Images for Lecture November 7

 Slow Down Freight Train

Rose Piper

1946

 Art of the Negro: Native Forms

Hale A. Woodruff

1950-51

 Afro Emblems

Hale A. Woodruff

1950

 Blue Intrusion

Hale A. Woodruff

1958

 Every Atom Glows: Electrons In Luminous Vibration

Norman Lewis

1951

Harlem Turns White

Norman Lewis

1955

 Evening Rendezvous

Norman Lewis

1962

 Blue is the Smoke of War, White the Bones of Men

Romare Bearden

c. 1960

Tribal Mark

Aubrey Williams

1961

 …I Have A Special Fear for My Loved Ones

Elizabeth Catlett

1946

 Sharecropper

Elizabeth Catlett

1952

Illumination No. 1

Sunder Boghossian

1964

Images for Lecture November 5

Click below for the lecture slides for November 5:

Quiz #2

Below are nine images from which I will choose the five slide identifications on Quiz #2:

The Banjo Lesson

Henry Ossawa Tanner

1893 

 Aspiration

Aaron Douglas

1936

 Portrait of Langston Hughes

Winold Reiss

c. 1925

 Barbeque

Archibald Motley, Jr.

1934

 African Dancer

Richmond Barthé

1933

 Nous Quatre a Paris (We Four in Paris)

Palmer Hayden

c. 1930

Angel

Wiliam Edmondson

1932-37

 Migration of the Negro, Panel 1: During the World War there was a Great Migration North by Southern Negroes

Jacob Lawrence

1940-41

Tribal Mark

Aubrey Williams

1961

Below are three essay topics from which I will choose the one for Quiz #2

1. In the early decades of the 20th Century, African American leaders like W.E.B. Dubois and Alain Locke issued a call to African American artists to create a new "black aesthetic" that would "uplift the race" and deliberately reconnect with the traditional and ancient arts of Africa.  Name two of the artists who made work aimed at answering this call and describe how each did so.
2. Define Primitivism and tell how it is demonstrated in at least two artworks that you have seen in class.
3. Describe the prominent artistic style of the WPA/FAP and explain what changes Archibald Motley, Jr. made to his stylistic approach when he painted Picnic as a government commission.

Images for Lecture November 2

Click below for the lecture slides for November 2:

Terms of the Day for November 2

• Proletariat – a term used to identify the working class in capitalist systems.  Members of this class do not have ownership of the means of production and therefore sell their labor to those who do.
• Capitalism –  an economic system that is based on private ownership of the means of production and the creation of goods or services for profit. Other central elements include competitive markets, wage labor and capital accumulation.
• Communism –  established by Karl Marx, a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless, moneyless, and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production. The movement claims that since the world has a superabundance of material wealth, societies can allow distribution based on need and social relations  based on freely associated individuals.
• Négritude –  a literary and ideological movement, based in Marxism, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France in the 1930s that found solidarity in a common black identity as a rejection of French colonial racism. They believed that the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora could stand against French domination.

Images for Lecture October 29

Click below for the lecture slides for October 29:

Terms of the Day for October 29

• The Great Depression – a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement which followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and eventually spread worldwide.
• The New Deal – a  series of economic programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1936 in response to the Great Depression and focused on what historians call the "3 Rs": Relief, Recovery, and Reform. That is, Relief for the unemployed and poor; Recovery of the economy to normal levels; and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.
• Works Progress Administration (WPA) – the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads.
• Federal Art Programs (FAP) – was the visual arts arm of the Great Depression-era New Deal Works Progress Administration program in the United States.  It’s primary goals were to employ out-of-work artists and to provide art for non-federal government buildings: schools, hospitals, libraries, etc.