfagiorgis, “Afrofemcentrism and Its Fruition in the Art of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold (A View of Women by Women),” Sage 4, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 25–32, reprinted in he Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 475–85. 62. See Margaret Walker, For My People, with lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1992), originally published as “For My People,” in For My People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942), 13–14. 63. Elizabeth Catlett, conversations with Melanie Herzog on April 25 and April 26, 2010, and statement at the unveiling of Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, April 28, 2010. 64. Catlett’s Mahalia Jackson joins her bronze Louis Armstrong, 1975–76, in Armstrong Park. Born in New Orleans, Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972) moved to Chicago in 1927 as part of the Great Migration. 65. Elizabeth Catlett Mora, “he Negro People and American Art,” Freedomways 1, no. 1 (Spring 1961): 76. Catlett’s keynote address to the National Conference of Negro Artists, “he Negro People and American Art at Mid-Century,” is excerpted in Samella Lewis, he Art of Elizabeth Catlett, 97–101, and reprinted in its entirety in the irst issue of Freedomways, 74–80.

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CONTRIBUTORS Renée Ater earned a BA in art history from Oberlin College and an MA and PhD in art history from the University of Maryland. She is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. Ater’s scholarship and teaching focus on American art of the nineteenth and twentieth century with a specialization in African American visual culture. She is the author of Keith Morrison, volume 5 of he David C. Driskell Series of African American Art (2005), and Remaking Race and History: he Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (2011). Ater was awarded a 2004–2005 National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and a 2006 General Research Board Summer Research Award from the Graduate School of the University of Maryland for Remaking Race and History. Currently, Ater is researching a book entitled Unsettling Memory: Public Monuments to the Slave Past in the United States. In relation to this project, she has published two articles, “he Challenge of Memorializing Slavery in North Carolina: he Unsung Founders Memorial and the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project” in the edited volume, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (2012), and “Commemorating Black Soldiers: he African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C.” in the exhibition catalog Tell It with Pride: he 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial (2013). Kirsten Pai Buick is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, where she has taught since 2001. Her areas of teaching and research interest include the visual culture of the irst British empire; art of the United States to 1945; African American art and visual culture as transnationalist enterprise; women as patrons and collectors of art; and issues of critical race/gender/class theory as they impact material culture. She received her PhD and MA in art history from the University of Michigan and her BA in art history from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (2010).

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Susan Earle is curator of European and American art at the Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, where she is also courtesy assistant professor in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and ailiate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has curated more than forty exhibitions, including the irst nationally touring retrospective of the work of Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, for which she also edited and contributed to the accompanying book, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (2007). Other recent publications include An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton and Cynthia Schira (2013), “Mimi Smith: Fashioning Art and Life,” Woman’s Art Journal (Spring/Summer 2011), and “An Allegory of Black Power: Aaron Douglas’s he Founding of Chicago,” he Register of the Spencer Museum of Art (2007–2008). She held a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation in 2006, and received an Outstanding Educator Award from the Kansas Torch Chapter of Mortar Board Senior Honor Society (2004). She earned PhD and MA degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and a BA cum laude from Williams College. Lisa E. Farrington is founding chair emeritus of art and music at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). She also spent iteen years as senior art historian at Parsons School for Design in New York and Paris. She was the 2008 Cosby Scholar at Spelman College, where her conference, “Hottentot to Hip Hop: he Black Female Body in Art and Visual Culture,” was held. She earned PhD and MPhil degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center; an MA from American University; and a BFA from Howard University magna cum laude; and she was an honors graduate of New York’s School of Art and Design. Her museum experience includes the National Gallery of Art and ten years at the Museum of Modern Art. Her writing awards include the Outstanding Contribution to Literature (ALA), the Hurston Wright Literary Award, and the Association of Black Women Historians Memorial Book Prize, all for her groundbreaking book Creating heir Own Image: he History of African-American Women Artists (2005). She is currently completing another Oxford Press text on African American art from colonialism to the twenty-irst century. Melanie Anne Herzog is professor of art history at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. She holds an MFA in ceramics and a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a BA in art and art history from Johnston College (now Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands) in Redlands, California. She received the James R. Underkoler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2006, and Edgewood College’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Multicultural Education

