#blackart — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #blackart, aggregated by home.social.
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By African-American artist Augusta Savage, portrait of Gwendolyn Knight, ca. 1934–35, bronze. As a bronze cast, it appears in more than one collection, both public and private. More info in ALT. #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory #BlackHistoryMonth #womanartist #womenartists #sculpture
A quote from the artist, who was also a teacher: "I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work."
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Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872), Sunset on the New England Coast, 1871, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 66 3/4 in. (92 x 169.5 cm), Cincinnati Art Museum. #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory #oilpainting #painting
From Alex Greenberger, ArtNews, January 29, 2021: ‘1861, the Daily Cincinatti Gazette wrote effusively of the artist, calling him “the greatest landscape painter in the West”—a superlative that would go on to be echoed when he later traveled abroad and obtained fame in Europe. But success had by no means been assured for Duncanson.
Born sometime around 1821 in Fayette, New York, Duncanson was raised by two freed Black people. (Previously, scholars had thought one of them was white, but Ketner’s research dispelled that notion.) His grandfather had been a slave; his father was a carpenter and a house painter. After an itinerant upbringing spent partly in Detroit and Monroe, Michigan, Duncanson wound up in Cincinnati, which was considered an art capital at the time. It was there that he became a part of a budding network of Black artists that included James Presley Ball, who ran a daguerreotype studio for which Duncanson worked as the principal artist. “This was the first real aggregate cluster of an African-American community of artists in America,” Ketner told Smithsonian Magazine in 2011…
Even though Duncanson’s work had a loyal following among patrons, artists, and critics alike, he was nearly forgotten until the 1970s. Much of his current reputation is thanks to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which held a survey of Duncanson’s art on the occasion of the centennial of his death, in 1972, though curator David C. Driskell also helped elevate his paintings. In a landmark traveling exhibition called “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” which opened in 1976 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Duncanson’s work was placed in a continuum of key Black artists that included Edmonia Lewis, Henry Ossawa Turner, Horace Pippin, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and many more. “I was looking for a body of work which showed first of all that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years; and by stable participants I simply mean that in many cases they had been the backbone,” Driskell told the New York Times of his exhibition in 1977, when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum.’
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Your art history post for today, by the first African-American artist to win international acclaim: Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), “Abraham's Oak,” 1905, oil on canvas, 21 3⁄8 x 28 5⁄8 in. (54.4 x 72.8 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery. #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory
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Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), portrait of Marian Anderson, oil on canvas, 76 x 40 1/4 in (193 x 102.2 cm), National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Not on view, which seems a crying shame. #arthistory #BlackHistoryMonth #blackarthistory #blackart #womanartist #womensart
From the website: “One of the outstanding voices of the twentieth century, contralto Marian Anderson—like many African American artists of the time—first achieved success in Europe. Impresario Sol Hurok convinced her to return to America, and a triumphant 1935 concert secured her reputation. In 1939 she became embroiled in a historic event when the Daughters of the American Revolution banned her appearance at its Constitution Hall because she was black. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and facilitated Anderson’s Easter Sunday outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial—an event witnessed by 75,000 and broadcast to a radio audience of millions. In 1955 Anderson was invited to appear at the Metropolitan Opera (in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera), becoming the first African American to sing an important role with that company. In 1978 she received a Kennedy Center Honors award.”
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Your art history post for today: by Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007), "Play at Dark (Westminster Street, Madison Park)," 1935, oil on canvas board, 24x18 inches, (610x457 mm), sold through Swann Auction Galleries October 8th, 2019 for $185,000. #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory #BlackHistoryMonth
From the website: ‘This beautiful and quintessential Allan Crite painting of Boston is the most significant of his scarce 1930s oil paintings to come to auction. The painting bursts with the activity of children playing and their parents promenading, with over thirty figures included in this bustling evening scene. Crite faithfully painted what he saw on sidewalks, parks and playgrounds in this "Neighborhood Series." His faithful observations of African-American life in Boston's Roxbury and South End districts include paintings, drawings, watercolors and linoleum cuts made into the 1940s. In February of 1936, Crite summarizes the intention with the series in his diary: "My intention in the neighborhood paintings, and some drawings, was to show aspects of life in the city with special reference to the use of the terminology 'black' people and to present them in an ordinary light, persons enjoying the usual pleasure of life with its mixtures of both sorrows and joys... I was an artist-reporter, recording what I saw." This painting is similar in its carefully rendered setting and dense concentration of figures to one of Crite's best known paintings, School's Out, also from 1936, in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.’
