Motley's paintings were intent on showing African American progress and lifestyle.  They depict scenes that are in sharp contrast to the life of poor, rural blacks in the South.  Motley was born in New Orleans in 1895 and moved with his family to Chicago when he was a boy where he lived in a predominately white Italian neighborhood.  He saught out other African Americans and began to sketch them as a boy.  

 

What race is the woman in the painting?  Archibald Motley was known for showing little difference between white and black subjects.  Here, his subject is shown with all the material items of white women of status. In this work Motley is saying to African Americans be proud and saying to Euroamericans that black people are beautiful.  He intentionally set out to defy stereotypes of African American women as poor and uneducated.  His subject has poise and confidence as she stares straight at the viewer.  Yet, she is relaxed in the way she holds her hands.  The painting is dark, except the womens face which is highlighted by her red collar, cheeks, and lips.  

 

Octoroon, is an old term that refers to a person of mixed race that was one-eighth black.      

In this painting we see 5 overlapping masks floating in space, along with a figurine.  The masks may represent different tribes, but they are an homage to her ancestry.  The racial discrimination she experienced in her life stuck with her and influenced her art.  The painting shows how different cultures or ethnics come together to unite. It shows how many different races can come together in their own different ways. The red figure is meant to show strength and protection found in her African heritage despite the prejudices.

 

Later in life Jones taught at Howard University where she encouraged her students to travel to Africa.   

The painting is one of two extant paintings from a four-part mural cycle that Douglas created for the Hall of Negro Life building at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. The work touches on many of the themes that characterized the creative expressions of the Harlem Renaissance, including African Americans’ shared heritage and cultural identity, the progression from slavery to freedom, and the Great Migration, during which more than a million black Southerners left their agrarian environs for the industrial North.

 

Born in 1899, Douglas was a leading artist in the Harlem Renaissance.  He was popular as a book illustrator and created works for many black writers.   

Born in Boston in 1905, Jones had to struggle more than her white and male counterparts to be taken seriousy as an artist.  

 

African influences are apparent in Self-Portrait, in which Jones links her identity with traditional African sculpture.  Throughout her career, Jones has championed the international artistic achievement of African-American art. She has also been an important role model for other African-American artists, particularly those involved with her design and watercolor courses at Howard University from 1930 to 1977. 

Elizabeth Catlett’s art centers on the black female experience. In her prints and many of her sculptures, she focuses on developing compositions with multiple figures.  It shows the connections and connectedness of women to those around them.  

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Singing Their Songs is one of six lithographs that Catlett made to illustrate the poem “For My People,” written in 1937 by her friend, author Margaret Walker. The first line of Walker’s poem refers to black people “everywhere/singing their slave songs repeatedly”; it also describes people kneeling in prayer.

Catlett has illustrated both actions.

 

The differences in the way the people are depicted suggests they are from different times, and places: that they have different experiences.  She does this by varying the scale of her figures, using different colors and lighting,  and separating them into registers, Catlett suggests that these men and women represent the African American experience differently but are connected noentheless.

When he made this portrait of the singer and civil rights activist Cleota Collins, in June 1932, Henry Bannarn was studying at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). It is his earliest known work. Born in Oklahoma, Bannarn had moved with his family to Minneapolis while still a child. Thanks to a grant from the Minnesota philanthropist James Ford Bell, Bannarn was able to move to New York, where his studio at 306 West 141st Street became a creative center and meeting place for African American artists, musicians, and poets. Within the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, Bannarn became famous for his paintings and sculptures and was admired as a teacher and a mentor to younger artists.

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In 2007 one of Bannarn's oil paintings sold for $24,000.