Man Eating His Heart or Secret Sorrow, ca. 1900
After Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s exposure to the works of Auguste Rodin at the Paris Exposition Universelle, we can see her departure from the Beaux-Arts traditional style of idealized or respectable subjects in her work Man Eating His Heart or Secret Sorrow. Instead of focusing on traditional or respectable subjects she uses this piece to contemplate and express the universal themes of human sufferings and inward states of mind. Fuller disregards the finely articulated details of the Beaux Arts tradition to create a piece that, although we can tell it is a male hunched in on himself opening his mouth to eat something, still conveys details about him that remain unclear such as his eyes and what he is holding. The work is based on the poem "In the Desert" by Stephen Crane and features a creature eating his own heart. Fuller's work changes the creature to a human, which likens the creature in the poem to humans. The title Man Eating His Heart or Secret Sorrow indicates that Fuller is dealing with the theme of human suffering, but the private nature of sorrow draws us into the man's mental state, making us question how we as humans deal with sorrow. While sorrow is undoubtedly a horrible and sometimes painful mental state to be in, Fuller's work implies that it can be used to make us stronger individuals. When we deal with our sorrows we are like the man eating his own heart in that we use our sufferings as motivation to be better people and to do better things. Fuller's work can be seen as a physical representation of how our sufferings shape us as humans.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
Kayla Cooper
Untitled (Mary Magdelene), 1930
Untitled (Mary Magdalene) is an example of how Richard Nugent conveyed his homosexuality in his art fairly clearly. The painting is of a woman who is completely nude and seems to be standing up or coming forth from the page she is painted on. She is nude but her private parts are not of a typical woman. The figure is “performing a sexy burlesque of hyperbolized gender…[which] seem to mimic gender rather than express its authenticity .” This mimicry and hypergenderilization make this piece unique and even borderline grotesque. The nipples of the woman are very out of portion of the rest of her body and are erect to a very extreme level. Her facial make up is also very ‘draggish’ in style; one can assume that Nugent was pulling inspiration from the nightlife he often frequented. The color of her skin, thin painted on eye brows and lips and hair that is long and colorful all points to the performativity of her sexual expression and gender as a whole. The title of the series gains inspiration from a play entitled Salome that came out during the Harlem Renaissance, and the play itself made Salome the “characterization of … a potent symbol of sexual transgression. ” The sexualization of all images of the series is clear, but this image is the strongest in its features and over sexualization, with clear vagina exposed beneath translucent triangles and lips pursed. The image is powerful and expected of Nugents type of art.
Richard Bruce Nugent
Cidney Michelle Holliday
Black Face and Arm Unit, 1971
Jones acknowledges the vibrancy of the body as the medium for creative expression. This installation consists of 30 life-size plaster coasts of faces and arms decorated in dots and stripes of different colors and patterns. The patterns resembled those of African body-paint traditions. Body painting was used in African societies to denote social status and religious beliefs. The piece combines abstract expressionist versions of painted African masks to suggest scarification with detached crooked arms. The installation represents the black body as a temple of creativity. The sculptures are portrayed with one eye opened and the other eye closed perhaps suggesting the links between the living and the dead and also the dual nature of artistic expression itself (between the world of matter and the world of spirit or conscious and unconscious). Jones’ interest in religious rituals may have inspired this installation, but it was this installation that inspired Ben Jones to look deeper into his African roots. The use of canvas for the faces and arms represent the ideology of African skin often regarded as a black canvas. One could look at this installation as Jones’ blank canvas—a canvas that he intended to fill with knowledge of his African roots.
Ben Jones
Tathiana Marcelin
Brown Girl After the Bath, 1931
Archibald J. Motley
In his work Brown Girl After the Bath, Motley revisited his origins of portraiture, yet his approach was seasoned according to his new objective of allowing African Americans to see themselves as an artistic center. He wanted an audience both black and white to whom he could show the richness and diversity of black culture, in hopes that whites would abandon their racial prejudice and develop an appreciation for African American contributions. In this work, he explores the black body as an artistic center through the nude portrayal of a young woman. She is seated at an elegant vanity adorned with an ornate vase and lamp. Her eyes establish contact with the viewer who seems almost to be an intruder disrupting a process of deep introspection. Here, Motley consciously constructs an appreciation of and homage to black beauty. The girl represents the notion of seeking self-identification within one’s skin, an idea common within the Black Atlantic. Motley portrays the young woman poised, with quiet innocence and purity. As a result, black beauty is depicted as an entity that is innocent, unthreatening, and capable of sophistication and style.
Archibald J. Motley
Katie Ramseur
Tempest of the Niger, 1964
James Amos Porter was the illustrious Father Of African American art history, as well as an artist, art-historian, instructor, arts administrator and artistic and cultural bridge builder. Born in Baltimore in 1905 to John Porter, a minister and Lydia Peck Porter, a schoolteacher, Porter attended public schools in the DMV area before graduating cum laude from Howard University in 1927 (Dictionary of Art Historians.) After receiving his MA from the New York University Fine Arts Graduate Center, Porter began writing Modern Negro Art, published in 1943. Modern Negro Art, considered a definitive read for those interested in African American art history explored the history of African-American art from its origin to the mid-twentieth century, and featured revealing discussions with contemporary artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley.
