by Lauren du Plessis

From pastoral landscapes to protest art, discover the work of ten pioneering black American artists and their history

Art tends to have two effects on us when we view it. The first is the purely aesthetic, the heart-wrenching power of seeing something novel, beautiful, frightening, or unexpected. Second is the theme: that search for meaning that asks, “who made this, and why?”

Below are ten of the most influential Black painters, sculptors, and photographers from the last two hundred years of American history. From breaking down barriers to establishing new cultural canons, these artists have pioneered the portrayal of Black experience in the United States through works that do all of the above: inspiring wonder, hope, and shock in equal volumes.

In response to both historical and contemporary injustices, Black art gives voice to those previously silenced. At the same time, several art movements have celebrated the beauty and flourishing of Black culture.

Notable movements include the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties, which revived African American music, art, writing, and scholarship. In the sixties and seventies, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) combined activism and art to invoke pride in Black history and culture. Though not predominantly arts-focused, the Black Lives Matter movement has led to large-scale murals and public artworks that at once protest police brutality and convey hope, solidarity, and a colorful reinvention of spaces. Looking forward, Afrofuturism imagines speculative futures and technologies that blossom out from Black experiences.

All this has come from a diverse history: from Romantic landscapes to bold abstraction. Without further ado, let’s dive into this journey through the work of ten iconic artists…

Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821-1872)

Robert S. Duncanson was a landscape painter whose work frequently depicted rivers and lakes against glowing, golden sunsets. Associated with both the Hudson River School and the Ohio River Valley tradition, he was the first African American artist to become known internationally.

He had no formal training, and taught himself by using other artists’ works as reference and sketching outside. His most famous work, Land of the Lotus Eaters, has a mythical and Romantic feel. Later in life, he lived in Canada and toured the United Kingdom.

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907)

Also known by her Native American name, Wildfire, Mary Edmonia Lewis was the first professional African American and Native American sculptor. She grew up in New York then went to college in Ohio, but was met with hostility and racism, being accused of several crimes before leaving.

She found a teacher who helped her learn sculpture, and launched a successful career, making sculptures and busts of abolitionists. However, the praise she received often felt insincere, and she worried about being taken advantage of. Relocating to Rome, she found more artistic and spiritual freedom, and her career solidified. Her neoclassical style of sculpture, and passion for abolitionist causes, can be seen in many pieces, such as ‘Forever Free’, below.

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pennsylvania to a bishop and abolitionist father, and lived near artist Robert Douglass Jr. who inspired him to become a painter. He went to the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts and studied anatomy intensively. Later, he traveled to Paris, where art circles were more open, and he grew a strong reputation in France.

He painted portraits, seascapes, and increasingly religious works, and became internationally acclaimed. His realist oil paintings are often illuminated in pastel tones, contrasted with moody blues and warm oranges.

James Van Der Zee (1886-1983)

Photographer James Van Der Zee was born in Massachusetts and early on displayed keen musical talent, although by his teenage years he had also built a darkroom in his parent’s house. He moved around New York and New Jersey, before settling in Harlem.

Van Der Zee founded an art and music conservatory with his sister, and later a photography studio with his wife. Throughout the twenties and thirties he became well-known, photographing celebrities and his Harlem neighbors alike.

Alma Thomas (1891-1978)

Alma Thomas was born in Georgia to a dress designer and a businessman. After moving to Washington following the Atlanta race riots, she was able to access art classes for the first time. She went on to study fine art at Howard University, where some sources claim she was the first woman in America to earn a Bachelor’s in art.

She taught in a school until retirement, but continued to study sculpture and painting, developing her signature style with abstract expressionist and color field influences. Going on to create a number of bright collections, she exhibited her work around the country, finding fame at the age of eighty. Rather than producing explicit social commentary in her works, she wrote that she “sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness.”

Augusta Savage (1892-1962)

This iconic sculptor loved to make things from childhood, and after taking a clay modeling class, her passion was cemented. She was awarded a scholarship in New York and completed her four-year course in only three. However, Savage was continuously discriminated against and rejected from further art studies, or was unable to afford the high living expenses.

