#Aaron Douglas

[maestrita]

BSG x The Onion

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More? Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

[grandmoments]

I'm in love with this chaos!

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The December 1925 issue of Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life. Published by the National Urban League, it was known for fostering literary culture during the Harlem Renaissance. Cover by Aaron Douglas.

Photo: Ellen Lupton Instagram

[chantssecrets]

Aaron Douglas, Untitled (seated man with head resting)

[longlistshort]

Laura Wheeler Waring, “Girl with Pomegranate”, ca. 1940, oil on canvas

Winold Reiss, “Langston Hughes”, 1925, Pastel on illustration board

Winold Reiss, “Alain Leroy Locke”, 1925, Pastel on illustration board

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art showcases some of the outstanding work created during this time period. The exhibition also provides some background on the artists, their peers in the art world, and their community.

From the museum-

The Harlem Renaissance emerged in the 1920s as one of the era’s most vibrant modes of artistic expression. The first African American-led movement of international modern art, it evolved over the next two decades into a transformative moment during which Black artists developed radically new modes of self-expression. They portrayed all aspects of the modern city life that took shape during the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the segregated rural South in search of freedom and opportunity in Harlem and other expanding Black communities nationwide.

This exhibition explores how artists associated with the “New Negro” movement-as the Harlem Renaissance was originally known, after influential writings by the philosopher Alain Locke and others-visualized the modern Black subject. It reveals the extensive connections between these artists and the period’s preeminent writers, performers, and civic leaders. At the same time, it reconstructs cross-cultural affinities and exchanges among the New Negro artists and their modernist peers in Europe and across the Atlantic world, often established during international travel and expatriation.

This complex, multilayered story unfolds through portraits, scenes of city life, and powerful evocations of Black history and cultural philosophy. Highlights include seldom-seen works from historically Black colleges and universities and culturally specific collections. Across its broad sweep, opening with founding ideas and concluding with activist imagery made on the cusp of the civil rights era, it establishes the critical role of the Harlem Renaissance in the history of art as well as the period’s enduring cultural legacy.

Horace Pippin, “Self Portrait”, 1944, Oil on canvas, adhered to cardboard; and “The Artist’s Wife”, 1936, Oil on linen

The caption for the above paintings reads-

Contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall has described Pippin’s self-portrait as a “monumental statement of self-confidence.” In this small painting, tightly cropped at bust length, Pippin gazes confidently at the viewer, his firmly drawn likeness reflecting a well-disciplined hand. Pippin portrayed his wife, Jennie Ora Fetherstone Wade Giles, at three times the scale of his own image, but he unified the two paintings by using a similar palette. Jennie’s blue dress is echoed in the background of his portrait, while the background of her portrait is picked up in the artist’s tie and button-down shirt.

The portraits in the exhibition are not the only standouts. Below are a few more selections.

Suzanna Ogunjami, “Full Blown Magnolia”, 1935, oil on burlap

William H. Johnson, “Flowers”, 1939-40, oil on plywood

Aaron Douglas, “The Creation”, 1935, and "Aspiration", 1936,Oil on masonite

From the museum about artist Aaron Douglas–

A core objective of the Harlem Renaissance was to portray the history and cultural philosophy that gave shape to a specifically African American identity and worldview. The artist Aaron Douglas, whose monumental murals earned him acclaim as the period’s foremost history painter, was also respected for his masterful use of biblical allegory to convey aspirations for freedom, equality, and opportunity.

Douglas first developed his signature silhouette figural compositions-derived in part from Cubism, Egyptian tomb reliefs, and American popular culture-for book and magazine cover illustrations in the late 1920s. He later elaborated this distinctive style in large-scale works for public projects and institutional commissions nationwide as well as at Fisk University in Nashville, where he established the art department and taught for thirty-eight years. Both Douglas and the sculptor Augusta Savage, founder of a Harlem community art school, created art inspired by the work of the author and composer James Weldon Johnson.

Laura Wheeler Waring, “Mother and Daughter”, 1927, Oil on canvas board

About Laura Wheeler Waring’s painting Mother and Daughter from the museum-

Mother and Daughter is perhaps the most direct engagement by a prominent Black artist of this era with the controversial topic of racially mixed families; its very existence was a disruption of the silence on the subject within certain segments of society. Waring experimented with some of the modernist pictorial devices favored by Alain Locke in her portrayal of a Black mother and her white-presenting daughter, rendering them not as specific individuals but as generic types emblematic of the omnipresence of racially mixed families. Flattening their near-identical facial features in profile, Waring established the true subject of the painting via the title and through the work’s most prominent element: the divergent skin tones that point to the subjects’ radically different paths through a social life defined by color lines.

