Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance

By University Press of Mississippi

Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier.

Including seventy-two black and white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers.

In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626742079

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Throughout 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 This 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 significant 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. The 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

The 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 people³ The 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 difficulty obtaining proper training in the visual arts, and as was true for black male visual artists the best training was in Europe. While Paul Gilroy and others have written extensively on the politics of location, especially important to the people of the Black Atlantic⁴ 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. The 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 The 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 define his own position as a cultural leader and member of the Talented Tenth. The influence 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 twenty-fifth 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 often on the significance 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:

Thus 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

The 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 artists. Women artists, just like Du Bois, realized deeply the need of uplifting the masses of their people.⁸ This goal could be aided with thoughtful, dignified representations of African Americans. However, before the Harlem Renaissance, most black visual artists did not depict black subject matter in their work. They avoided it for many reasons, most importantly because white patrons either had no interest in or despised such subject matter. Meanwhile, developing a sufficient 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. These 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, lifting the veil, not allowing the viewer to see those depicted in his works as anything else but a part of mainstream American life. His first 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, The Thankful Poor, was painted sometime in 1894. Although this subject was common in European painting, Tanner replaced Dutch or French peasants with two African Americans. The women artists discussed in this volume were aware of Tanner and his groundbreaking work, as well as the work of Edmonia Lewis. Tanner’s final work of this period, The Young Sabot Maker, which focuses on an African American figure, was completed in 1895. The 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. These 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. This 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, The Creole Show, a theatrical production that broke with minstrelsy traditions, featured glamorous, attractive Black women. This 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 These 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 refinement.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 first novel, There 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 first. 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.

The 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. The 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.

These visual artists wanted their art to make a difference. Du Bois had encouraged all black artists, men and women alike, to create art that served a purpose: Thus 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 confined 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, offered 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 effect… And were not all Italian art, and most of the music of the world, done in the cause of religion? The 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 after the propaganda cause has passed.²¹ Pickens went on to note that art existed without propaganda, but questioned its purpose: "There 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:

There 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 art expression… The 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

The 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: The sense of beauty is the last and best gift of Africa to the world and the true essence of the black man’s soul. African art is the offspring 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, often shunned by their male counterparts, excluded from the creative world by a vast veil.

They illuminated the issues of race and they hoped to uplift the souls of their people. The 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 unselfish 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 suffrage movement. These women artists spoke to the struggles of their race, including racial terrorism and violence committed against African Americans: lynchings, torture, discrimination. They addressed issues pertaining to war, politics, the right to vote, and education, family, and motherhood. They worked in an environment also known to white women, a world that did not support women who had a family and a career.

The 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 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 fine 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. The 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. These 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. Theresa Leininger-Miller examines the work of sculptor Augusta Savage; in particular, Savage’s sculptures of women, the historical influences 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 prolific 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 fierce 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 reflected this deeply rooted commitment.

The 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. Their legacy would provide the groundwork for the artists of the civil rights era and beyond.

Notes

1. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 12.

2. Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 40.

3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 12.

4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 133.

5. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The 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 Affair 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: The 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: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 40.

13. Ibid., 41.

14. Ibid., 41, quoted from Zona Gale, Introduction to The 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, The 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 define race in social, cultural, and historical terms, and that he fell back on a biological definition of race. Boxill does not agree and offers a more charitable interpretation of Du Bois’s views.

19. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art, 297–97.

20. The 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., The New Negro (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 254.

24. Du Bois, The Answer of Africa, in What is Civilization? ed. Maurice Maeterlinck, Dhan Gopal Mukerji et al. (New York: Duffield, 1926), 46.

25. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices within the Veil (1920; rpt., Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thompson, 1975), 185.

26. Catlett was as much an educator as an artist; she attended Howard after 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).

CHAPTER ONE

HARLEM AND THE RENAISSANCE: 1920–1940

Cary D. Wintz

What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin? This 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 define its nature. This 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. The 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. The significance of Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston would not be fully acknowledged for a half century after the end of the Renaissance. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. However, there was no analysis of the developments in these fields. 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 fields of art, music, and theater.

Fortunately this narrow view has changed. The 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. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held almost one hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Club on Twelfth Street off Fifth 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, There 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

The Civic Club dinner significantly 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 finished reading them. As the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, then offered 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 The 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, fiction, 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 Shuffle Along opened at the Sixty-Third Street Musical Hall. Shuffle 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 significanceof the