ABSTRACT
In 1925, Harlem Renaissance logician Alain Locke extolled in his edited volume The New Negro what he perceived as, “The promising beginning of an art movement instead of just the cropping out of isolated talent.” 1 Locke specifically encouraged African American artists to look to African art for inspiration, a perspective not wholly embraced by the diverse group of artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Locke’s pinpointing of new and complex approaches to representing blackness undoubtedly define this period, however, and describe a larger artistic movement that spanned well beyond Harlem and the United States. Variously titled the Harlem Renaissance, the Negro, or “New Negro” Renaissance, this artistic awakening falls between the nineteen teens with the beginning of Great Migration of African Americans to the urban north, and the 1929 stock market crash. The prevailing voices and innovative forms of representation emerging during the Renaissance proper would extend well into the 1930s and early 1940s, however, through black participation in the Federal Art Project (FAP). While the literary production of this period, which includes celebrated authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, often first comes to mind as exemplifying the Renaissance (as established within high school and college curricula), the visual production of the period is equally as rich, varied, and essential to understanding early twentieth-century American art and culture. The fundamental need for black self-representation and the generation of complex, humanizing, and varied understandings of black lives and individuals continues to have relevance as a global theme in contemporary and recent art and visual culture. The range of approaches to representing blackness and the dissensus over how African Americans should be represented is foundational to the Renaissance and is perhaps its most enduring statement of black complexity and humanity.