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in 2008. Her publications include Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (2000), Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People (2005), and “Imaging History, Memory, and the Raced and Gendered Body: he Legacy of Elizabeth Catlett,” in he Female Gaze: Women Artists Making heir World (2012), as well as Milton Rogovin: he Making of a Social Documentary Photographer (2006), “Women of Metal: Innovation, Connection, and Education” in Women of Metal (2008), and essays on mixed-media installation artist Flo Oy Wong, Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones, and current practices in the teaching of Native American art. Amy Helene Kirschke is professor of art history at University of North Carolina–Wilmington. She is the author of Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance (1995) and Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Art of African American Identity and Memory (2007), which was awarded the 2007 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication. She coedited (with Phillip Luke Sinitiere) Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Crisis, and American History (2014). She is one of the authors of Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (2007) and has contributed chapters to books in the ield of African American art/Harlem Renaissance, including Temples for Tomorrow: African Diasporas in the Old and New Worlds; Cary Wintz’s Harlem Speaks: he Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later; and Women of Color: Taking heir Rightful Place in Leadership. She has written numerous articles and exhibition essays in the ield of African American and African art. heresa Leininger-Miller is associate professor of art at the University of Cincinnati and the former director of graduate studies. She is the author of New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (2001), and essays in the anthologies he Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (2003) and Out of Context: American Artists Abroad (2004). Her essays also have appeared in the exhibition catalogues, he Harlem Renaissance (2009), Paris Black (2006), and Paris Connections: African-American Artists in Paris, as well as multiple refereed journals, reference guides, and auction catalogues. Leininger-Miller is working on her second book, Sculpting the New Negro: he Life and Art of Augusta Savage, with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and a Scholarship in American Modernism from the Georgia O’Keefe Museum Research Center. She has curated exhibitions on illustrated sheet music of the Civil War, by black composers, and about nineteenth-century Cincinnati, as well as shows on the Tyler Davidson Fountain of 1871 and the self-taught African American artist Mary Bell.

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Cary D. Wintz is the distinguished professor of history at Texas Southern University and is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance in and in African American political thought. Wintz is an author or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political hought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: he Road to the White House; and he Harlem Renaissance in the West. He served as an editor of the Oxford University Press ive-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has also written extensively on Texas history and is an author of one of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: he Lone Star State, and coeditor of Major Problems in Texas History. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas State University.

INDEX Abolitionism, 25 Académie Colarossi, 57 Académie de la Grand Chaumière, 91, 158 Adelphi College, 102 Aden, Allen, 207 African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Missionaries, 120 Afri-Cobra, and Jef Donaldson, 199 Alexander, Albert, 73 Allen, Frederick, at Harpers, 4 Alston, Charles, 143 American Anti-Slavery Society, 39 American Federation of the Arts, 144 American Mercury, 107 American Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, 58 Americans of Negro Lineage, 55, 71, 74 America’s Making Exposition, 53, 63–75, 77, 78; and John Daniels, 66, 69; and the Negro Group, 70; and Charles Storey, 67 Amy Spingarn Art Award, 102 Arial, William, 120 Armory Show, 126 Armstrong, Louis, 17 Arthur, George Robert, 168 Artis, William, 170 Art Students League, 117 Arts and Crats of the Homelands, 66 Atkins, Francis L., 121

Bannister, Edward Mitchell, 42 Barnes, Albert, 110 Barnes, Gilbert Hobbs, 37 Barthé, Richmond, 89, 143, 144, 146, 211; Mangbetu, 171 Bass, Maudelle, 132–36 Bauer, Michaela and Wolfgang, 141 Bearden, Romare, 17, 19, 142, 198; he Artist and Modern Art, 110 Beardsley, Aubrey, 196 Benjamin, Tritobia Hayes, 199 Benneteau-Desgrois, Felix, 158, 159 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 87, 107–10, 164, 214; and Academie Julien, 108; and Columbia University, 108; and Howard University, 108; Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas, 109; and Pratt Institute, 108; and Sorbonne, 108 Bernard, Catherine, 200 Bishop, Isabel, 200 Black Migration, 8 Boehler, Hans, 141; Freundinnen, 140 Boehler Foundation, 148, 149 Bontemps, Arna and Jacqueline, 126, 211 Book of America’s Making, 71 Boston, Massachusetts: and black population, 38; and Soldier’s Relief Fair, 42 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 59, 179, 199 Boston Museum School, 178, 179, 186 Bothers, Harper, 11 Bourdelle, Antoine, 160, 170 Boutet de Monvel, and Prinet, 91 Boykin, Cloyd L. 74 Boykin Art School, Greenwich, 170 Boyle, John Joseph, 116

