Race in America comes with a lot of struggle. It has been over fifty years since segregation ended, and race is still the cause of debate over police brutality, discrimination, and hate crimes. In the public eye, race relations are a more muted topic. Most people, white and black say that the time of racial cynicism is over. Race relations now are less defined by politics and more by experiences in schools, sports, popular culture and religion. In the arts, race is becoming more defined as the celebration of culture.
One well known and celebrated African American artist is Jacob Lawrence. Lawrence was born in 1917 and grew up in a segregated America. He was best known for his portrayal of African American life in his paintings. Lawrence’s style was remising of Pablo Picasso’s cubism, but with more color and darker features. He referred to his style of art as “Dynamic Cubism”, a style that is carried on by several other African American artists today. Lawrence was just thirteen when he was first introduced to art when his family moved to New York. One of his art teachers say that Lawrence had great potential and urged him to study hard and get into a good school.
At the age of sixteen he dropped out of high school and took a job at a printing plant and continued to take art classes lead by Charles Alston, another African American artist at the time. Alston lead Lawrence to the American Arts School where he met Augusta Savage who helped him get a scholar ship to the school as well as a work study position. He worked and studied hard for many years. During this time he had created many notable paintings, one of which he is best known for “The Migration Series.”
“The Migration Series” is a 60 panel set of narrative paintings ...
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... Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” gives the viewer a first-hand look at what it was like to be black during the great migration. He captures the very essence of black America. This series painting have a wide variety of content ranging from black people setting under a tree, to hundreds of African Americans loading a train to New York. Lawrence finds what really shows his culture for what it really is, rich. Black culture is a big part of America and the “Migration Series” takes into account the daily lives of African Americans before and after segregation.
Works Cited
Gates, H. Family Matters. 2009. Best American Essays. Class Readings 2014
Kruger, B. Mariani, P. Black Culture and Postmodernism. Remaking History. Class Readings
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Phillips Collection. The Migration Series. Jacob Lawrence. Retrieved from the Web. April 1,
2014
Flashing forward a few years later past the days of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, several, but not all in the younger generation see the members of the black and white race as equal and find it hard to fathom that only a few years ago the atmosphere surrounding racial relations was anything but pleasant. Whites and blacks have co-existed for many hundreds of years, but as Tyson points ...
Kehinde Wiley was born in 1977 in Los Angeles, California. He is a New York visual artist who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of black people in heroic poses. As a child, his mother supported his interest in art and enrolled him in after school art classes. When Wiley was 12 years old he attended an art school in Russia for a short time. At the age of 20 he traveled to Nigeria to learn about his African roots and to meet his father. He has firmly situated himself within art’s history’s portrait painting tradition. He earned his BFA at San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and he received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2001.
He has resided and taught in New York. I think his images and prints continue to reveal his practice and memories of growing up in the South. Not only is his subject matter about African American people, but more universally, people of all kinds - black, white, wealthy, poor, religious, northern or southern. As to what I found, his work has been portrayed as Southern, black, or radical, but I think he is above all an American artist. He draws on many different influences in his art, including his father.
...ce was recognized for his talent. Despite the primitive look of Lawrence’s painting the gesture are read and reveals a set of principles inspired by African-Americans. Thus, the modernist aesthetic of his art shows the critical faith of a people oppressed and striving to get ahead. Therefore, elements of his work and themes like man’s struggle produce one of the United States most famous African-American Artist of all times Jacob Lawrence.
For my research I decided to visit the Smithsonian art museum in Washington dc. The Smithsonian art museum has about 3299 art works on display for viewing. I was able to see many great works of art while the art museum. The trip was eye opening. I was exposed to different art techniques with varying use of contrast and depth. I noted the different brush strokes and drawing styles and how they varied between each artist. After viewing many works of art, I decided to compare Henry O Tanner’s painting “The head of a Jew in Palestine” with Alice Pike Barneys painting, “The head of a Negro Boy”
born in Topeka, Kansas, and was sometimes referred as the "the father of black American art."