Nonetheless, her sculptures became recognized and she received commissions from prominent social figures. Her community raised funds for her, and finally, she was able to attend a school in Paris. On returning to the US, she ran workshops and contributed to the early careers of many significant artists. As her work was often clay or plaster, much of it is missing or has been damaged. Even so, her influence is undeniable and she is now appreciated as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Aaron Douglas (1889-1979)

Another figurehead of the Harlem Renaissance, in his early years Aaron Douglas took art classes and later went to the University of Nebraska to study Fine Art. He came to Harlem during the height of the Renaissance, where he painted murals and became an art editor and illustrator, bringing attention to racial injustices of the time through his work. His murals became noteworthy and he was commissioned on several large projects.

Keen to see young Black artists prosper, Douglas was involved in the Harlem Artists Guild and towards the end of his career, he founded a new art department for Fisk University in Tennessee, where he taught until retirement. His African-centered imagery and use of silhouettes creates a sense of unity between African Americans and Africans.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006)

Known for photojournalism, Gordon Parks also directed major films that told the stories of slaves and mistreated Black Americans. He was born to a farming family in Kansas and his early life was deeply affected by segregation and limited opportunities. Still, he taught himself photography skills, and quickly caught the eye of photography clerks, who helped him find work.

He ended up in Chicago, photographing socialites, fashion, and portraits. He joined the FSA (Farm Security Administration) to document the lives of poor communities. One of his best-known photographs, American Gothic, shows a cleaner named Ella Watson standing in front of the American flag with a mop.

Later, he took photographs for Vogue and Life magazine and published books, before consulting on Hollywood films and moving into directing and producing.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)

Referring to his style as “dynamic cubism”, fused with the aesthetics of Harlem, Jacob Lawrence was a painter known for his use of bright colors. After living in foster care and then reconnecting with his mother in Harlem, Jacob attended classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, where he worked with Augusta Savage.

His work mixed stories of the African American struggle during the Great Depression, with bold color and striking shapes. He created long series of paintings to tell stories, such as the “Migration Series”, where he showed Black Americans moving away from the rural South. He worked in tempera, screenprints, and other media.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

Part of the Neo-expressionist movement, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career had a global impact on the art world. After struggling at school, he and his friend Al Diaz formed a graffiti duo around an invented character, SAMO. He joined a band, created art prolifically, and upcycled clothing.

After his first successful exhibitions, Basquiat quickly gained recognition, befriended fellow artists such as Andy Warhol, and acquired a worldwide art dealer. His work combined visual art, music, fashion, and social commentary at an astounding pace: it is thought he produced over 2,000 pieces of artwork during his short life.

From realism to abstraction, these artists and many, many more have explored and brought awareness to the issues of their time, and expressed each of their unique experiences of the world they lived in.

By Emily Lordi

IN 2020, THE artist Kiyan Williams began deep-frying American flags, first encasing small, souvenir-size Stars and Stripes in bubbled golden skin, then cooking a full-size nylon banner with paprika and flour. It was a gesture of play as much as protest, striking above all for Williams’s decision not to burn the flags but to preserve their crisp, and oddly appetizing, ruination. Last year, around the same time that those works were displayed at Lyles & King gallery in New York, Williams, 32, scaled up their practice by installing a 13-by-8-foot structure of hardened earth called “Ruins of Empire” in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The sculpture referenced the bronze Statue of Freedom (designed by the sculptor Thomas Crawford and fabricated by enslaved laborers) perched atop the dome of the U.S. Capitol since 1863, while sinking it into the earth. Rather than destroying a cherished American symbol, Williams was once again staging its decomposition — now in a larger sense and in view of the public. “I hate to use the word ‘magic,’” Williams says. “It’s like a mystery. People ask, ‘How is this standing? How is this here?’”