Baker, Josephine, 5, 157; in “La Revue Nègre,” 157, 162, 164 Baltimore Afro-American, 85 Bankhead, William B., 70

243

244 Brackett, Edward A., 38, 41 Bravo, Manuel Alvarez, 135 Brawley, Benjamin, 20 Brenson, Michael, 223, 224 Broken Fetter, 39 Brooklyn Navy Yard, 143 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 211 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 10 Brown, Charlotte Hawkins, 145 Brown, Elsa Barkley, 44 Brown, John, 41, 42, 45 Brown, Minnie, 102 Brown, Sterling, Southern Road, 18 Brown, William Wells, 37; and Phillis Wheatley, 27 Buck, Pearl S., 148 Bullard, Laura Curtis, 39 Burchield, Charles, 182 Burke, Selma Hortense, 115, 119–21, 138–50; and Herman Kobbe, 146, 149; and Livingstone College, 147, 149, 150; and Eugene O’Neill, 139; and Selma Burke School of Sculpture, 145; and Swarthmore, 146 Burleigh, Harry hacker, 76, 188, 189 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 162; and Works Progress Administration, 210 Burroughs, Margaret, 211 California Eagle, 137 Calloway, Cab, 19 Calloway, homas J., 58 Carlyle, homas, 40 Carnegie Corporation, 158 Carnegie Grant, 158 Carnegie Hall, 6 Carnegie Institute, 207 Carney, Sergeant William, 41 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste: Les quatre parti du monde soutenant la sphère, 166; Pourquoi naître esclave, 165, 170 Carrington, Joyce, 87; and Egypt, 104 Carter, Elmer A., 107

Index Carver School, 215 Catlett, Elizabeth, 145, 205–30; Homage to My Young Black Sisters, 225; Negro Mother and Child, 208; he Negro Woman, 218, 219, 223, 225; Sharecropper, 222; Target, 226 Chapman, Maria Weston, 42 Chase, William Merritt, 116, 124 Chestnutt, Charles, 100 Cheyney Training School for Teachers, State Normal School, 91 Chicago Art Institute, 92 Chicago Arts Crats Guild, 210 Chicago Defender, 70, 77 Child, Lydia Marie, 26, 39, 40, 42 Chrichlow, Ernest, 142, 170 Christian Register, 39 Civic Club Dinner, 4 Civil War, 33, 89 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 31, 32, 33, 34 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, “Bamboula,” 76, 77 Colin, Paul, Le Tumulte Noir, 162 Columbia University, 12, 91, 139, 142, 146 Communist Party, 212 Cooper Union, 117, 158 Corcoran Gallery of Art, 92, 125 Cordier, Nicholas, Vénus africaine, 165 Cortor, Eldzier, 143, 211 Cottage City, 187 Cotton Club, 20 Couch, Professor, 28, 35 Council for Racial Understanding, 145 Crawford, John S., 29 Cresson Traveling Scholarship, 91 Crisis magazine, 7, 19, 59, 70, 85, 92, 93, 96, 97, 100, 125 Cullen, Countee, 4, 16, 166; Caroling Dusk, 20; Palms, 20 Cult of True Womanhood, 30, 33, 36, 46 Dahomey, 165, 167; and Amazons, 172 Daly, Victor, 59

