BLK ART: The Audacious Legacy of Black Artists and Models in Western Art

By Zaria Ware

2024 NAACP Image Awards Nominee: Outstanding Non-Fiction

A fun and fact-filled introduction to the dismissed Black art masters and models who shook up the world.

Elegant. Refined. Exclusionary. Interrupted. The foundations of the fine art world are shaking. Beyoncé and Jay-Z break the internet by blending modern Black culture with fine art in their iconic music video filmed in the Louvre. Kehinde Wiley powerfully subverts European masterworks. Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It’s clear that modern day museums can no longer exist without change—and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings. Quietly held within museum and private collections around the world are hundreds of faces of Black men and women, many of their stories unknown. From paintings of majestic kings to a portrait of a young girl named Isabella in Amsterdam, these models lived diverse lives while helping shape the art world along the way. Then, after hundreds of years of Black faces cast as only the subject of the white gaze, a small group of trailblazing Black American painters and sculptors reached national and international fame, setting the stage for the flourishing of Black art in the 1920s and beyond. Captivating and informative, BLK ART is an essential work that elevates a globally dismissed legacy to its proper place in the mainstream art canon. From the hushed corridors of royal palaces to the bustling streets of 1920s Paris—this is Black history like never seen before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063272422

Book preview

Hendrick Heerschop, The Moor King Caspar, 1654, oil on oak panel, 74.8 x 60.5 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, © bpk Bildagentur/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY

Luca Giordano, Four Women Making Music, 1658–60, oil on canvas, 57 x 101.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Dedication

For the seven-year-old girl

always sitting in the corners

of bookstores, and her parents

who sat right beside her

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1: The Models: Looking Behind the Dystopian Curtain

Holier Than Thou-est

Case Study: It’s All Greek to Me

Scandal! Murder! Intrigue! Bridgerton! Oh My!

Case Study: Black England

Where Art Thou Waldo?

Amsterdam? Amsterdam.

Case Study: What Goes Around Keeps Going

Ne Touche Pas à Mes Cheveux (Don’t Touch My Hair)

Case Study: Seriously, Don’t Touch It

Turbans, Orientalism, and Pumpkin-Spiced Lattes

Faces

Part 2: The Artists: Before the Harlem Renaissance

Robert Seldon Duncanson (c. 1821–1872): The House Painter Turned Master Artist

Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901): The Art Prodigy Turned National Award Winner

Edmonia Lewis (c. 1844–1907): The Self-Taught Sculptor Turned Celebrity

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937): The Young Dreamer Turned BLK ART Icon

But Wait, There’s More?

A Final Note

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Further Reading

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, R.A., O.M., Portrait of a Sailor, ca. 1858, oil on paper laid down on panel, 41 x 30.5 cm, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

As a little girl of five years old sitting alongside my dad in hushed bookstores and libraries, I fell in love with history. Bookstore day was a duty I took on proudly. Every Friday evening, we’d walk hand in hand toward the shelves housing stories of people who had lived long before me—of the unsinkable ship that struck an iceberg, of the red-headed queen who never married, of the men and women in gilded ballrooms dancing atop marble floors. With only my two hair buns tall enough to reach over the counter, I would stand on my tiptoes and watch a librarian check our books out. All of this exposure was a welcome mistake my parents made. All day, I’d follow my mom around reciting random facts about vanishing cities and recipes for poisons. When we visited our local museum with its large marble columns and grand staircases, I’d pretend to be a long-lost princess as I belted out Disney songs. During summer vacations, I’d run around our house in medieval costumes as sole ruler of my powerful kingdom of stuffed animals.

It never really occurred to me that my being black and loving history would be considered an oxymoron until I was seven years old and went to a kids’ dress-up party as an Egyptian princess—only to be told by a friend that I was obviously too dark to be any kind of royalty. In elementary school, I quickly learned with all the other little kids that my ancestral heritage was one of slavery, cotton, and uneducated savages—and that any black person worth mentioning would and could only be directly involved with slavery or the Civil Rights Movement. In nearly the same breath, we’d discuss the genius of Einstein, the world-shaking artistry of Van Gogh, the breathtaking symphonies of Mozart, and the magnificence of Europe’s old monarchies. Without reservation, an educational system decided for small children that whatever this strange negative blackness was, we should be wary of it or even hate it, whether that was consciously or unconsciously. And so we did. Long before I was old enough to realize, I had been solidly armed with a love for faraway cultures and a half-hearted interest in my own.

