Abstract art by African-American artists

African-American artists have created various forms of abstract art in a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, collage, drawing, graphics, ceramics, installation, mixed media, craft, and decorative arts, presenting the viewer with abstract expression, imagery, and ideas instead of representational imagery. Abstract art by African-American artists has been widely exhibited and studied.

Black artists and abstract art

Many artists have claimed responsibility for creating the first piece of abstract art, given the "non-representational" and “non-objective" subject matter of the work. Between November 1906 and March 1907, Hilma af Klint created a series of abstract paintings, "Primordial Chaos".Voss, Julia (June 25, 2019). The first abstract artist? (And it's not Kandinsky) Focus: Hilma Af Klint. Tate Gallery. In 1909, Francis Picabia painted "Caoutchouc". A year later, Wassily Kandinsky signed "1910" to one of his abstract watercolors, "Composition VII", although many researchers believe that the work was actually created in 1913; Kandinsky may have backdated his work to claim credit for being the first abstract artist in modern art history unaware of af Klint and Picabia's works.

The first Black artist to be recognized for creating an abstract work is just as interesting; the challenge with the abstract work associated with black artists is that "it did not announce itself as Black art." Black abstract artists faced all of the same aesthetic, intellectual, and value questions that other abstract artists faced and also had to confront individual and institutional biases regarding content as it related to black abstract signals and symbols. Lowery Stokes Sims, the former president of Studio Museum in Harlem and the first Black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, proposed that abstraction originated from African art, and that Black artists are claiming their birthright through abstraction.

The glaring omission of Black artists is evident throughout American art history.McGee, Julie L. McGee. “The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920–1950”: David C. Driskell and Race, Ethics, and Aesthetics. Callaloo. Johns Hopkins University Press. Volume 31, Number 4, Fall 2008. pp. 1175-1185. 10.1353/cal.0.0241 Many black artists felt marginalized in the white-dominated art world. Museum leaders and gallery owners were rarely interested in the work of Black artists. In the 1700s and 1800s, Black artists created work that did not reflect “the Black experience" in their subject matter;Perry, Regina A. (1992). Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art. National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books. ISBN 978-1566400725. they painted portraits of white familiesJoshua Johnson (ca.1763-after 1826). Smithsonian American Art Museum. and sweeping landscapes of white owned landsHarvey, Eleanor Jones (January 21, 2021). "Inauguration Highlights Rainbow Painting by African American Artist": Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey shares the story of Robert S. Duncanson. Smithsonian American Art Museum. as a way to make money as an artist, which could be interpreted as the “Black experience” for artists during this period.Stead, Rexford. Two Centuries of Black American Art. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Museum Associates of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976. Black artists played a pivotal role in the growth of contemporary art of the 1920s to 1940s, yet they existed on the outskirts of the art world in the United States. Robinson, Shantay (December 16, 2024). The Year in Black Art: Six Blockbuster Exhibitions. ARTnews. During the mid-20th century, several Black artists created nonrepresentational and abstract work, including Robert Blackburn, Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Fred Eversley, Norman Lewis, and Tom Lloyd, during the Abstract Expressionism movement.Raiford, Leigh (January 14, 2021). Burning All Illusion: Abstraction, Black Life, and the Unmaking of White Supremacy". Art Journal 79, no. 4 (Winter 2020) . Since the 1950s, the understanding and presenting of abstract work by Black artists has been a major movement in African American and American art history. By the 1970s, the American art world was evenly split between Black artists who created representational and political work, and artists who investigated "abstract strategies."Sims, Lowery Stokes (July 15-22, 2010). Oral history interview. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Howardena Pindell and her abstractions were rejected by the Studio Museum in Harlem, encouraging her to "go downtown and show with the white boys", and scolded for making work that was "not sufficiently black". Black American women artists represent 0.5 percent of museum and gallery acquisitions. Historically, the Black Arts Movement focused on a racial equality narrative and viewed abstraction as a reflection of inequality, a privilege of the rich, and frowned on abstract work that was viewed as not contributing to racial justice. Black Abstractionism and the art that it represents was motivated by an attraction to blackness, embracing the discovery of “strategic abstraction” for all of its blackest possibilities, and enabling an artist to avoid "corporeal materializations".Powell, Richard J. “Walking on Water: Embodiment, Abstraction, and Black Visuality”, in Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ed. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014), 1–19.