Index Dawson, Charles, 211 Dazel, Archibald, he History of Dahomey, An Inland Kingdom of Africa, 165 Degas, Edgar, 124 DeKooning, Willem, 142 Delacroix, Eugene, Liberty Leading the People, 162 Delany, Martin R., 45, 144 Delgado University, 210 DeMille, Agnes, Black Ritual, 135 Designers Art School, and Ludwig Frank, 180 Dillard University, 210 Dore, Ashton, 14 Double Consciousness, xi Douglas, Aaron 3, 7, 15, 16, 102, 180, 185, 190, 192, 195, 196, 199, 223; Aspects of Negro Life, 192; Fire!!, 19; he Founding of Chicago, 192 Douglas, Ann, 30 Douglas, Georgia, 89 Douglass, Frederick: and Anthony Aaron, 128; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 27, 40, 42, 128, 220 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 8, 9, 15, 16, 20, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78, 100, 112, 150, 158, 185, 198; “Answer of Africa,” xvi, 69; Black Folk: hen and Now, 93; Blackwater, 87; and illustrators of Crisis, 85–107; and May Howard Jackson, 125, 126, 128; and propaganda, xv; “he Seven Gits of Ethiopia to America,” 75, 77 Du Bois, Yolanda, 87, 100 Dunbar High School, 123, 206 Duncan, Isadora: he Art of the Dance, “Terpsichore,” 160, 161, 162; and Bacchic dances, 161 Dunham, Katherine, 211 Eakins, homas, 116, 117 Ebony, 225 École des Beaux-Arts, 146 Ecton, William P., 117

245

Edmondson, William, 143 Edstrom, Peter David, Sphinx, 119 Einstein, Margo, 139 Ellington, Duke, 16 Ellis, Billie, 87 Ellison, Ralph, 20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 40 Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 223 Estampas de la Revolucion Mexicana, 217, 219 Estevancio (slave of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza), 76 Europe, James Reese, 6, 7 F. A. Foster Company, 183 F. Schumacher and Company, 183 Farris, Phoebe, 148 Fauset, Jessie, 92; he Brownies’ Book, 87; Crisis, 87; “Dark Algiers the White,” 99; “Double Trouble,” 99; Plum Bun, 18; here Is Confusion, xiv, 3, 4 Finley, John, 77 Fire!!, 3, 15, 16, 107 Fisher, Rudolph, 92; “he City of Refuge,” 11, 17 Fisk University, 14, 193 Fletcher, Samuel, on Oberlin College, 27, 30, 31 Forbes, Frederick E., Dahomey and the Dahomans, 166 Ford, John Anson, 132 Fountainebleau School, 158 Francis, John H., 117 Frazier, E. Franklin, 14 Freedmen’s Journal, 42 Freedmen’s Record, 39 Freelon, Allan, 144 Freiheit Gezang Farein Gallery, 142 French, Daniel Chester, Africa for the Continents, 61 Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 37

246

Index

Fuller, Meta Warrick, 53–84; and Du Bois, 58; and Egyptian art, 59, 60, 61, 74; Emancipation, 58; Ethiopia, 53, 55, 58, 74, 78, 188, 224; and Girls’ High School, 56; and Hollingsworth School, 56; and J. Liberty Tadd School of Industrial Art, 56; and Lois Jones, 188; and Locust Street Girls’ School, 56; and Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts, 56; Warrick Tableaux at the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, 58, 90 Gaither, Edmund Barry, 198, 199 Garrison, William Lloyd, 37, 41; and “Immediatism,” 25; and he Liberator, 37, 39 Garvey, Marcus, 8, 10, 16; Negro World, 158; and Garveyites, 164 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Douglass, 40 George Washington Carver School, 214 Giddons, Paula, xiv Glassberg, David, 75 Goss, Bernard, “Negro Art in Chicago,” 211 Graly, Charles, 116 Granger, Lester Blackwell, 121 Grant, Ulysses S., 42 Great Depression, 15 Greener, Richard, 37 Grimes, Leonard A., 37 Guillaume, Paul, 110 Halpert, Edith, and the Downtown Gallery, 142 Handy, W. C., “Memphis Blues,” 6 Harding, Warren, and anti-immigrant laws of 1921, 68 Harem, Maud Cuney, 60 Harlem Community Art Center, 143; and FDR, 211, 214 Harlem Race Riot of 1935, 14 Harlem Renaissance, 3, 4 Harmon, William E., 91

