Born in Florida in 1892 Augusta Savage knew early on that she wanted to be an artist. However, the road to creating was not an easy one for her. She was not encouraged at home and she was born into a generation of racism in the South.

Skipping school at times, she enjoyed sculpting animals and other small figures. Her father didn’t approve of this frivolous activity and did whatever he could to stop her.

Savage once said that her father “almost whipped all the art out of me.”

A Monument of Hope and Beauty

Despite her father’s objections and the racism that she encountered, she went on to make a name for herself. Her experiences became part of the passion that she expressed in her work and the passion she expressed through teaching. Throughout her life, she taught art and especially enjoyed inspiring and encouraging young talented artists.

She advanced through her studies of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she finished the four-year program in three years. She was recommended by Harlem librarian Sadie Peterson (later Delaney), for a commission of a bust of W.E.B. DuBois. The sculpture was well received and she began sculpting busts of other African American leaders, including Marcus Garvey.

The sculpture that brought her the most fame was one of an expressive Harlem child, titled Gamin (1929). The work was also instrumental in awarding her a scholarship to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. A few years earlier in 1922, she had received the French scholarship but the offer was rescinded when white Alabama students who had received similar grants refused to travel to France unless she was removed from the group. 

Her unsuccessful appeal against that loss initiated her lifelong fight for civil rights and the recognition of black artists.

In the late 1930s, Savage was commissioned to create a sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The piece, The Harp, inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” became one of her best-known.

In 1940 she retired from art and moved to a farm in New York where she lived in rural obscurity. She passed away on March 26, 1962. While she was all but forgotten at the time of her death, Savage is remembered today as a great artist, activist, and arts educator.

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.
-Augusta Savage

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Bill Traylor was an African-American artist born into slavery in the mid-1800’s, incredibly beginning his career as a self-taught artist at the age of 85.

Some of his most notable works of art were those that depicted his memories of plantation life in Montgomery, Alabama.

Born on April 1, 1854, Traylor’s family were slaves who continued to farm after emancipation.  When Traylor was 85 years old, he slept in a back room of a funeral home after moving to Montgomery from Benton in Lowndes County.  During daylight hours, Traylor would use supplies he had found such as cardboard pieces from shirt packaging and pencil stubs to create his impression of the people he saw passing by, and of plantation life as he remembered it from his youth.  He would then exhibit his drawings by hanging them on a fence for passers-by to see.

In his 80’s Traylor produced more than 1,200 drawings!

From that point until he was close to 90, Traylor would produce more than 1,200 drawings.  While his art was simplistic, mostly delineated geometric forms and figures, Traylor’s works of art never gained attention and popularity until nearly 30 years after his death.

While his drawings were exhibited at a show organized by Victor E. D’Amico in New York in 1942, none of Traylor’s artwork sold.

It was only in the late 1970’s when Traylor’s drawings became recognized and popular with the public as well as critics.  Charles Shannon, a painter who Traylor had met in his later years and who had purchased art supplies for Traylor, had kept his friend’s drawings over the years before unveiling them to museum and art dealers and professionals.

Startlingly Modernistic

Some of the art work created by Traylor were done simply with pencil and “found” cardboard scraps, while others included poster paint, colored pencils, and crayons.  Much of his work is called “startlingly” modernistic; today, his work has become some of the most sought-after of that created by self-taught artists.

Traylor’s Art Work is Held in Numerous Public Collections

Amazingly considering the simplistic nature of his works and his elderly age when he really put his talent to use, Traylor’s art work is held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, High Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Prior to his death at a nursing home in Montgomery in 1949, the artist had traveled to Washington D.C. in 1942 where he lived with his children during World War II until 1945, when he returned to Montgomery and lived on the street once again.  Ultimately, he was urged to  move in with a daughter in the area by relief workers.

Bill Traylor’s story is one that is tragic in a way, considering he will never know the popularity of his work and impact of his talent. However, film maker Jeffrey Wolf (Director/Producer/Editor) has made the documentary Chasing Ghosts which captures the essence of Bill Traylor’s work and life.

•Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts Trailer from jeffrey wolf on Vimeo.

It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw

Today Bill Traylor is considered to be one of the most important self-taught American folk artists. Winner of Lee & Low’s New Voices Award Honor, It Jes’ Happened is a lively tribute to this man who has enriched the world with more than twelve hundred warm, energetic, and often humorous pictures.

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Presidential Portraits – The Obama’s Portraits Unveiled

The Obama’s official portraits were unveiled on Monday, February 12th 2018. These portraits will reside at the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House, the exhibition in the Smithsonian Institution.

The exhibition tells the American story through the presidents who have shaped history. Beginning with President George H. W. Bush, the National Portrait Gallery initiated a process by which the museum would commission a portrait of each president.

Presidents select their artist of choice. This amazing opportunity for the selected portrait artists will bring a new level of visibility to their work.

The Obama’s selected Kehinde Wiley, a Yale University-trained painter.