In recent years, art historians, museum curators, and gallery dealers have shown increased interest in Black abstract painters and sculptors. These artists and their works expand the study of art, art history, and art as a commodity, yet Black artists are often relegated to museum basement showings and limited-run exhibitions. Black visual artists represent 2.2 percent of museum acquisitions, 6.3 percent of museum exhibitions, and less than two percent of the $187 billion global art market, according to a 2022 report surveying thirty-one museums in the United States.

History

1920s As part of "The Negro in Art Week" (1927), the Art Institute of Chicago presented a Chicago Woman's Club organized exhibit featuring more than 100 artworks from the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art and examples of modern and contemporary art, including abstraction, portraiture, realism, and ritualism. The exhibition catalogue was designed by Charles C. Dawson. The Negro in Art Week: Exhibition of Primitive African Sculpture, Modern Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Applied Art, and Books, is considered to be the first major museum show of Black artists in the United States.Art and Design Chicago. Charles Clarence Dawson. WTTW. https://interactive.wttw.com/art-design-chicago/charles-clarence-dawsonCooks, Bridget R. Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/4394.

In 1929, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC hosted on the ground floor of the U.S. National Museum building, "American Negro Artists", and included artists such as Palmer Hayden, Archibald Motley, and others.Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Negro Artists at the National Gallery of Art, 1929. Smithsonian Institution Archives Record Unit 311, National Collection of Fine Arts, SIA-SIA2016-011407.Who's Who on Artists of Exhibit, Record Unit 311, National Collection of Fine Arts. Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2016-011446.

In New York, the Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement of the 1920s, attempted to redefine the meaning of blackness, the Black experience, and Black artDriskell, David L. The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920-1950. Introductory Essay. Two Centuries of Black American Art. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Museum Associates of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976. and established black abstract, objective, and representational art as central to modern art history. From 1928 to 1933, the Harmon Foundation hosted five shows featuring Black artists. These exhibits and the annual Harmon Foundation awards were high-profile opportunities for Black artists.

1930s In the early 1930s, Aaron Douglas created paintings that were "geometric symbolism", abstract, flat, and not adhering to standard conventions. His murals at Fisk University provided HBCU students with daily exposure to art and the work of a black artist. During the Great Depression, Americans viewed art more conservatively and grew suspicious of abstract images and art, some thinking that abstract images were propaganda of foreign countries. Some may view abstract art as difficult to understand, yet black abstract artists have a history of using abstraction to speak to real situations.

In 1933, the Smithsonian presented Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists, a show sponsored by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.

Sargent Claude Johnson was creating abstract work that married geometric shapes and forms rooted in African aesthetics as early as 1934.The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Exhibition Catalogue. The Met. February 25–July 28, 2024. https://cdn.sanity.io/files/cctd4ker/production/11732a99e27813e22c19c79e2c53753972c1ada5.pdf A pioneer in the New Negro movement, Johnson's copper and enamel Mask (1934) was exhibited at The Met’s Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition in 2024. In 1945, he created two abstract pieces, "Breakfast", an oil painting, and "Lovers", a terracotta sculpture, that are housed in the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art.

In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art hosted African Negro Art, a show that featured a variety of African sculptures and masks, as well Belgian Congolese abstract tufted cloth patterns, on loan from the Collection Henri-Matisse in Nice, France.Sweeney, James Johnson (ed). African Negro art. Museum of Modern Art: New York. 1935. Exhibition URL: www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2937; https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2937_300086871.pdf

In 1936, the Texas Centennial Exposition, the first world's fair held in the Southwest, showcased the Hall of Negro Life, the first recognition of black culture at a world's fair. The Hall of Negro Life attracted more than 400,000 visitors, who entered through a lobby featuring murals by Aaron Douglas, a modern abstract painter who played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance.Anderson, Nancy. "Aaron Douglas", NGA Online Editions, https://purl.org/nga/collection/constituent/38654 (accessed September 23, 2024). The Hall of Negro Life showcased works on loan from the Harmon Foundation, including paintings, sculpture, and graphic art work by modern, figurative and representational artists, including Richmond Barthé, Leslie Boling, Hilda Brown, Samuel A. Countee, Allen Rohan Crite, Arthur Diggs, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, Sargent Johnson, Henry Letcher, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Henry Ossawa Tanner, Laura Wheeler Waring, James L. Wells, and Hale Woodruff. In addition, Edna Manley created "Pocomania", a sculpture that features abstract and representative qualities in 1936.