Harmon Foundation, 7, 8, 89, 91, 102, 110, 126, 185 Harmon Gold Award, 92 Harris, Michael D., 224 Harvard University, 60, 91, 180; and Fogg Art Museum, 185 Hayden, Harriet and Lewis, 37 Hayden, Palmer, 166; Fétiche et Fleurs, 169 Haynes, George, 92 Hayward, William, and Harlem Hellighters, 145 Herring, James, 207, 216 High School for the Practical Arts (Boston), 177 Hills, Patricia, 212 Holbrook, Francis C., 110 Hollingsworth, Fred, 142 Homer, Winslow, 185 Horton, James Oliver, 38 Hosmer, Harriet, 40 House Un-American Activities Committee, 137, 217 Howard, Adeline T., 43, 44, 45 Howard University, 125, 193, 198, 206, 208 Hughes, Langston, 3, 5, 12, 15; “Cross,” 18; Mulatto, 18; “he Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 15; Not Without Laughter, 18, 20, 21, 108, 205; “he Weary Blues,” 16 Hunt, William Morris, 42 Hurston, Zora Neale, xiv, 3, 15, 185; Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 18; Quicksand, 18, 21; heir Eyes Were Watching God, 17 Hylan, John, 68 Ideal Womanhood, 35 Immigrants, 53, 54, 66 Independent, 39 International House, 102 Irwin, David, 29 J. Liberty Tadd High School, 115 Jackson, Mahalia, 229, 230

Index Jackson, May Howard, 90, 115, 121, 149, 150; Clark Bailey: Head of a Negro Child, 122; Head of a Negro Child, 126, 127; Kelly Miller, 126; Mulatto Mother and Child, 127, 128; Paul Laurence Dunbar, 123, 223 Jardin d’Acclimation, 167 Jazz Age, 6 Jeferson, homas, and Sally Hemmings, 128 Jim Crow, 124 Johnson, Charles S., 4, 85, 107, 112; and Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute, 107 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 92, 125 Johnson, James Weldon, 4, 6, 10, 69, 92; Black Manhattan, 12, 14, 18; “Lit Every Voice and Sing,” 102; God’s Trombones, 18; and NAACP, 53, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78 Johnson, Joshua, Portrait of Cleric, xiii Johnson, Sargent Claude, 121, 143, 224; Elizabeth Gee, 122 Johnson, William Henry, 179 Jones, Anna Russell, 183 Jones, Carolyn Dorinda Adams, 177 Jones, Eugene Kinckle, and the National Urban League, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77 Jones, Loïs Mailou, 111, 144, 175–200; and African motifs, 177; and Boston, 177; Buddha, 178, 196; Challenge-America, 197, 198; Clochards, Montmartre, 193, 196; Ganges, 183, 184; Gladiola Garden, 189; and Les Fétiches, 178, 180; Les Pommes Vertes, 180; and Oak Blufs, 176; Self Portrait, 194; Totem Poles, 180, 181; and Toulouse Lautrec, 196; Ubi Girl from Tai Region, 193, 198 Jones, homas Vreeland, 177 Kachun, Mitch, 88 Kechley, Elizabeth Hobbs, 183 Kellogg, Paul, Survey Graphic, 5

