Aron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance is the term given to a period in American history where a new focus on the African-American experience emerged. This emergence began in the Harlem region of New York.
It was a time when African-American artists began to express their culture and at this time in history there came a new focus on the African-American artist and African-American Art.
The Harlem Renaissance has been described as "a cultural and psychological watershed, an era in which black people were perceived as having finally liberated themselves from a past fraught with self-doubt and surrendered instead to an unprecedented optimism, a novel pride in all things black and a cultural confidence that stretched beyond the borders of Harlem to other black communities in the Western world" (Powelland).
This Renaissance extended to all areas of the arts including painting, singing and performing. What was similar about these artists was their focus on the black experience, "painter Aaron Douglas, author Langston Hughes, jazz musician Duke Ellington, blues singer Bessie Smith, dancer Josephine Baker and the consummate all-round performer Paul Robeson - had certain attitudes about the black experience as art that, through paintings, writings, musical compositions and performances, explored an assortment of black representational possibilities" (Powelland).
This period in the 1920s is describes as "extremely uplifting to African-Americans as a people. Personalities and individuals connected...
Harlem Renaissance- Literature and Art The Harlem or Negro Renaissance marked the 20s and 30s as a period where the spirituality and potential of the African-American community was expressed in the most explosive way possible. Black art had been relatively unknown to the American public until then, at least to the urban communities. Centered in the Southern states and with a freedom of expression generally trampled with, black art expression was
Harlem Renaissance The Southern Roots of Harlem Renaissance The African-American artistic, literary, and intellectual self-development, known as the Harlem Renaissance, is one of the most important and pivotal moments in the history of African-Americans -- and that of the United States in general. The Harlem Renaissance greatly influenced African-Americans' perception of who they were, their roles in American society, and their place within the racialized society dominated by Whites. The Renaissance movement,
Cosmopolitan Modernism1: Case StudyThe article �The Cosmopolitan Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance� from The Nation, by Rachel Hunter Himes, published on April 15, 2024, discusses the Harlem Renaissance as a cosmopolitan reflection of modernism. It discusses the transatlantic exchanges that influenced Black society and art in the 1920s and 1930s. But it also discusses the Met Museum�s attempt to present this period and this art (or lack of) in recent
Some artists, such as Aaron Douglas, captured the feeling of Africa in their work because they wanted to show their ancestry through art. Others, like Archibald J. Motley Jr., obtained their inspiration from the surroundings in which they lived in; where jazz was at the forefront and African-Americans were just trying to get by day-to-day like any other Anglo-American. Additionally, some Black American artists felt more comfortable in Europe
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