Aaron Douglas: Harlem Renaissance Artist from Topeka

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided public works employment and sponsored cultural projects. Zora Neale Hurston, funded through the Federal Writers Project, documented stories of exploited Black workers in Florida's turpentine camps. Aaron Douglas, funded by the Public Works of Art Project, painted four murals titled 'Aspects of Negro Life' documenting Black American history from slavery through the Depression for the New York Public Library.

Aaron Douglas completed four panels called Aspects of Negro Life from Slavery Through Reconstruction in 1934 for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, which is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This mural was created when he was professor at Fisk University, just after he had accomplished his dream of living and studying in Paris.

The Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was the largest of all New Deal art projects. The WPA was known for building roads, stone walls, school buildings, and federal buildings. Most artists employed with the WPA and other New Deal art projects never gained notoriety and are today's obscure references. However, for others, it was the first step in their successful careers. Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner both spent eight years working for the WPA. African-American and Native-American artists were also hired to depict their unique histories and cultures, including Aaron Douglas who created 'Aspects of Negro Life,' a four-panel mural that still hangs in the New York Public Library in Harlem.

The influence of African art and European modernism is revealed in Douglas's mature style, which by the 1930s comprised the synthesis of African and European elements. By this time, Douglas was creating large-scale murals. His most famous mural sequence, 'Aspects of Negro Life,' was produced under the auspices of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and installed at the Schomburg Center in Harlem in 1934, where it remains today.

Aaron Douglas's important mural series from 1934, Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project, comprises four monumental panels envisioning the physical and spiritual journeys of African Americans from their homes in Africa to modern life in jazz age American cities. This panel is entitled From Slavery Through Reconstruction. Using angular silhouetted figures painted in light and dark colors, Douglas synthesized the sagas of slavery, racial terror, and freedom in stylistically modernist ways. In a matter utterly different from Benton's exaggerated and three-dimensional figural style, Douglas layered transparent and opaque forms and concentric circles of radiating light to flatten space and depth across the five-foot-high, 11-foot-long mural. He united the composition with a freeze of naturalistic cotton bolls that extends almost the length of the mural's foreground, which crescendos into tall cotton then decrescendos to come to a stop just beyond the slave who broke his chains. In 1933, Congress enacted legislation as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal to limit the supply of agricultural production and therefore drive up prices. Farmers had to plow under more than 10 million acres of cotton already planted. The Associated American Artists, a new organization founded in 1934, commissioned prints by American artists as part of a new effort to support them during the Depression and to make art more widely and commercially available. Benton's lithograph Plowing It Under was based on his 1929 painting Plowing Benton retitled the print because his South Carolina pastoral could now represent a new federal program in action. On Christmas Eve in 1934, just two months after the organization's launch, Benton appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a first for Time and an artist. Plowing It Under sold out. Benton ultimately made 50 prints for the Associated American Artists, 12,000 sold, and they were the organization's best sellers. Two portrayed cotton scenes: Hoeing Cotton on your left based on a late 1930s drawing and Back from the Fields based on a 1945 painting.

Harlem Renaissance visual artists transformed Black identity through innovative styles. Aaron Douglas fused African motifs with modernist techniques using flat planes, angular transparency, and mystical space, exemplified in works like Noah's Ark and From Slavery Through Reconstruction. Augusta Savage faced immense personal struggle—from her father destroying her sculptures to being denied a Paris scholarship upon discovering her race—yet created powerful humanistic portraits challenging racist caricatures. Her unfinished masterpiece Lift Every Voice and Sing was destroyed due to funding shortages. Jacob Lawrence documented Black life through his 60-panel Migration of the Negro series, revealing that discrimination followed migrants Northward. His research revealed Black culture was never studied seriously in schools, driving his commitment to documenting African American history through art.

The Harlem Renaissance (1920s) was a transformative cultural movement that revitalized African American art and inspired global Black communities; seven key artists including Langston Hughes (poetry), Aaron Douglas (visual arts), Lois Mailou Jones (painting), Augusta Savage (sculpture), Gwendolyn B. Bennett (writing), Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (multimedia art), and James Van Der Zee (photography) pioneered innovative artistic expressions that challenged racial stereotypes and celebrated Black identity during a period of rising Black consciousness following World War I.

The Harlem Renaissance was a pivotal cultural movement where African American artists like Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Faith Ringgold, and Romare Bearden used bold, abstract styles to tell stories about everyday life and history, transforming traditional craft forms into fine art and establishing African American artists as legitimate creators in the art world.

Lois Mailou Jones, a Black painter from the early 20th century, was revolutionary simply by being a Black woman who pursued art. In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked a major civil rights revolution, and Jones represented a parallel revolution in art. She studied with Impressionists in Paris, championed African art throughout her career, and worked to bring African artistic traditions to broader recognition. Her work challenges viewers to reconsider assumptions about who can be an artist and what art traditions deserve recognition.

Romare Howard Bearden (1911–1988) was an influential American artist whose work spanned collage, watercolor, oil, photomontage, and printmaking. Born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem and Pittsburgh, his art drew visual metaphors from these communities, as well as from African sculpture, masks, and textiles; Byzantine mosaics; Japanese prints; and Chinese landscape painting. He studied Western masters including Duccio, Giotto, de Hooch, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. Bearden began his career as a cartoonist and art editor for university publications and later worked as a social worker while creating art at night. His first solo exhibition was in Harlem in 1940, followed by one in Washington, D.C., in 1944. He was a prolific artist whose works were exhibited across the U.S. and Europe. In the 1960s, he became the first art director of the Harlem Cultural Council and co-founded key institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Five Gallery to support emerging Black artists. He was also a published writer on social and artistic issues. In the early 1970s, he and his wife Nanette Rohan established a home in St. Martin, whose landscapes influenced his later work. Bearden maintained close ties with prominent figures such as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and Jacob Lawrence. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972.

Aaron Douglas used distinctive graphic styles combining African forms with modernism to change how Americans associated Black identity. He and other Black illustrators created work for Black-owned publications like The Crisis (NAACP) and Opportunity. Lois Mailer Jones introduced African-American children into picture books in the 1920s-30s, predating Ezra Jack Keats' 'The Snowy Day.'

Aaron Douglas was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, working as an artist and designer for publications including Crisis and Opportunity magazines. He also designed covers for Fire magazine, which was the first Black visual arts magazine ever produced. Douglas created endpapers and covers that combined artistic innovation with political messaging, establishing a template for Black graphic design that influenced generations of designers. His work exemplifies how visual design can serve as both artistic expression and political commentary.

During his time at the Barnes Foundation, Douglas produced covers and illustrations for publications of the New Negro movement including the NAACP publication 'Crisis' and the National Urban League's 'Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life.' These contributions demonstrate how visual artists supported and amplified the literary and intellectual work of the Harlem Renaissance.

W.E.B. Du Bois declared that all art is propaganda and must be, despite purist objections. He stated he would not care for any art not used for propaganda purposes. Both the NAACP and National Urban League, as civil rights organizations, became genuine patrons of literary arts through their publications Crisis and Opportunity. Magazine editors and anthologists perceived the political potential of literature in fighting oppression, willing to weaponize literature for this purpose. Compliance with this goal became preferred for authors seeking publication opportunities.

During the 1920s, Aaron Douglas worked as an art critic while illustrating numerous African American publications including The New Negro, The Crisis, and Opportunity. These publications were crucial during the Harlem Renaissance as they served as primary sources of information about art, music, literature, architecture, and nightlife. In the digital age, these publications were essential for how people learned about cultural movements and artistic developments, functioning as the primary news and information sources for African American communities.