The Art of the Negro Native Forms Hale Woodruff

In the Centre of the Muses

January Christian Bernabe

In the Middle of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection, commemorates two historically significant events in African American art history, the 70th anniversary of the formation of the collection and the 60th year ceremony of the unveiling of Hale Woodruff'south mural, The Fine art of the Negro.  The volume is edited past Tina Maria Dunkley and Jerry Cullum (Clark Atlanta University, 2012).

The art drove owes its beingness to the African American arts visionary, Hale Woodruff.  Atlanta University and Clark College were separate institutions then, merging into Clark Atlanta University just in 1988.  At the invitation of John Promise, Atlanta Academy'south first African American president, Woodruff joined Atlanta University in 1931 to showtime an fine art department.  Virtually immediately, he proposed one of the most important and ambitious art initiatives that the mail bellum South would experience in the mod era.  Woodruff proposed a 3-pronged framework to provide African American artists a venue to testify their piece of work, provide them with cash prizes and share their artwork with the community at large.  The prizes were incentives for artists to develop their skills by producing pieces for Atlanta University to purchase.

In the Spring of 1942, Woodruff saw his proposal come to fruition.  The very showtime Exhibition of Paintings, Prints, and Sculpture past Negro Artists of America opened. Nearly xxx juried exhibitions sponsored by Atlanta University would exist held annually until 1970.  These exhibitions would later be called Atlanta University Fine art Annuals.  Each contributed to the growth of the Art Collection, with Atlanta Academy's purchases of the top prizes of oil and watercolor paintings, prints, and sculptures.  In total, the annual exhibitions secured 291 pieces for the core collection.  Donations from art patrons and acquisitions have grown the Art Collection to about 1,200 pieces. The primary focus continues to be African American art, only works by other artists of colour are besides included.

Invited to introduce the first fine art almanac in 1942, Alain Locke, the preeminent scholar, philosopher, and figurehead of the Harlem Renaissance, offered the opening remarks to what would get the pinnacle event for efflorescence of African American art in the United States outside of New York Urban center.  In his statement, Locke conveyed the transformative potential of the arts in the "Southland," which, as he predicted, "will bring healthy growth and conduct rich fruit."  And indeed, the art annuals proved to exist unique in their mission.  While artists like Jacob Lawrence, who won in 1947 for his vibrant cubist-inspired oil painting Playland, would secure a place within the canon of  American art, others would take but their prize victory equally their legacy.  An example of this is the cocky-taught Otis Galbreath. His folk-style realistic oil painting, Let Bygones Be Bygones, won in 1964. The annual exhibition embraced an egalitarian spirit, for both trained artists and self-taught artists could submit artwork to be judged.

What readers will find useful and enthralling in In the Eye of the Muses is the remarkable and virtually near complete reproductions of the artwork acquired through the art annuals.  The colour reproductions of the artwork and the accompanying details of the prizes and the lists of jury members will concenter both art historians and lay art appreciators alike.  Chronologically organized, the artwork brings into light the affective and social milieus of the artists and the African American community in the Us writ large.  The book also contains biographies of all the artists represented in the art collection, equally well as additional reproductions of donated and acquired pieces.  The volume contains archival textile besides: photographs, letters between African American artist Romare Bearden and and then Atlanta University president Rufus Cloudless regarding the racial exclusivity of the art annuals, and reproductions of missing art pieces from the core collection. In the Center of the Muses also includes copies of 1945 and 1951 Time magazine reviews of the fine art annuals.  Both reviews teeter on predictable themes, and criticism of specific pieces are imbued with clichéd ideas about race in the reviewers' attempts to make sense of the figurative forms in the artwork.  Unfortunately, the Time reviewers simply scratched the surface.

