American Art

Unlike previous displays of art by African Americans presented on the National Mall in 1929 and 1930 that were derived chiefly from shows organized by the Harmon Foundation in New York, the Smithsonian Institution’s 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists was a distinctly Washington affair. Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History sponsored the show, with contributions from Alain Locke, James A. Porter, and James V. Herring from Howard University, as well as Washington-based artists James Lesesne Wells and Loïs Mailou Jones. Taking place just as the New Deal art initiatives were being launched, the 1933 exhibition interjected Washington into ongoing debates regarding definitions of African American art and American Modernism during the interwar period.

The comprehensive 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery of Art sought to introduce a broad public to the creative expression of African Americans at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. In its use of race as its organizing principle, the exhibition was also an early contributor to the production of “African American art” as a distinct field of study. James V. Herring, Alain Locke, and James A. Porter each played a key role in interpreting and presenting African American art both in Washington, D.C., and across the nation, and laid the foundations of an art-critical and art-historical tradition that continues today. This essay explores how Herring’s background as a curator, Locke’s background as a philosopher, and Porter’s background as an artist all colored their interpretations of African American art at this important juncture.

This article considers a specific context in which the 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists operated. The Smithsonian National Gallery of Art was located in the National Museum’s new building of Natural History, featuring its science collections of anthropology and animal specimens. Both its science and art exhibitions presented museum visitors with a narrative that contrasted “superior” white Western civilization to “primitive” peoples of color. By examining two earlier temporary art shows in 1929 and 1930, along with the concurrent display of the Herbert Ward Collection in the museum’s Africa Hall, we can see how competing ideas about race, culture, and national identity played out.

The Smithsonian Institution’s 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists included student work. This may seem unremarkable, but underlying this curatorial choice were contemporary debates over how to modernize education in Washington, D.C. In fact, the art exhibition was directly involved in an ongoing civil rights struggle. Since World War I, Washington public school administrators had been working to reform the education system by implementing models of scientific management. Many African American art teachers who trained as progressive educators found these reforms stifling and pursued other ways to realize their pedagogical ideals, such as project-based activities and community-centered lessons. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of local educators, Howard University professors, and a national network of educational leaders through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the 1933 exhibition put the work of progressive educators and their students on a national stage, asserting the importance of innovative teaching in African American schools.

This essay focuses on the role of the newspapers in extending the reach and impact of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History’s (ASNLH) Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists (1933), which the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art hosted. I analyze how the press advanced the show’s politics of representation through accounts produced by critics writing in the black and white newspapers. By covering certain aspects of the exhibition, reporters highlighted black Americans’ achievements in the visual arts. This emphasis on the aesthetic abilities of the African American artists in the show aligned with the goals of progressive politicians and civil rights activists at the time, including Carter G. Woodson, the founder and head of the ASNLH.

During the 1950s and 1960s Richard Lippold was a leading practitioner among a select group of artists who were frequently commissioned by modernist architects to create large-scale, site-determined sculptures for interior threshold spaces. These collaborative projects offered new models for the integration of art and architecture during the postwar period, but also resulted in intense debates, with the resulting work simultaneously celebrated as some of the most important examples of American sculpture being produced at the time and derided for being nothing more than shiny, metal decoration within architectural schemes. This article focuses on two of Lippold’s most high-profile commissioned sculptures: Orpheus and Apollo (1962) in Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, and Gemini II (1966) in the Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts in Houston. It argues that the postwar principle of synergy provides a framework to assess the stakes of the more pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture at midcentury.

Smoking held a prominent place in William Harnett’s private experience and painterly endeavors. Between 1875 and 1880 the artist composed dozens of small-scale still lifes that foregrounded smoking products and paraphernalia, and engaged the vibrant promotional culture that arose around tobacco after the Civil War. Aiming these pictures at respectable male viewers who were, like himself, immersed in this culture, Harnett shaped complicated accounts of smoking that echoed and amplified booster imaginings of the habit, playfully undercut the brand iconographies and promotional claims of the tobacco market, and harnessed their subjects to explore a range of traditional painterly problems and still life concerns. The resulting works shed new light on Harnett’s interests in consumer culture and encourage us to reconsider the late nineteenth century within the longer history of American artistic engagements with modern commodities and advertising.

During the Second World War, the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information played a crucial role in the development of visual propaganda in American culture. Revisiting this period and in particular the poster art of Ben Shahn, this article explores his work in the larger context of searching for a democratic propaganda vis-à-vis totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia. Shahn included references to mass media, repurposed photographs, and explored depictions of violence, for example, in a series called The Nature of the Enemy. His work at the Graphics Division, produced in close collaboration with other artists, thus reflected on the challenges of finding appropriate new forms of pictorialism for the horrific narratives of atrocities coming out of Europe. I argue that it introduced modernist elements of reflexivity that made his posters sophisticated, but also challenging and controversial. Ultimately, I contend that these war posters reflect a struggle to create a visual rhetoric that negotiates the domestic and international implications of warfare, while aiming to project an inclusive, universalist vision of humanity.