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Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), “Ethiopia,” 1921, painted plaster, 170.2 x40.6 x 51 cm, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. #blackarthistory #blackart #blackartist #womanartist #womenartists #arthistory
From the Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA, which has a large number of her works in its collection: “Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), an American sculptor, is known for her groundbreaking depictions of the African and African-American experience. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, she created intimate portraits of friends and family, self-portraits, and commissioned works for national and international expositions. Anticipating themes of the Harlem Renaissance, Fuller used the figure as metaphor to represent broad themes as African-American artists and intelligentsia sought to formulate and celebrate an African-American cultural identity and express racial experience and social issues in America. Works such as the Study for Ethiopia Awakening and Study for the Spirit of Emancipation (both in the collection of the Danforth Art Museum) celebrate African heritage while expressing aspirations for the future.”
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Your art history post for today by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), the first African-American artist to achieve international fame: “The Annunciation,” 1898, oil on canvas, 57 × 71 1/4 inches (144.8 × 181 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art. #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory
From the museum website: “Tanner painted The Annunciation soon after returning to Paris from a trip to Egypt and Palestine in 1897. The son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner specialized in religious subjects, and wanted to experience the people, culture, architecture, and light of the Holy Land. Influenced by what he saw, Tanner created an unconventional image of the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God. Mary is shown as an adolescent dressed in rumpled Middle Eastern peasant clothing, without a halo or other holy attributes. Gabriel appears only as a shaft of light. Tanner entered this painting in the 1898 Paris Salon exhibition, after which it was bought for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1899, making it his first work to enter an American museum.”
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Your art history post for today, by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), the first African-American artist to win international acclaim, “The Annunciation,” 1898, oil on canvas, 57 × 71 1/4 inches (144.8 × 181 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art. #arthistory #blackart #blackartists #blackhistory #blackarthistory
From the website: “Tanner painted The Annunciation soon after returning to Paris from a trip to Egypt and Palestine in 1897. The son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner specialized in religious subjects, and wanted to experience the people, culture, architecture, and light of the Holy Land. Influenced by what he saw, Tanner created an unconventional image of the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God. Mary is shown as an adolescent dressed in rumpled Middle Eastern peasant clothing, without a halo or other holy attributes. Gabriel appears only as a shaft of light. Tanner entered this painting in the 1898 Paris Salon exhibition, after which it was bought for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1899, making it his first work to enter an American museum.”
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There's quite a story about this amazing art collection, but few people on campus know about it. Which is why we're doing this project.
#ArtHistory #BlackArt #BlackArtHistory
#NYC #Queens https://web.york.cuny.edu/campus-art/installation/houston_conwill.html -
Samella Louis (1923-2022) “Together We Stand," Color lithograph, this impression sold at auction, Swann Galleries, 2021, for $11,875, well above its estimate of $4,000-6,000. #BlackHistoryMonth #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory #blackartists
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Charles White (1918-1979), Preacher, 1952. Pen and ink and graphite pencil on board, 22 13/16 × 29 15/16 in. (57.9 x 76 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. "Art must be an integral part of the struggle." - Charles White #arthistory #blackarthistory #blackart
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Contemporary artist Jonathan Green (born 1955), “Daughters of the South, color lithograph on Arches paper, 1994, this impression sold at Swann Auction Galleries for $2,750 in 2016. #blackart #blackarthistory #BlackHistoryMonth The artist’s website: jonathangreenstudios.com
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Beulah Ecton Woodard (1895-1955), “Maudelle,” Fired terra-cotta painted brown w/ white & green additions, c. 1937-38, 12x12 1/4x8 in., Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. #blackarthistory #blackart #blackhistorymonth #womanartist
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Watercolor! Masterful work! Leroy Allen (1951-2007): “Sun Drops,” 2001, 29x21 inches (737x533 mm), sold through Swann Auction Galleries for $10,625 in 2021. More info in ALT text. #blackart #blackarthistory #arthistory #blackhistorymonth
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Eldzier Cortor (1916–2015), Lady with Fan II, Oil on linen canvas, 2005, 18x12 inches (457x305 mm), sold through Swann Galleries in 2017 for $75,000. #arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory #blackarthistory
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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), “Nicodemus Coming to Christ,” 1927, oil on canvas laid down on board, 61¼ x 71 in. (155.6 x 180.3 cm.), sold through Christie’s auction house in 2008 for $541,000
#arthistory #blackart #blackarthistory #BlackHistoryMonth -
Such a happy work! Your art history post for today is by Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007), “Play at Dark (Westminster Street, Madison Park),” 1935, oil on canvas board, 24x18 inches, sold through Swann Auction Galleries in 2019 for $185,000. #blackart #arthistory #blackarthistory
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“Theresa,” by contemporary Texas artist Kermit Oliver, born in 1943: acrylic on masonite board, 1973, 6 1/2x6 1/2 inches (165x165 mm), sold through Swann Auction Galleries in 2017 for $7,500. Here is his website: kermitoliver.com #blackart #blackarthistory #texasartist