Social Context

In the Eye of the Muses recognizes the heavy constraints placed against African Americans in the Southward.  Indeed, we demand merely to remember that these art annuals emerged and flourished during a tumultuous menses of American history.  In the 1940s and 1950s, African American communities located in what Locke in his countdown voice communication called "the Southland" continued to be ravaged past Jim Crow racial restrictions across all sectors of Southern social club.  Racial segregation was as commonplace every bit the daily violence and combative speech inflicted toward African Americans.  These quotidian realities of African American life were often inspirations for many of the artworks.  Every bit Tina Dunkley notes of the core art drove:  "Predominated by figurative content, the recurring themes are alienation, travail, history, genre, faith, and portraiture."

Negro Woman (1952) past John Woodrow Wilson captures an attention to portraiture and exudes the social climate of the twenty-four hours throughout the sheet.  Her optics say information technology all.  With the beginning of World War Ii and the participation of many African American soldiers in the war, it comes as no surprise that paintings like John Woodrow Wilson'due south Blackness Soldier (1943) and Mark Hewitt's Spirit of the 366th (n.d.) convey the emotional cost that Globe War Ii inflicted on African American soldiers and their families.  Both works won prizes at the exhibitions.  As the larger fine art earth connected to celebrate the successes of the abstract expressionist movement in the 1950s, artist like Geraldine McCullough in The Black Knight (n.d.) and Alexander S. McMath's Prelude to a Kiss (n.d.) would harness the language and forms of abstract expressionism in their work, merely would not relegate form beneath content.  Rather, both artists infused their paintings with the sensibilities and movements grounded in the spirit of African American culture equally jazz musicians did in their compositions decades prior.

The influence of the Civil Rights Motion also constitute its way into the art annuals, specifically in the last show in 1970, when all of the members of the Jury of Selection were African American—the first fourth dimension and the last.  Information technology is worth noting that the winning aggregation sculpture in the 1970 exhibition was James Newton's The American Sixties (1969) that, in its minimalistic style, symbolically comments on the rising of black nationalism and ceremonious rights politics of the 1960s. The work features 3 semi-automatic guns, segmented blocks, and cut out stars all painted in black, with the but color being a thin ribbon of cherry-red, white, and blue.

Murals Afterward threescore Years

Hale Woodruff's mural, The Art of the Negro, was unveiled at Atlanta University in 1952.  Woodruff apprenticed nether Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Rivera's influence tin can exist readily spotted in Woodruff'due south own landscape work.  Like Rivera, Woodruff often focused on historical and cultural themes, displaying varying degrees of political overtones.  The spaces in Woodruff'south murals are densely packed with figures and objects, forming complex still edifying African American historical narratives. We need only expect at Woodruff's most admired three-paneled Amistad Murals, commissioned by Talladega College in 1938, to go a sense of Woodruff's interests in representing racial uplift through the depictions of heroic events and figures in African American history.

We also see Rivera'south influence in the ways that Woodruff represented the human class, an example of transcultural substitution that Woodruff would tap into to produce The Art of the Negro muralfor Atlanta Academy. The attending to positive African American visual narratives would go Woodruff's defining ethos and would guide him in the production of The Art of the Negro for brandish in the entrance hall of the Trevor Arnett Library.

In the Eye of the Muses includes reproductions of Woodruff's studies for the murals also as the final landscape pieces that are currently in the Trevor Arnett building.  Besides included in the volume is an insightful essay by art historian Jerry Cullum that provides historical context and critical readings of Woodruff'southward The Art of the Negro studies and the final landscape at present on display.

The Art of the Negro foregrounds Woodruff's centering of African (male) bodies and their importance to the larger narrative of Western knowledge product.  The titles of the each of the panels of the mural provide a narrative arc for its viewers. The titles motion from Native Forms, Interchange, Dissipation to Parallels, Influences, and Muses. Art historical surveys of Western art frequently begin with discussions of cave paintings of Lascaux in French republic.  Woodruff, all the same, reconfigures the subject field of fine art history'southward origin story by placing Africans squarely at its center in the console Native Forms.  He also represents African influences in Western epistemology as seen in Interchange as well as African influences in Western aesthetics in the aptly titled panel Influences.