Beauford Delaney, “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin)”, 1941, Oil on masonite

Finally, this portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney was also a highlight.

From the museum about the work-

Delaney met the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts-intellectual, social, and artistic-the two gay men began a friendship that would last thirty-eight years. Dark Rapture, the first of Delaney’s several portrayals of Baldwin, presents the author in a thickly painted, expressive tonal study of reds, browns, and blues against a brightly hued landscape. Both introspective and joyous, Dark Rapture stands as a visual manifestation of queer camaraderie, identity, and the search for belonging in the modern world.

This exhibition closes 7/28/24.

[la-muse-noire]

Aaron Douglas, Aspiration, 1936

[museum-archives]

Go Down Death

1934

Aaron Douglas (American, 1899-1979)

Oil on Masonite

[petalpetal]

Artist I Like Series

Aaron Douglas 1899 - 1979 an American painter, illustrator and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild.

[denimoverall]

[karmaalwayswins]

The Met "Harlem is Everywhere Episode 1: The New Negro" (2024)

First episode of a series of podcasts exploring The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit, "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism", on view until July 28, 2024.

[nancydrewwouldnever]

Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936, oil/canvas (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

In 1936, Douglas was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Installed in the elegant entrance lobby of the Hall of Negro Life, his four paintings charted the journey of African Americans from slavery to the present. Considered a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural phenomenon that promoted African and African American culture as a source of pride and inspiration, Douglas was an inspiring choice for the project.

The Hall of Negro Life, which opened on Juneteenth (June 19), a holiday celebrating the end of slavery, was visited by more than 400,000 fairgoers over the course of the five months that the Exposition was open to the public. This commemoration of abolition, and the mural cycle in particular, served as a critical acknowledgment of African American contribution to state and federal progress. Unfortunately, of the four original paintings only two, Into Bondage and Aspiration (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), remain.

[grandmoments]

The confusion continues!

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[chantssecrets]

Betsy Graves Reyneau, Aaron Douglas, oil on canvas, 1953.

[holmesoldfellow]

Cover art by John Cassaday for the five issues of "The Trial of Sherlock Holmes" by Leah Moore, John Reppion, and Aaron Douglas (May-September 2009, Dynamite Entertainment)

"A Smoking Gun," "A Locked Room," "A Killer On The Loose," "Brought to Justice," and "Endgame"

[toomuchlovereviews]

Final Destination 2 (2003)

⭐️⭐️⭐️ .5

I’m aware I am watching these films out of order, I still can’t find the first one on Criterion on Demand, but c’est la vie.

Maybe it’s because I always believe my friends, but I would never have let my friend drive onto the highway after hearing her vision. Wack. Her friends were not there for her.

I can’t help but feel like this whole series is like that text post about Apollo gifting people with Sight.

(Edit: THIS ONE!)

Also very wild to say “have you noticed anything ironic?” to a person that believes they’re going to die. That’s pretty twisted.

Also, sometimes, it’s not fate coming to get you, it’s a lack of kitchen safety and WHIMS knowledge. It all gets us in the end. Regardless, the tension in each death scene is so worth it.

I think that this twist on the original narrative was compelling but sometimes the actors couldn’t sell it. See: “See what? 😐 Pigeons? 🤨” and “😃 Tim! 😐” Other actors were putting their whole pussy into their performance to the point of near camp. But I think that horror movies like this make a person like myself easier to digest the horror.

You should watch this film for:

The yearly reminder that WHIMIS safety is indeed important

Edging. You get it if you have seen a single movie in this franchise.

The mid 00s dialogue, with gems like “Suck my junk, biatch!”

Similar titles:

The rest of the Final Destination Franchise (ig)

Escape Room (2019) (deals with a lot of planned horror, and asks the question ‘who will make it out alive?’)

[themuseumwithoutwalls]

MWW Artwork of the Day (2/3/23) Aaron Douglas (African-American, 1899-1979) Building More Stately Mansions (1944) Oil on canvas The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Douglas's art fused modernism with ancestral African images, including fetish motifs, masks, and artifacts. His work celebrates African American versatility and adaptability, depicting people in a variety of settings —- from rural and urban scenes to churches to nightclubs. His illustrations in books by leading black writers established him as the black artist of the period. Later in his career, Douglas founded the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The style Aaron Douglas developed in the 1920s synthesized aspects of modern European, ancient Egyptian, and West African art. His best-known paintings are semi-abstract, and feature flat forms, hard edges, and repetitive geometric shapes. Bands of color radiate from the important objects in each painting, and where these bands intersect with other bands or other objects, the color changes.

Douglas is one of the featured artists in this MWW exhibit/gallery: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.343798162392226&type=3