247

Keppel, Frederick, and Carnegie Corporation, 170 Key, Vivien Schuyler, 87, 100–104; “Children’s Number,” 102; and Crisis, 102; and Krigwa, 102; and “he Library Hour,” 103; and “Mid-Winter,” 104; and Pratt Institute, 100, 101 Kimball, Gregg D., 44 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 148 Kinsey Collection, Los Angeles, 124 Kirkham, Pat, 180 Klimt, Gustave, 141 Knight, Gwendolyn, 170 Kollwitz, Kathe, 220, 221 Ku Klux Klan, 93 La Boheme Tea Room, 180 La Farge, John, 42 La Guardia, Fiorello, 14 Lane, Franklin K., 70 Lange, Dorothea, and Farm Security Administration, 218 Langston, John Mercer, 33, 34 Larson, Nella, xiv, 3; Passing, 18; Quicksand, 18 Lawrence, Jacob, 16; Harriet Tubman and Black Migration, 17, 19, 145, 170, 220 Lawson, Ellen, on Oberlin College, 25 Lewis, David Levering, 88 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 22–46; and Emancipation Proclamation, 22; and John Keep, 25; and Samuel Lewis, 23, 26; and S. J. Mills, 24; and New York Central College, 24; and Oberlin College, 22, 25, 28, 35, 36, 45; and patronage, 23, 34; and Rome, 46; “he Song of Hiawatha,” 22 Lewis, Norman, 142, 144, 170 Lewis, Samella, 210 Liberia, 95 Library of Congress Copyright Oice, 137 Lie, Jonas, 189 Lincoln, Abraham, 42, 93

248

Index

Lincoln University, 13 Lipchitz, Jacques, 170 Lorain County News, 35, 36 Locke, Alain: “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” 5; “Legacy of Ancestral Arts,” xv, 4; he New Negro: An Interpretation, 5, 15, 89, 129, 149, 168, 184, 185, 198, 207, 208, 211, 224 Los Angeles All City Annual Outdoor Arts Festival, 137 Los Angeles Central Library, 130 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 121, 131 Los Angeles Municipal Art Department, 149; and Kenneth Ross, 137 Los Angeles Negro Art Association, 130 Los Angeles Times, 118, 137 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 220 Louvre, the, 57, 59 Lowe, Ann, 183 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 184 Luba-Tabwa-Tumbwe igure, 136 Lukens, Glen William, 118 Luxembourg Museum, 57 Lynching, 17, 71, 93 Madagascar, 206 Maillol, Aristide, Venus with a Necklace, 141 Massachusetts Normal School (Boston), 177 Masses, he, 89 Matthews, Miriam, 130 Mayer, Henry, 37 McCarty, Henry, 91 McCarthyism, 149 McKay, Claude, 16; and Eulalie Imelda Edwards, 148; Home to Harlem, 17; “If We Must Die,” 17, 19, 139, 148 McMillen Gallery, 142 McPherson, James, 26 Mendez, Leopoldo, 221 Merrill, Marlene, on Oberlin College, 25 Messenger, 107

Mestizaje, 223 Mexican Revolution, 215 Miestchaninof, Oscar, Man in a Top Hat, 170 Miller, Kelly, 128 Miller, Nathan, 68 Milmore, Martin, 61 Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte), 189, 199 Montmartre, 157, 158 Mora, Francisco, 217 Morton, Jelly Roll, 6, 16 Motley, Archibald, 211 Munro, homas, 110 Murray, Freeman, 61 Museé de Cluny, 57 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 177, 184; and Museum School, 177 Nadelman, Elie, 170 Nathaniel hayer Prize, 177 National Academy of Design, 125, 128 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 39 National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 10 National Conference of Negro Artists (Washington, D.C.), 230 National Training School for Women and Girls, 120 National Urban League, 10, 55, 158 Neal, George E. , 211 Neel, Alice, 200 “Negro Artist Comes of Age, he,” 144 Negro Colony, 157 Negro Day, 77 Negro History Bulletin, 196 Nell, William C., 37 New National Era, 39 New Negro, he, 7, 125, 175, 176 New Negro Renaissance, 3 New York Age, 58, 71 New York Artists’ Gallery, 143 New York Public Library Harlem Branch, 7

