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
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”
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.
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.
Research by Benny Andrews Andrews wanted to express black experience through his art, but he found it a very difficult thing to do. He was using nonfigurative expressionism, which became a personal movement for him. Andrews wanted to convey himself in a different way from other artists in order to create his own exclusive personality. I think his works are delicate, and cherished. He is a visual artist, writer, and teacher.
...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.
born in Topeka, Kansas, and was sometimes referred as the "the father of black American art."
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:
Jacob Lawrence is celebrated for his insightful depictions of American and, in particular, African American life. Best known for his epic series of paintings on such subjects as the lives of Harriet Tubman and Toussaint L'Ouverture, he has also created numerous prints, murals, and drawings. Among the latter are a delightful set of twenty-three illustrations...
Jacob Lawrence's unique career has earned him a National Medal Of Arts , election to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design,a National Council of the Arts commisionership, and dozens of honorary degrees and awards, including the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. His paintings has been freatured in several major art exhibitions and many different museums. Lawrence's parents came from the south but they moved to Harlem where Lawrence grew up. Lawrence was born in 1917 and grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression. He had many extraordinary educational oppurtunities as well as his first employment as an artist. In the studio of his mentor, Charles Alston, young Lawrence painted while the Harlem Renaissance was blooming with a generation of young artists and writers. He studied at the Harlem Art Workshop from 1932-1937 and at the American Artists School from 1937-1939. In the 1930's there was two main art groups,realism art and abstractionism art. Lawrence rejected both of them and made up his own style of art. His paintings are alive with human figures, usually African Americans,engaged in all different types of activities. He dipicted the figures in his paintings with dignity and grace. He got his ideas from several different sources. He used repetitive paterns and a lot of different colors and design which are commonly found in a quilt or an African textile. He made up to as many as 60 paintings which are each telling a story and the messages are usually of human triumph over oppression and injustice. Although his paintings often relate to the history and experience of black people their themes are universal. Lawrence allso 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 obtain 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. Edith immediately organized an exhibition for Lawrence's art work, and Lawrence joined the select few group of artists she presented, which included Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, and Ben Shahn. Lawrence's Migration series was purchased and divided between the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillip's Collection.
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.
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.
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.
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.