Aaron
Douglas
Known as the “Father of African American Arts,” Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1918, May 26, 1899. He was the first African-American to explore modernism and to reflect African art in his paintings, murals, and illustrations. Douglas developed an interest in art early on, finding some of his inspiration from his mother's love for painting watercolors. He attended a segregated primary school, McKinley Elementary, and Topeka High School, which was integrated. In high school Douglas took courses that prepared him to study for a fine arts degree in college.
Following graduation, Douglas worked in a glass factory and later in a steel foundry to earn money for college. He spent some months working in a Detroit, Michigan, automobile factory, where he experienced racism and discrimination. During this time he attended art classes in the evening at the Detroit Museum of Art. While World War I raged in Europe, he attempted to join the Student Army Training Corps (SATC), but they dismissed him. He transferred to the University of Minnesota where he rose to the rank of corporal in the SATC before the end of the war in 1919. Returning from the war, he enrolled at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. There he pursued a liberal arts curriculum that included drawing, painting, and art history. He studied drawing under Blanche O. Grant, later a prominent member of the Taos, New Mexico, art colony.
As a senior, Douglas received a prize for excellence in drawing. He graduated from Nebraska earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1922 as the first Black art major in its history. The following year also earned a B.F.A. degree from the University of Kansas. The next year he accepted a teaching position at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, where he served as instructor of art for two years. On the advice of friends, Aaron Douglas fulfilled a dream of moving to New York City in 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. A serious reader from boyhood, Douglas kept abreast of the growing cultural movement in Harlem through the pages of two influential periodicals: The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, the monthly publication of the National Urban League edited by Charles S. Johnson.
His work came to the attention of Johnson, who was actively recruiting young Black writers, poets, and artists from across the country to come to New York. Through him, Douglas met Bavarian-born painter Winold Reiss and became the artist’s prize student. Winold Reiss encouraged him to use his African heritage for artistic inspiration. Reiss drew on the legacy of German folk paper-cuts for his work, and that influence is seen in Douglas' illustration work. Douglas became motivated to research African heritage as a source of subject matter for his work, and in December 1925, his work was published alongside Reiss’s in Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation, with additional essays by other progressive African American leaders.
Soon, Aaron Douglas found his reputation as an illustrator rising quickly. After only a year of being in Harlem, Douglas had established himself as a notable artist within the African community. Douglas’s experience with racism and racial solidarity imbued him with an eagerness to play a role in promoting social change. His work within the Harlem community was well received and successful because he was one of the first creators to incorporate African motifs and designs into his work. By looking into past Black experience within the United States and hearkening back to African heritage both figuratively and literally, Douglas was able to transform his work into a modernized version of African pattern.
In 1926, Douglas married teacher Alta Sawyer. While in Harlem, Douglas became close friends with poet and author Langston Hughes and sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1927, W.E.B Du Bois invited Douglas to join the staff of The Crisis as their art critic. That same year at the age of 28, Douglas was invited by James Weldon Johnson to contribute illustrations to another revered Harlem Renaissance book, "God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse", which the author based on traditional religious oratory. Critically praised, God’s Trombones was Johnson’s masterwork and a breakthrough publication for Douglas. Both Johnson and Douglas received awards for their work. Around the same time, Douglas worked on a magazine with novelist Wallace Thurman to feature African-American art and literature. Entitled "Fire!!", the magazine published just one issue.
With his reputation for creating compelling graphics, Douglas became an in-demand illustrator for many writers. He would continue to make illustrations for other magazines such as Vanity Fair and Fire!! He had a unique artistic style that fused his interests in modernism and African art. However, Douglas’s last major illustrations were made for Paul Marand’s book, Black Magic (1929). Douglas created some of his best-known paintings in the 1930s. In 1930, Douglas was invited to decorate the walls of the Fisk University Library in Nashville, TN. He created a series of murals telling the story of the Black experience from the shores of Africa to life in America. In these murals were themes including Black religious songs, labors, and Blacks in Africa as well as in America.
In September 1931 Douglas took a leave from Fisk University and sailed for Paris, where he undertook additional formal training and met expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner. He later lived briefly in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Back in New York, the following year, Douglas had his first solo art show at Caz Delbo Gallery. In 1934, with funding from the Public Works Administration, he started one of his most legendary works—a series of murals entitled "Aspects of Negro Life". It featured four panels, each depicting a different part of the African-American experience. Each mural included a captivating mix of Douglas's influences, from jazz music to abstract and geometric art.
The Douglas exhibition was a series of paintings made for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the site of the Schomburg Center. For subject matter, Douglas drew on the history of the African American experience from enslavement through the Reconstruction to twentieth-century lynching and segregation. The panel "The Negro in an African Setting" shows Douglas at the peak of his powers. It depicts life in Africa before enslavement as joyous, proud, and firmly rooted in the community. During the height of his commissioned work as a muralist, Douglas served as president of the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935. That same year, Douglas painted a mural for the Harlem YMCA titled "Evolution of Negro Dance". In that same year, Douglas created eight paintings that were based on smaller versions for "God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse".
In 1938, Aaron Douglas earned a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation, a generous provider of stipends to hundreds of African American artists and writers. The funds allowed him to travel to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Virgin Islands and create watercolor paintings of life there. During Douglas’s later years, around 1940, Charles S. Johnson, the first Black president of Fisk University, invited Douglas to create the university's new art department. The next year he accepted a full-time position in the art department. He chaired the department for 30 years, before retiring in 1966. Douglas was concerned with students learning the fundamentals the hard way, and placed emphasis on becoming an artist rather than an educator of art. He focused on the world and its social problems such as the struggles of Blacks in America, the attitudes Whites held towards African-Americans, and the plight of Jews throughout the world.
Although teaching in Nashville, Douglas and his wife, Alta, retained their apartment in Harlem, where they remained active in Harlem’s cultural community. Taking his educational responsibilities quite seriously, he enrolled at Columbia University's Teachers College in 1941, and spent three years earning a master's degree in art education. In his later years, Douglas received countless honors. In 1963, he was invited by President John F. Kennedy to attend a celebration of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, held at the White House. In 1970 Douglas returned to Topeka, his hometown, for the first retrospective exhibition of his work at the Mulvane Art Center. The following year he was honored with a second retrospective at Fisk.
Douglas remained committed to learning and growing as an artist, outside of his work in the classroom. Seven years after his retirement, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Fisk University. He continued to guest lecture until his death in 1979. Aaron Douglas left behind an incredible legacy. He is regarded as one of the most influential visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, in which he played a leading role. Douglas' work was socially charged and centered on Afro-centric imagery and methods, which was highly uncommon at the time. He was one of the first artists to use visual arts as a way to construct powerful social commentary on segregation and racial issues in the United States. Douglas' work pioneered the African American modernist movement and went on to inspire many African American artists to utilize African elements in their art.