While the history of America can inspire fantasies of scorched-earth demolition, Williams is one of several Black artists to respond instead with massive experimental construction. “Ruins” is part of a trend toward monumental Black art located in outdoor public spaces, as well as in the museum. Last April, Simone Leigh, 55, the first Black woman to have her work shown at the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, filled the venue with towering abstract sculptures of Black female forms — including the 16-foot-high bronze bust “Brick House” (2019), originally installed on the High Line overlooking 10th Avenue in Manhattan. (Leigh’s first museum survey opens April 6 at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.) Charles Gaines’s “The American Manifest: Moving Chains,” a 110-foot-long bargelike structure made of steel and African mahogany, with nine 1,600-pound chains churning overhead, arrived at New York’s Governors Island last October. (It’s widely thought to evoke the slave trade.) Hank Willis Thomas, 47, has created several huge works, such as the 19-ton bronze homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King recently unveiled on the Boston Common. Xaviera Simmons’s recent exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York, “Crisis Makes a Book Club,” featured a 16-foot-high structure, “Align,” representing the imagined response of white women to the antiracist books they’ve been reading. And at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., EJ Hill, 37, has built an operational roller coaster, its rails painted cotton candy pink.

These works are monumental in every sense — in terms of the money, time, labor and space required to make them, as well as their social and technical ambition. Their creators, all of whom have worked in other media like painting and photography, describe them as manifestations of creative dreams; and the effect of encountering them can, as Williams notes of “Ruins,” verge on sublime. Their appeal is elemental in a nation where we marvel at the sheer size of things; and political, given that those with the resources to create such works, whether within museums or parks, have historically not been Black.

As these works travel America — Gaines’s “Moving Chains” will be relocated to a port in Cincinnati next year — or redefine plazas they permanently occupy, their spectacular presence itself can feel reparative in a country filled with places where Black people could not legally (and still cannot comfortably or safely) go, especially at a moment when Black freedom is often articulated in terms of size: “Never be smaller than you are,” the American poet Elizabeth Alexander recalls her husband telling her Black sons (in her 2015 memoir, “The Light of the World”). Such art signals both presence and absence. For these works, as large as they are, might be best understood as maquettes or smaller-scale models for broader change: By exuding the possibilities of Black power and play, they ask what would happen if there were an even greater freedom, among artists and nonartists alike, to roam, defy and create — to leave every kind of trace or mark upon a space.

BLACK ARTISTS HAVE long staked large-scale claims to the visual landscape of the United States — whether by painting the community-based Wall of Respect mural created by the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago in 1967, tagging the New York City subways with graffiti or creating outdoor sculptures such as Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, a series (begun in 1986) of brightly painted abandoned houses on Detroit’s east side. But the canvases for these works were typically pre-existing structures, and making them was relatively inexpensive (and, in the case of graffiti, often illegal), whereas today’s free-standing sculptures require social sanction and robust institutional support. According to the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, new, “high-profile, well-funded commissions” are at last going to Black artists.

The most epic of these was perhaps Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety,” the 75-foot-long, 35-foot-high mammy-sphinx crafted of polystyrene blocks and sugar, displayed in the defunct Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn for three months in 2014. (The work, Walker’s first foray into site-specific sculpture, was, like “Moving Chains,” commissioned by Creative Time, a New York-based organization focused on public art.) A critique of colonial sugar extraction, the exhibit was so popular that lines stretched down the block. More recent works, such as Williams’s “Ruins” and Wangechi Mutu’s 2019 bronze goddess figures installed in the exterior niches of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been easier to view.

There are distinct pleasures in making large work — Leigh says she feels her hand transform “from being a club to a fine tool” when sculpting, say, the eye of a figure that dwarfs her — and in displaying it for the public: Williams speaks fondly of seeing kids climbing on “Ruins” as though it were a jungle gym, or adults resting in its shade. Hill says he created “Rises in the East,” a 2021 Ferris wheel sculpture, in New Orleans in the hope of giving that city’s residents more opportunities for joy. Most of these artists’ abstract and portable works, which are as invested in the future as they are critical of the past, can be seen as monuments only in the most expansive definition of the term, devised by Paul Farber, the 40-year-old co-founder and director of the Philadelphia-based arts organization Monument Lab: “a statement of power and presence in public.” It can be a trap to view them as substitutes for older monuments, like the toppled statues of Confederate generals. As Leigh says, “I get calls once a month to right a wrong.” Such reparative civic work often requires artists to compete with one another and to cater to myriad stakeholders who see their work as a “political symbol” — which Leigh, for one, is loath to do.