In the somber panel Dissipation, Woodruff does not shy abroad from depicting the violence of colonialism; rather he centers the harsh outcomes of colonialism through painting the destruction of African objects. Dissipation, more than broadly, speaks to the obliteration of African creative traditions.

In the terminal panel, Muses, Woodruff envisions the transhistorical alliances between the African artist at centre in his indigenous garb and the artists of color surrounding him.  Each of the figures that surround the key figure has followed in the African human'south footsteps. The African figure at center is their muse.  Yet, the other men in the panel have besides go muses in their own right over the years to the many students and community members who have stopped to reflect on Woodruff's landscape.

Out From the Basement

Given the prominent placement of Woodruff'south The Fine art of the Negro mural in the vestibule to the Trevor Arnett Library, it seems curious, if non ironic, that the artwork from the art annuals were relegated to a poorly lit basement infinite in the same edifice later the final show in 1970.  Art collector and essay contributor Brenda Thompson recalls, "The Trevor Arnett basement was cramped and the lighting poor, so the artworks were hard to see."  Thompson's recollection is a far departure from the vibrant ambiance of the fine art annual openings that African American artist and essay correspondent Freddie Styles remembers as "gala affairs . . . people wore their very best clothing to impress."

In 1979, then African American studies graduate educatee Tina Dunkley had a serendipitous run across with the art in the basement that would change the trajectory of the collection.  Bringing the artwork from out of obscurity, out from the dimly lit basement, would take over a decade later on her initial encounter with it.  As the drove's managing director when returning to Clark Atlanta University in 1994, Dunkley led the renovation of the Trevor Arnett edifice to accommodate the university's of import art.  She would guide its trajectory into heady terrains, as In the Eye of the Muses is one of many fantastic outcomes of her stewardship. The art drove is now housed in the reading room of the former library, and Woodruff'southward The Fine art of the Negro serves as a plumbing equipment introduction to the collection.

Power of the Visionaries

Despite the heavy socio-cultural constraints that burdened African American artists, the art annuals became a cultural beacon for them. Every bit In the Eye of the Muses brilliantly captures, African American arts were celebrated, and they flourished in Atlanta University 3 decades. For many of the artists, these art annuals were the only opportunities for them to bear witness their work, given the racial animosity that they faced from the larger predominately white fine arts earth. Alain Locke, nevertheless, foreshadowed the potential of the annual exhibitions in his opening remarks in 1942. As Locke believed, "contemporary immature Negro artists are now in its vanguard," and he predicted the of import soci-cultural and political impact that the immature artists and their artwork could attain. Their artwork had the power to uplift a race. Even if momentarily, the artwork could transport its viewers away from the harsh realities of their existent-life experiences by exposing them to the vitality, creativity, and broad range of the artistic talents of the African American artists who participated. Ultimately, the art annuals proved successful in unsettling the catechism of American art by creating new muses for budding African American artists, art patrons and students of art history.

In many ways, In the Centre of the Muses is a spring collection of visionaries.  Artists and intellectuals alike are written about with sincerity and authenticity, and the artwork reproduced in the book capture transformative moments in American art history that Hale Woodruff would certainly nod at approvingly.  Seventy years have passed since the first fine art almanac, and the guiding question of the necessity of race-specific exhibition venues or curatorial projects remains as truthful and pressing today as it did in Woodruff'due south day.

If there are two things readers should realize later they finish reading and looking at the art In the Eye of the Muses they are art continues to serve as a powerful and instructive site of transformation and learning; and that we are very lucky to have such a unique and important art collection housed at Clark Atlanta University.

January Christian Bernabe is an independent scholar, editor and curator who is based in Chicago.

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Source: http://iraaa.museum.hamptonu.edu/page/In-the-Eye-of-the-Muses-

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