The Significance of the Interwar Decades to Scholarship on African American Art

In 1992, looking back at the career of James A. Porter, Edmund B. Gaither declared that essentially two problems dominated discussions of African American art in the early twentieth century: did a distinctively black art exist and what was its relationship to American art? ¹ These comments were made in the context of observations about the respective influence of Porter and Alain Locke on the writing of African American art history. Locke urged artists to explore their own traditions and heritage, laying the groundwork for the possibility that a characteristically racial art might emerge. Alternately, Porter, unsympathetic to the idea of racial art, sought to account for the achievements of black artists in ways that embedded them solidly within the story of American art. ²