Graphic Arts and Printmaking, African Americans in

By: Aaron Myers

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Graphic Arts and Printmaking, African Americans in

History and legacy of black contributions to print illustration, a medium encompassing woodcut printing, engraving, etching, silk-screen printing, and lithography.

Prior to the twentieth century, only a few African American artists worked in the graphic arts. Increased African American participation was facilitated by the Work Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, a program to provide jobs during the Great Depression. African American artists working in any art medium have historically represented a small percentage of the total number of artists. For this reason and because so few of them worked in a printmaking medium, their graphic art production constitutes a relatively small, although significant, body of work.

The assertion by James A. Porter, in his 1943 book Modern Negro Art, that “no Negro artist attempted an etching, engraving, lithograph, or block print until after the First World War” is false. There is evidence that black printmakers were active in the United States as early as 1724. Although the anonymity of slaves and the tendency of some masters to take credit for their slaves' work make tracing the individual achievements of early African American graphic artists nearly impossible, some examples have been documented.

One of the earliest known African American graphic artists is Boston slave Scipio Moorhead, who reportedly engraved the only known portrait of slave poet Phillis Wheatley. This engraving appeared as the frontispiece to the 1773 London edition of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley praised Moorhead's talents in her poem “To S.M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Work.”

Three slaves—an unidentified father and his two sons, Caesar and Pompey—set type and engraved woodblocks in the Boston printmaking shop of Thomas Fleet, who in 1821 came to Massachusetts from England to escape religious persecution. The father, according to Fleet, was an exceptional artist “who cut on woodblocks all the pictures which decorated the ballads and small books of his master.” Free blacks and slaves who worked in the graphic arts customarily learned printmaking through apprenticeship with a white artisan.

During the antebellum period, African American artists such as Robert M. Douglass, Jr., and Patrick Reason used their printmaking talents to further the cause of abolition. Reason, who was skilled in engraving, draftsmanship, and lithography, engraved in copper a heroic likeness of the runaway slave and antislavery lecturer Henry Bibb for publication in abolitionist journals. Other black artists of this era established and operated their own lithography businesses. These artists, including Grafton Tyler Brown in , California, Jules Lion in New Orleans, Louisiana, and James P. Ball in Cincinnati, Ohio, executed certificates, street maps, portraits, and landscapes for a predominantly white clientele. Unlike Douglass and Reason, they avoided political issues in their art.

Although known primarily as painters, Henry Ossawa Tanner and his student William Edouard Scott made a significant technical contribution to printmaking. During the first two decades of the twentieth century they applied the techniques of the French Impressionists to their etchings and lithographs of landscapes and seascapes. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the late 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, African American artists such as William MacKnight Farrow, Allan Randall Freelon, and Albert Alexander Smith adopted this approach to printmaking.

In the early twentieth century African American graphic artists found outlets for their work in black publications like The Crisis, Survey Graphic, and Opportunity. Aaron Douglas, one of the most prolific illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance, pioneered a bold style known as geometric symbolism, in which African Americans and African motifs were rendered in silhouetted, angular forms. From the mid- to the late 1920s, he won prizes from Opportunity and The Crisis for his covers. He also illustrated several books, including The New Negro (1925) by Alain Locke, The Emperor Jones (1926) by Eugene O'Neill, and God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) by James Weldon Johnson. James Lesesne Wells was another such graphic artist who broke away from European American artistic conventions and embraced a two-dimensional African sensibility.

Black and white artists alike were thwarted in their graphic art production by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. They resumed their creative activity thanks to the establishment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). Artists in the program were paid $15 to $90 per month for a wide variety of artistic assignments. In addition to funding the creation of art in public spaces, this government program facilitated the founding of community art centers and the development of artists' workshops. The community centers, which proliferated in urban areas across the United States, brought black and white artists into contact in a way that would not otherwise have been possible during the 1930s and 1940s.

These centers catalyzed creative experimentation by giving artists access to new technology and materials. Fruitful exchange of ideas among teachers and students led to the improvement of lithography and silk-screen techniques. Many artists assigned to one project took advantage of the opportunity to pursue their interests in other artistic fields. For the first time in their careers, they were able to focus their energies on creation rather than on the struggle to make a living. Aspiring art students who could not afford a good art education received instruction from some of the most talented artists of the era.

One of the most famous WPA/FAP community art centers was the Harlem Recreation Art Center, where renowned African American artists such as Selma Burke, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Jacob Lawrence, and Augusta Savage were employed. Charles Alston, Ernest Crichlow, William H. Johnson, and Norman Lewis are four more noteworthy African Americans who worked extensively in the graphic arts and taught at the Harlem Recreation Art Center. This was one of the few centers in which black students worked exclusively under the tutelage of black artists, exploring lithography, etching, woodblock making, and silk screening.