In 1963 Porter received a Faculty Research grant from the Washington Evening Star, which enabled him to go on sabbatical for a year researching African art in Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Accordingly, August 1963 through August 1964 “ bracket the most prolific period of Porter’s life, when he produced more paintings and drawings than in any similar year of his career” (Porter 11). Jeff R. Donaldson recalls that while Porter’s 1963 sojourn was only his second trip to Africa “his work was always influenced by African art as far back as the 1930s when he utilized African sculptural forms in…portrait and figure compositions” (Porter 11). In commenting on Porter’s 25 oil paintings and numerous drawings produced during this international trip, Donaldson relates that Porter’s works “stand in perfect balance with the portraiture and other work of his early career and at the same time, like the man himself, they fit his description of the dynamism of contemporary African art as changing in accordance with the emergent cultural patterns of a changing society (Porter 12).
Accordingly Porter’s 1964 Tempest of the Niger depicts one of a series of paintings that Porter completed during this sabbatical in Africa in 1964. In it Porter portrays a churning allegoric panorama in which the river Niger might be thought to “symbolize the ebb and flow of cultural values in West Africa” (Tempest of the Niger). The Tempest of the Niger is the most abstracted and kinetic of the series. Individual faces whirl and twirl in and out of grays and white and blues, alongside red tones. The blue background consists of a landscape with peculiarly shaped houses and structures.
James A. Porter
Justin Stafford
Monique from the Alter Ego Series, 2009
Derek Blanks
The alter ego photograph of actress and talk show host, Monique, by Derek Blanks insinuates ideas of W.E. B. Du Bois “double-consciousness” using renditions of the comedy and tragedy opera masks. In an interview Blanks explains how this image stemmed from Monique’s sadistic character in the movie, Precious, and reflects the actress’s ability to embody a horrid role, while maintaining her identity. Furthermore, juxtaposing Monique’s face imposed onto a serious mask behind a laughing mask alludes to the double-consciousness that African-Americans must play in their daily lives. In essence, when outside of the security of their race, African-Americans exist in conscious awareness within the context of White America.
The image also subtly rivals the “happy-go-lucky” stereotype of the unusually cheerful and carefree African-American compared to the stereotype that those individuals, especially African-American women, are always anger and bitter. Blanks reveals that these stereotypes are contradicting and consequently fallible. Moreover, the lack of intermediate representation of the Black identity ultimately dehumanizes African-Americans by constricting their expression of emotion into a box instead of a spectrum.
Derek Blanks
2009
Jamela Peterson
El Rapto de las Mulatas, 1938
Carlos Enríquez, nicknamed “The Painter of Cuban Ballads”, was a white Cuban artist who produced the majority of his work from the 1930s to 1950s, a period marked by political turbulence in Cuba. Cuban artists of this time celebrated the country in their work hoping to augment the strength of their national identity. Enriquez’ paintings are known for their mythological depictions of the Cuban people and landscape that come together in a nationalistic celebration of Cuba. They are also marked by an obsession with the body of the Cuban mulata while simultaneously exemplifying her importance as a national symbol of Cuba.
In the 1930s Afrocubanismo emerged as an artistic, literary, and political movement that celebrated the African inspired cultural elements in Cuba and encouraged members of Cuban society to embrace all the cultures of their heritage. The 19th century works of Fernando Ortiz, Cuban anthropologist, and José Martí, Cuban philosopher, were repopularized and frequently referenced by artists and intellectuals of the period who were speaking out against the political and social climate of the 20th century. Martí in his essay Our America famously said, “There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races”. People of mixed race, like the mulata, became important icons used to represent Cuba, the nation without races. For example, the iconic figure of Cuba is Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, or the Virgin of Charity. She is a mulata and is always depicted with variations of caramel colored skin.
In 1938, after a four-year stay in Europe, Enríquez painted El Rapto de las Mulatas or Abduction of the Mulatto Women. The painting is transposition of a famous French painting The Abduction of the Sabine Women by Nicolas Poussin painted in 1634-35. Enríquez appropriated the scene from the European painting and created the Cuban equivalent: abducted mulatas in an erotic fantasy scene painted from a voyeuristic male perspective. We see two mulata women taken on horseback by two armed “mambise” riders, popularized Cuban soldiers of the War for Independence, as they ride through the Cuban countryside. In contrast to the men in full uniform, the abducted mulatas are completely nude and thus made accessible to the voyeuristic male viewer. The pervasive sexual energy is represented by bright red and yellow brushstrokes that erupt from the scene. Despite the fact that the mulatas are depicted as highly sexual beings that find pleasure in being abducted, there is also an aggressive and confrontational element in the women’s character. One of the women is staring directly into the eyes of the soldier who has her in his grasp, challenging her abductor. The look she is giving him could be read as a look of confident seduction or a look of defiance. Either way, the mulata is given a level of powerful agency. Because the mulata is an icon of Cuba, her strength in the painting represents the strength of the country so desired by Cuban artists and intellectuals of the time period.
Carlos Enríquez
Sarah Thornton