One the most distinguished artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City and spnt part of his child hood in Pennsylvania. After his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. "He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library's 113 5th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks - the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise - that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu - in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America's first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks, which could speak explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of modernism. Or, in Locke's own words, "There is in truly great art no essential conflict between racial or national traits and universal human values." This would not sit well with today's American cultural separatists who trumpet about the incompatibility of American experiences - "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" - but it was vital to Lawrence's own growth as an artist. Locke perceived the importance of the Great Migration, not just as an economic event but as a cultural one, in which countless blacks took over the control of their own lives, which had been denied them in the South: When years later he told an interviewer that "I am the black community," he was neither boasting nor kidding. He had none of the alienation from Harlem that was felt by some other black artists of the 1930s, like the expatriate William Johnson.
Since the election of President Barrack Obama in 2008, many people have started to believe that America is beyond racial inequalities - this is not the reality. Rather, we, as a society, chose to see only what we want to see. Discrimination is still rampant in our nation. Michelle Alexander explains that since the Jim Crow laws were abolished, new forms of racial caste systems have taken their place. Our society and criminal justice system claim to be colorblind, but this is not the actuality. Michelle Alexander explains:
Lawrence also made murals for his story telling. Throughout most of the 20th century, art institutions within black communities were the only places that exhibited the work of black artists. If other galleries did have black exhibits, they were singled out as "Negro artists" or "Negro Art". Without gallery exposure, they were rarely noticed by influential people or at appropriate prices. In 1941 Alain Locke, a friend of Lawrence's introduced Lawrence's Migration series to the owner New York's Downtown Gallery Edith Halpert.
During 1910 and 1970, over six million blacks departed the oppression of the South and relocated to western and northern cities in the United States, an event identified as the Great Migration. The Warmth of Other Suns is a powerful non-fiction book that illustrates this movement and introduces the world to one of the most prominent events in African American history. Wilkerson conveys a sense of authenticity as she not only articulates the accounts of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, but also intertwines the tales of some 1,200 travelers who made a single decision that would later change the world. Wilkerson utilizes a variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology, and economics in order to document and praise the separate struggles but shared courage of three individuals and their families during the Great Migration.
During the early to mid-twentieth century Langston Hughes contributed vastly to a very significant cultural movement later to be named the “Harlem Renaissance.” At the time it was named the “New Negro Movement,” which involved African Americans in creating and expressing their words through literature and art. Hughes contributed in a variety of different aspects including plays, poems, short stories, novels and even jazz. He was even different from other notable black poets at the time in the way that he shared personal experiences rather than the ordinary everyday experiences of black America. His racial pride helped mold American politics and literature into what it is today.
Race has been one of the most outstanding situations in the United States all the way from the 1500s up until now. The concept of race has been socially constructed in a way that is broad and difficult to understand. Social construction can be defined as the set of rules are determined by society’s urges and trends. The rules created by society play a huge role in racialization, as the U.S. creates laws to separate the English or whites from the nonwhites. Europeans, Indigenous People, and Africans were all racialized and victimized due to various reasons. Both the Europeans and Indigenous People were treated differently than African American slaves since they had slightly more freedom and rights, but in many ways they are also treated the same. The social construction of race between the Europeans, Indigenous People, and Africans led to the establishment of how one group is different from the other.
Warmth of Other suns was wonderful, with great stories of Americans history with spans of long migration of African Americans who take off from the south to northern and western cities. Black citizens was in hunt of a more comfortable and healthier lifestyle from the south were African Americans was being treated awful. From 1916 to 1970, the Great Migration transformed America with millions of African Americans moving locations across the United States with a huge influence on public life, economic, political and social challenges. Also a new African American culture that would be in decades of the next generation to come.
Although it would be an injustice to say that one could sum up the entire history of race interrelations in the United States in one essay, a brief overview is always beneficial.
The world has lived through generations of racism and racial profiling. After the days of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Civil Rights Movement, the American people thought they had passed the days of hatred and discrimination. Although Americans think that they live in a non-racist society, minorities today still live in the chains of oppression and prejudice through sports, schools, and social media.