Index New York Society of Independent Artists, 126 New York Times, 69; and Allan Jewell, 144, 149 New York Water Color Club, 92 New York Worlds Fair of 1939, 170 Newsome, Eie Lee, 87; Gladiola Garden, 195 New-York Mirror, 41 Norton, Clara Steele, 28 Oak Bluf, Martha’s Vineyard, 186, 188 Obama, Barack, 188 Oberlin College, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 56 O’Higgins, Pablo, 221 Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, 33 Opportunity, 4, 7, 19, 85, 90, 177; and illustrators, 106–12 Orlof, Chana, 170 Orozco, José Clemente, 110 Osofsky, Gilbert, 13 Otis Art Institute (UCLA), 118 Palmer Memorial Institute (Sedalia, North Carolina), 145, 189 Pan-Africanism, 8, 16, 53, 78 Paris, France, xii, 58 Paris Exposition Sculpture Grand Prix, 119 Parks, Rosa, 149 Parsons School of Design, 116 Paul, Eleanor, 87 Peabody, Elizabeth, 39 Pearl S. Buck Foundation, 148 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 91, 92, 116, 121 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, 147 Perkins, Linda, 43 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 146 Phillips, Wendell, 41 Pickens, William, xv Pierre-Noel, Louis Vergniaud, 184, 190; and Pierrettes, 185 Pippin, Horace, 179

249

Poiret, Paul, 182, 183 Pollock, Jackson, 142 Porter, James, 125, 144, 171, 198, 207; Modern Negro Art, 209, 216 Powell, Richard, 220, 223, 224 Powolny, Michael, 141 Preparatory High School for Negro Youth, 123 Proctor’s Twenty-hird Street heater, 6 Prophet, Elizabeth, 89, 90 Prophet, Nancy Elizabeth, Congolais, 171 Public Works Art Project, 207 Quarles, Benjamin, 40 Quill Club, and the Saturday Evening Quill Club, 185 Rand School for Social Science, 146 Rangel, Charles B., 199 Rainey, Ma, 6 Randolph, A. Philip, and the Messenger, 8 Rayon Institute of America, 178 “Red Scare” (1919–1920), 64 Red Summer, 55 Reisner, George, 60 Reiss, Winold, 180 Representative Negro, 40 Rhode Island School of Design, 177 Richardson, Marilyn, 24 Richmond, Virginia, 44 Rimmer, William, 42 Ringgold, Faith, and Women’s Caucus for Art, 198 Ripley, Grace, 177 Rivera, Diego, 110, 134, 135, 207 Robert C. Vose Galleries (Boston), 186 Robeson, Paul, 5 Rockefeller, John D., 55 Rodin, Auguste, 57, 119, 124, 160, 170 Roko Gallery (Greenwich Village), 145 Rollin, Francis, 45 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 145 Roosevelt, Franklin, 121, 144

250 Rosenwald Foundation, 158, 159, 168 Rosenwald Fund, 139, 215 Rosskam, Edwin, 12 Million Black Voices, 218 Salon d’Automne, 159, 162 Salon des Indépendants, 159 Sarah Lawrence College, 139 Sargent, John Singer, 184 Savage, Augusta, 89, 110, 111, 143, 157–72, 190, 214, 224; he Amazon, 163, 165, 166, 168; Bathing Boy, 159, 171; Bust of a Woman, 159; he Call, 167, 168; Danseur nu, 162; Divinité nègre, 169, 170; and Du Bois portrait, 171; “Gamin,” 171; and Harlem Community Art Center, 170; La Citadelle-Freedom, 161, 171; La dépêche africaine, 164; Lit Every Voice and Sing, 171; Martiniquaise, or Woman of Martinique, 162; Mourning Victory, 165–67; and the New Negro, 170; Terpsichore at Rest (Reclining Figure), 159; Tête de jeune ille, 163–65; and WPA Federal Art Project in the Uptown Art Laboratory, 170 Savage Studio of Arts and Crats, 170 Schiele, Egon, 141 Schomburg, Arthur, 69 Schulman, Daniel, 220 Schuyler, Vivien. See Key, Vivien Schuyler Scottsboro incident, 18 Sebree, Charles, 143, 211 Selma Burke Art Center (Pittsburgh), 147 Sentimentalism, 28, 46 Shaw, Robert Gould, 41, 42, 45 Shule Along, 5–7 Sims, Lowery Stokes, 179, 183 Sissle, Noble, 6; Chocolate Dandies, 7 Smith, Ada “Bricktop,” 157 Smith, Albert Alex, 110 Smith, Bessie, 16