She prefers to think of her sculptures in relation not to such traditional monuments but to the abstract works by Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso that she grew up seeing in downtown Chicago: “fabulous” sculptures, as she calls them, that “weren’t forced upon the public.” Similarly, Thomas has described his “All Power to All People” (2017), a Monument Lab-curated eight-foot-high sculpture of an Afro pick in downtown Philadelphia, as a homage to Claes Oldenburg’s giant 1976 “Clothespin,” located nearby. Williams, whose work with the earth nods to unrecorded ancestral histories and pays tribute to their grandmother’s practice of gardening, describes “Ruins” as revising the tradition of American land art, in which artists used machines to carve into the earth.

These Black artists are asserting their right to public space at a time when that space is still circumscribed by race, gender and class — and can be fatal to occupy. (Renisha McBride, the teenager who was shot in Dearborn Heights, Mich., in 2013, when asking for help, and Ahmaud Arbery, killed while jogging in Brunswick, Ga., in 2020, were assumed to be not neighbors but threats.) In a world of lower Black life expectancy — the activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has defined racism as “state-sanctioned … group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” — a work such as Leigh’s “Brick House,” a part-goddess, part-West African domicile figure cast in 5,900 pounds of bronze whose eyes Leigh omitted to avoid individualizing her, asserts Black presence and endurance, even as it memorializes Black denigration. Another of its references is a mammy-shaped restaurant in Natchez, Miss., that’s still in business today. Hill’s roller coaster, designed with Christopher Torres of Agency Artifact in collaboration with Skyline Attractions, and his larger Mass MoCA exhibition, “Brake Run Helix” (up through next January), seek to inspire awe and fun while also invoking the history of segregated amusement parks: Some visitors to the hangar-size room are invited to ride the artist’s manually operated roller coaster — which they do one at a time, often with a mixture of trepidation and glee.

“Moving Chains,” like “Brava!,” is also animated by the public’s encounter with it; Gaines, 78, wanted the work to critique the Statue of Liberty, across from which it is currently situated on Governors Island. Upon climbing up the hill behind the sculpture, visitors can see how it interrupts the self-congratulatory energy of Lady Liberty, as well as those monuments to American commerce, the skyscrapers, just beyond. For a Black artist to make such an intervention at this scale feels as audacious, in its way, as Williams’s decision to fry up American flags.

THE CHARGE OF such works is altered, but not necessarily diminished, when they are encountered in museums. The black walls of Simmons’s massive temple-like sculpture “Align” — the centerpiece of her Queens Museum exhibition — are filled with a white handwritten script she would like white women readers of antiracist texts to declaim: “We are entering the reparations framework,” she has them say. “Align” is a metaphorical megaphone broadcasting white remorse across the kind of museum real estate previously reserved for white artists. Yet Simmons, 48, goes further by bringing a reparations framework into the museum in a more practical way — distributing thousands of free books, including Alex S. Vitale’s “The End of Policing” (2017) and Jackie Wang’s “Carceral Capitalism” (2018), to exhibitiongoers.

Leigh has likewise used museum spaces not just to display work but to host symposiums for other Black women artists and thinkers, and says the “work would not have been complete without bringing the audience in.” In that spirit, the walls around Simmons’s sculpture feature photo collages of Black figures holding flowers — a nod to abolitionist iconography, Simmons says, as well as a “sensual” respite from the “heady” demands of “Align.” Behind the grand proscenium of Hill’s “Brava!” is another such refuge: a gallery filled with images of painted pink roses, some outlined with green neon light. Such florals recall what Zora Neale Hurston, in her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” calls “the will to adorn” — Black people’s life-affirming practice of making beauty in whatever space they have. That terrain might never have been the 40 acres promised by reparations, but it might have been a garden, or a windowsill. When Williams plants an earthen sculpture in a public park, when Leigh meticulously molds a giant female eye, these artists remind us that we can scale up indefinitely, but what we scale up from is the intimate process of lovingly tending to what is at hand.