The fine print workshop of the WPA/FAP community art center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, specialized in the graphic arts. Four black artists committed to developing and expanding the print medium staffed it: Samuel Brown, Claude Clark, Raymond Steth, and Dox Thrash. Although Brown worked principally in the watercolor department, he experimented extensively with printmaking. Clark captured the gesture and line of dance movements of the period through his prints In the Groove (1939) and Boogie Woogie (1940), which were executed in black and white.

Steth produced a powerful series of studies of black life that addressed social, political, and moral issues of immediate concern to the African American community. One of his most compelling works, Heaven on a Mule (1944), depicts two children on the back of a mule with their parents and dog, all outfitted in makeshift wings, who have brought their few belongings to a small hilltop in hopes that angels would greet them and deliver them from despair. Thrash developed the carborundum print process used by all these artists.

The carborundum print grew out of Thrash's use of carborundum crystals, an industrial product made of carbon and silicone that is used for grinding and polishing, to resurface used lithograph stones. Thrash, who discovered that different grades of carborundum crystals created different tints in the lithograph print, used this knowledge to create tonal variations that lent an unprecedented luminosity to his graphic work.

The Harlem Recreation Art Center closed in 1941, and the WPA/FAP ended in 1943, when employment increased dramatically during World War II. Much of the artwork produced during the WPA/FAP was warehoused, distributed to museums and libraries without being catalogued, or lost. In spite of the fact that only a small body of graphic works has survived, these WPA/FAP-employed African American artists spawned a new generation of printmakers through their teaching activity at the community art centers. Robert Blackburn, a student of the WPA/FAP workshops, continued to create graphic works during the second part of the twentieth century. However, he executed some of his most remarkable prints, including People in a Boat (1937), at the age of seventeen while still a student at the Harlem Recreation Art Center. In 1948 Blackburn established the Printmaking Workshop in New York to foster the artistic and technical development of African American graphic artists.

The 1930s and 1940s in Mexico, as in the United States, were a time of heightened social consciousness and criticism, which found expression in the art of each country. Many African American artists of this era drew inspiration from the visual language of Mexican artists, who, through murals and graphic work, had persistently demanded social and political justice for the oppressed. Hale Woodruff, Charles White, and Elizabeth Catlett were three of several African American artists who went to Mexico to study under Mexican artists and learn graphic art techniques. Woodruff studied with the famous muralist Diego Rivera, whose influence in both form and content can be seen in Woodruff's visual statements against lynching, Giddap and By Parties Unknown, both woodblock prints created in 1935.

White, who went to Mexico in 1946, perfected his technique in linoleum cuts with the help of Leopoldo Méndez at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (established in 1937) in Mexico City. The graphic work done there became well known in the United States through numerous traveling print exhibitions. The Taller artists, involved in the social, political, and economic problems of the Mexican people, produced hundreds of prints on inexpensive paper that were distributed to all classes of people. Catlett, who traveled to Mexico in 1946 on a Rosenwald Fellowship, studied at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, where she “learned how to put art to the service of the people.” From 1946 to 1947 she produced a series of linoleum cuts, the principal print medium used at the Taller, describing the difficult life of the black woman in America.

In the late 1940s African American artists generated works that addressed racial inequalities in America and expressed black aspirations. In the 1950s black artists like etcher and engraver Norma Morgan and relief printmaker Walter Williams did not make social and political issues part of their graphic agenda. In the 1960s, however, with the emergence of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, artists began to create works conveying black solidarity and a strong identification with an African heritage. These works were informed by the themes and styles found earlier in the graphic work of Douglas and Catlett. Some artists such as Leon Hicks, Samella Lewis, Lev Mills, and Ruth Waddy, for example, continued to make racially conscious, figurative graphic art in the 1970s. Others, like etcher and lithographer John E. Dowell, Jr., for one, explored nonfigurative, abstract designs.

Like the 1930s and 1940s, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a proliferation of graphic workshops headed by black artists. In Washington, D.C., silk-screen artist Lou Stovall founded Workshop, Inc., and etcher Percy Martin started WD Graphic Workshop. Brandywine Graphic Workshop was set up by lithographer Allan Edmunds, Jr., in Philadelphia. Furthermore, many workshops, such as Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, begun in the Depression era in New York, and the printmaking department at Howard University, established in 1944 in Washington, D.C., by Winston Kennedy, remain active centers of graphic activity.

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