To make up for what school curricula never taught about our remarkable achievements, my mom recounted stories to me of black inventors and communities such as Black Wall Street. And my dad’s gigantic collection of cowboy boots, hats, seventies country music, and bolo ties meant I couldn’t escape tales of black cowboys and photographs of US deputy marshal Bass Reeves. But despite all their efforts to build my self-worth, I felt tinges of an emotion beyond articulation at my fingertips. It wasn’t exactly sadness as I wandered around the art museums that I loved, and it wasn’t exactly fear as the eyes of lords and ladies followed me from room to room. It was a gnawing question, one that only screamed louder with age: Where do I fit in? Among all the historical movies, textbooks, and art exhibits, I never saw anyone who looked like me. On the surface, it seemed as if positive black history simply didn’t exist. It seemed like there wasn’t any room for blackness anywhere. It was already condemned to degradation and chains and genocide. It was too heavy, too messy, too unfinished, too negative. Eventually, I’d understand this for what it was—an optical illusion carefully maintained for more than three hundred years.

As a teenager standing in the middle of grand museum halls watching heads crane upward to marvel at oil paintings of lilies, or bodies crowded around the tiniest of canvases, or packed lines full of people waiting their turn for the newest exhibits, I found something as electric as it was terrifying. One image could stop you, hold you, and make you feel—in less than sixty seconds. One image alone was magnetic enough to draw thousands. As I walked with the crowds, taking in the artworks considered worthy and great because their labels said they were so, my gnawing indecipherable feeling suddenly had a name—raw power—and we were all in the presence of it. Art can be weaponized. Art has started wars, incited violence, dictated beauty, maintained class order, encouraged complacency, erased legacies, created new ones, celebrated colonialism, turned villains into heroes, degraded minorities, and looked pretty while doing all of it. Whoever controls how someone sees anything—and makes sure that they never ask why—is in control of the past, future, and present. Whoever owns art, and by way of that owns history, by way of that owns minds.

From childhood, our modern understandings of the past help to build our entire worldview. Eventually, our minds are filled with hundreds of thousands of images, objects, buildings, and people that are solidly linked to significant moments in history or culture, even if those connections don’t include full, accurate pictures. Some of these links are almost knee-jerk reactions that require little, if any, thought. Medieval Europe? A knight in shining armor. Ancient Egypt? Pyramids. Ancient Greece? Marble statues. China? The Great Wall of China. Tibet? Mount Everest. The French Revolution? The guillotine. Shakespeare? Romeo and Juliet. Japanese culture? Kimonos. American history? The Declaration of Independence. Slavery? Black people. Black history? Slavery.

Hardly any of these connections are ever formed by chance or mistake; instead, they’re carefully crafted by the academic and entertainment worlds. This is why images of red big-lipped, offensive Sambo postcards or impoverished barefooted black men and women are more familiar to us than the black-and-white photographs of successful black men with monocles and top hats and their richly dressed families in the nineteenth century. This is why the word slavery immediately brings up a brown face, even though slavery has existed in various forms in nearly every civilization. This is why brown faces are excluded from historical fiction books, movies, and television series in the name of historical accuracy, even if they were present. Our collective knee-jerk reaction to connect black with slave is only a sign of a job well done.

More than one hundred years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois curated an exhibit entitled American Negro for the 1900 Paris Exposition. It challenged international stereotypes of blackness with 363 photographs of elegant black men and women engaged in study and daily life, and owning well-kept homes. Seventy-six years later, Fisk University professor David Driskell curated an exhibit entitled Two Centuries of Black American Art with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It was a groundbreaking showcase of more than two hundred works by Black American artists who were historically ignored and removed from mainstream acknowledgment. These two exhibits, unveiled in very different spheres of time, were as essential as they were stunningly audacious, because they dared to make positive connections where connections were never meant to be made: black + art and black + humanity.

As I bounced potential titles for this book back and forth in my head, everything felt unnecessarily flowery and poetic until the idea of BLK ART landed—what other two words could be any more perfect for a celebration like this? The idea of black art or even the term black art has often been used in a derogatory sense. Rarely are artists of color allowed to create without the concept of race shrouding their works. This is why artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales continue to create such gigantic waves when depicting black models in majestic ways reminiscent of the old masters.

But it’s essential that we recognize