Index Smith, Celeste, 87; and Aaron Douglas, 105; “Excelsior,” 105–6 Smith, Hoke, and Smith-Bankhead Americanization Bill, 70 Smith, James Rodney, and California News, 130 Société des Artistes Français, 159, 162 Society of Independent Artists, 125 Sophie Newcomb College, 210 Souls of Black Folk, xiii, 77, 128 Souza, Pauline de, 60 Spingarn, Amy, 89 St. Agnes School of Nursing, 121, 138 Stallworth, Shauna, 180 Starr, Sarah Logan Wister, 138 State University of Iowa, 208 Stehli Silks Corporation, 183 Steichen, Edward, 183 Steinbach, Sophia, 110 Stendahl Art Galleries, 131, 149 Sterling, Dorothy, We Are Your Sisters, 45 Still, William Grant, 17 Stix, Hugh, 141 Storey, William Westmore, 61 Studio Museum of Harlem, 225 Sumner, Charles, 42 Survey Graphic, 107 Swinth, Kristin, 57 Talented Tenth, 58, 88, 115, 121 Taller de Gráica Popular, 217, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 229 Tanner, Henry O., xiii, 7, 73, 91, 143 Ted Shawn School of Dance (Los Angeles), 177–78 hurman, Wallace, 17; Blacker the Berry, 18; Infants of the Spring, 18; Fire!!, 20; and Harlem magazine, 20 Tin Pan Alley, 11 Traton, Scott, 60 Truman, Harry, 144 Truth, Sojourner, 76 Tubman, Harriet, 220

Index Tulsa Riot, 8 Tuskegee Institute, 206 Up From Slavery, 77 Urania, 28, 29 Van Doren, Carl, Century magazine, 4 Van Vechten, Carl, 135; Nigger Heaven, 17 Vatican Museum, 29 Vedder, Elihu, 42, 61 Veerhof Gallery, 125 Vernon Public Library, 130 Vietnam War, 225 Villa des Brillants, 57 Villa Lewaro, 125 Walker Alexander, Margaret, 208, 211; For My People, 227 Waring, Amelia, 138 Waring, Laura Wheeler. See Wheeler, Laura Warrick, Emma Jones, 56 Warrick, William Henry, Jr., 55 Washington Society of Fine Arts, 128 Waterson, Anna Quincy, 39, 41 Wells, James Lesnesne, 207, 216 Weltanschauung, 126 weltzensang, of the Jazz Age, 115 Wesleyan Grove Camp Meeting, 186 West, Dorothy, 185 Weston, Edward, 132; and Weston Family Trust, 135 Wheeler, Laura, 87, 91, 108; “Africa in America,” 93; on Egyptian Art, 93, 97; “Egypt-Spring,” 96; Guggenheim Fellowship, 92; and Ingres, 93; “Lest We Forget,” 93; and the Middle Passage, 93; “Strength of Africa,” 98; “Veil of Spring,” 97 White, Charles, 211, 213 White, Walter: Rope and Faggot, 18; Negro, 18 Whitney, Anne, 38, 42, 62 Wilberforce University, 56 Wilkinson, Hilda, 87

251

Wilson, Jeremiah Moses, xii Wilson, Judity, 224 Winston-Salem State University, 120 Women’s Caucus for Art, 148 Woodard, Beulah Ecton, 115, 117–19, 121, 129–38; African Woman, 130; and Alonzo Aden, 129; and Du Bois, 129; and Dunbar, 129; and Francis Grimke, 129; La Croisère Noire, 131; Maudelle, 133; and Miller, 129; and the Masai, Ekoi, Luba, Mangbetu, 130; Two Billion (Creation), 138, 149, 150; Grant Wood, 208 Woodruf, Hale, 166 Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 138 Works Progress Administration, xi, 212 World War I, 6, 55; and Meta Fuller, 54; and race riots, 8, 11, 15; and Augusta Savage, 157; and 369th U.S. Infantry Division, 6 World War II, 20, 217 Wright, Richard, 20, 211, 218, 220 Wyatt, Anna M., 28 Yaddo Foundation, 147 Zadkine, Ossip, 170, 214, 223 Zuniga, Francisco, 217