Artist Kehinde Wiley

Wiley style often references Old Masters paintings for the pose of the figure. His paintings often blur the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation. Rendered in a realistic mode—while making references to specific Old Master paintings—Wiley creates a fusion of period styles, ranging from French Rococo, Islamic architecture and West African textile design to urban hip hop. His work is large, bright and vibrant with splashes of bold colors and contrasts.

Wiley earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale University, School of Art in 2001.

Artist Amy Sherald

For her painting, Michelle Obama chose Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald. Sherald is another African-American artist known for her unique style utilizing grey scale and and contrasting colors.

She is best known for her portrait paintings that address social justice, as well as her choice of subjects, which are drawn from outside of the art historical narrative. Through her work, she takes a closer look at the way people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social, and cultural expectations.

“I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create,” Sherald said at the unveiling ceremony. “Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic, an archetype.”

From Traditional to Modern

The media for presidential imagery has ranged everywhere from the traditional oil-on-canvas and marble to cotton handkerchiefs and sewing-box lids, and the Gallery houses a richly varied array of presidential likenesses.

The first painter to paint a presidential portrait was Gilbert Stuart and his portrait of George Washington painted in 1797.

Sources
http://npg.si.edu/portraits/collection-highlights/presidential-portraits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehinde_Wiley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Sherald

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Unlike many self-taught artists who only gained fame following their deaths, David Butler experienced success during his lifetime, holding several museum and gallery exhibitions at various locations including the Delaware Art Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Living to the ripe old age of 99, Butler was one of the original recognized stars of Southern African-American yard art. His home in Patterson, Louisiana is where he created an amazing tin zoological environment both inside and outside his home. He did this over several decades, and began his work as an artist at middle age, after his employment at a sawmill left him injured. The 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980” held at Washington, DC’s Corcoran Gallery, is where Butler’s art first rose to prominence. Unfortunately, one year later in 1983 illness would strike Butler, resulting in his having to move in with his family, away from the zoological environment he had created.

Butler liked to call the “creatures” he created “critters.” He drew inspiration both from mythological sources, and the Bible, as his mother was a missionary. Butler’s family’s religious beliefs impacted his artistic vision to an extent; he also created kinetic sculptures which included windmills, weathervanes, and spinning “whirligigs.”

An interesting fact is that Butler’s artistic ability developed somewhat due to the fact that he desired color in his yard during winter months, when the “real” flowers he had planted in spring would disappear. Some of the results of his imagination include cowboys, alligators, sea monsters, even flying elephants. Some of his works of art include “Two Headed Dragon Wagon,” “Peacock,” “Train,” “Man in the Moon,” and “Two Wisemen on a Camel.” His work can be found today at Gilley’s Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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Dial, who passed away at 87 years old on January 2016 was a self-taught African American artist who came to prominence in the United States in the late 1980s.

Thornton Dial was born in 1928 to a teenage mother, Mattie bell on a former cotton plantation in Emelle, Alabama. He began farm work when we was five years old and attended school rarely.

From childhood on, Dial built “things” using whatever he could salvage, recycling even his own work to reuse materials in new creations. Dial referred to what he made only as “things,” though late in life he found out that others call them “art.”

His principal place of employment was the Pullman Company in Bessemer, Alabama working as a machinist, until the company closed its doors in 1981. After the Pullman factory shut down, Dial began to dedicate himself to his art for his own pleasure.

He was ‘discovered’ by Bill Arnett, an Atlanta-based collector of art made by black Southerners. And the rest as they say, is history.

Many of Dials art pieces fetch in the upwards of 12,000 each.

What is Outsider Art?
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for raw art or rough art (untrained artists), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. More here

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Eldzier Cortor (January 10, 1916 – November 26, 2015) was an African-American artist and printmaker.

Early on he dreamed of becoming a cartoonist and took evening classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before enrolling full time in 1937.

He is considered to be the first African American artists to depict nude women as the central theme of his work. This was an unpopular choice for many artists at the time as a reaction to the dominant European and American cultural landscape at the time. This was also unfavored because of the historical legacy of the sexual exploitation of black women during slavery. Cortor refutes these notions by showing the nude black female body as a source of strength.

One of the most popular works by Cortor is The Room, which is a painting from a series of paintings of rooms, depicting scenes in the lives of people of the slum areas. [It] shows the overcrowded condition of people who are obliged to carry out their daily activities of life in the confines of the same four walls in a condition of utmost poverty.

One of his first moments of popular recognition came in 1946, when Life magazine published one of his figures, a seminude woman. He received prestigious fellowships — including the Guggenheim, which allowed him to travel to Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, where he was exposed to new examples of art and culture in the African diaspora.

“The idea is to get someone to pause awhile” instead of walking past a picture. Mr. Cortor said in the recent interview. “You try to just get them to stay with that painting for a while, you don’t just burst past it there. And that’s the idea. If you can get someone, to catch their eye a little bit.”

Other African American Artists
Artist Thornton Dial – Read More
David Butler, Southern African-American Artist Famous for Creating ‘Yard Art’ from Tin – Read More

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