Visual Arts

By: Luca Prono

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Visual Arts

Since the colonial period African Americans have encountered major obstacles in pursuing artistic vocations, largely as a result of the early Puritans' dislike of decadent elements in art and of the racism that pervaded colonial society. In fact, the capacity of black men and women to produce works of visual art was constantly challenged by white Americans until the twentieth century. From the very early days of slavery, African Americans were skillful creators of craft objects such as ceramics and furniture, yet artisans' names, with some notable exceptions, were lost. According to Sharon Patton, the author of African-American Art, America's “peculiar institution” was primarily responsible for this cultural amnesia. Slave owners, who might have recorded the achievements of black artisans, found nothing they deemed culturally significant in the artifacts of black slaves. The contributions of African Americans to colonial visual arts were almost entirely neglected until black political activism in the 1970s argued for the recovery of the work of early African American artists.

The premature conclusion that there were no black artists in the colonial period has been thoroughly challenged; African Americans were deeply engaged in the production of both folk and fine art. Initially, scholars could count only on household inventories and newspaper and city-directory advertisements as records of African American contributions to decorative arts, metalworking, and furniture making. Since the early 1990s, however, several pieces of furniture signed by African Americans have been retrieved. Slavery did not crush the artistic aspirations of African Americans; on the contrary, art became a powerful means for some to express their resistance to white oppression. It also offered them the possibility to express continuity with their African past while adapting that past to the new American context.

Creolization of African American Art

Archaeological excavations and analyses of early African American artifacts have prompted a revision of Melville Herskovits's conclusion, described in his study The Myth of the Negro Past, that there was no significant evidence of an African influence on colonial black visual arts. Sharon Patton has summarized the redefinition of Africanism, a term invented by Herskovits, as a “matter of syncretism (traditions merged but still discernible) and acculturation (gradual but complete cultural transformation).” According to her, understanding African American contributions to colonial visual arts involves “not only recognizing preserved traits or the design and shape of objects … but also recognizing cultural and social practices within everyday experience.” For example, developments in the construction of slave houses show this Creolization of African American visual arts, where different cultures merged.

The houses of the colonial slaves have often been likened to those of the European pioneers. Beyond superficial similarities, though, slave quarters represented close links to slaves' African roots as far as the exteriors, materials, and use of space were concerned. Indeed, early slave quarters were extremely similar to houses found in West and Central Africa. Over the years, contact with whites modified the exterior appearances of slave houses; the fireplace, for example, was moved inside. But African Americans retained the African model internally, whereby houses are divided into small, square rooms. The perception of slave masters that the inferior conditions of slaves were signified by the marginal positions of slave quarters and their confined interior spaces was actually misguided. The nature of the construction of their houses proved to be an important way for slaves to maintain a connection with their African past.

One of the most impressive buildings of the colonial period realized by an African American was the African House (1798), at Isle Breville, near Natchitoches, in Louisiana. The house, built on a plantation owned by the free black Marie Thérèse, is characteristic for its vast overhanging roof, which has been described as conceived from a mixture of African and rural French architectural influences. Other buildings on the plantation bore witness to the merging of different visual cultures to accommodate both personal and environmental requirements.

African American Slave Artists and Artisans

Although many African Americans were employed as artisans and craftsmen, their contributions have remained largely unacknowledged. Vast numbers of African American cabinetmakers, potters, quilters, basket makers, and blacksmiths found that through their work they could express creativity and inventiveness. The products of their skills offered Americans the tools to improve their daily lives. Their contributions to American craft created a historical legacy that, while not as influential as those left in other artistic sectors, deserves recognition. Slave artisans were able to compete with whites, and their skills were sometimes advertised on slave ship manifests. Males were particularly in demand as carpenters and blacksmiths to build and decorate plantation structures. Women, meanwhile, often worked with textiles and patchwork quilts; the designs and patterns of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century quilts show both European and African influences.

In addition to creating the objects required by their masters, African American slaves also produced folk art for themselves, such as drums, jugs, and statues of human figures that were probably used as ritual objects. These items often showed the enduring influence of African traditions on slaves' daily lives and on their artistic output. For example, despite the prohibition on making drums—caused by the fear that they could provoke revolts—slaves continued to make and use them. Early pottery pieces bore the same form and symbolism found in similar items in Central Africa. Through contact with European colonists and Native Americans, however, African artistic elements merged with traits from these other cultures.

One of the first names of an African American artisan can be found in the field of pottery. Dave the Potter (ca. 1780–ca. 1863) was a South Carolina folk ceramist active between 1820 and 1860 who worked in the numerous stoneware factories in Edgefield, as did many slaves and freed blacks. Yet his alkaline-glazed pots were unusually oversized, in that they were capable of containing up to forty gallons of liquid. More than fifty of his pots have been recovered, and twenty huge twenty-five-gallon jars distinctly display Dave's signature, along with the date of completion and a rhyming couplet—which were daring inclusions at a time when laws forbade the teaching of slaves to read and write. The rhyming verses cover a range of topics. They identify Dave's owner; explain how meat should be preserved in the jars; or, in some cases, boldly refer to his enslavement and the destruction of his family: “I wonder where is all my relations / Friendship to all and every nation.” As Patton argues,

"Dave's genius is evident in his ability to assert his identity within the anonymity of slavery by composing witty verse, signing his name and the date of the finished work, and alluding to his physical strength by the distinctively large jars. Dave's pots are cultural and personal commemoratives as well as works of art."

(p. 65)

American Revolution and the Enlightenment

American visual arts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were used as didactic tools to celebrate the republican and patriotic ideals fostered by the American Revolution. Indeed, the new values of the Revolution recalled the old virtues of ancient Greece and republican Rome. Thus, the artistic styles adopted to illustrate these values for American audiences evoked the classics in their abolishment of everything that was decorative and superfluous. This focus on the essential was what united the American Puritan tradition and the neoclassical style of the late eighteenth century; American neoclassicism and the Puritan tradition reinforced each other in mutual ways. In addition, the balanced forms of neoclassicism were perfectly in tune with the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which took a less extreme stance against religion in America than in Europe, focusing instead on the decisive rejection of absolutism and inherited privileges.

Parallel to the increasing sophistication of furniture, a similar transition occurred in American architecture. Simple and plain Puritan buildings evolved toward more stately forms reminiscent of Sir Christopher Wren's and Andrea Palladio's projects. The two most influential architects in eighteenth-century America were Benjamin Latrobe, who helped introduce architecture as a profession in America, and the amateur Thomas Jefferson, who designed his Monticello residence and the Virginia State Capitol at Richmond. Inspired by the Enlightenment values of symmetry and rationalism, they conceived architecture as an educational tool for American society. The architecture of Monticello, which was built by black slave labor, is also notable for its hypocritical erasure of slavery, as Jefferson hid his slaves' quarters from view below the hillsides that surrounded the house.

The establishment of the Republic called for a distinct national identity for American art. The country's capital, Washington, D.C., whose initial plan was commissioned to the Frenchman Pierre Charles L'Enfant, became the embodiment of such national character. The African American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker, whose father and grandfather were former slaves, was also involved in the planning of the District of Columbia. His actual contribution, however, is still subject to debate. Some scholars argue that he was simply employed in the 1791 survey for the city, while others claim that he worked closely with L'Enfant on the city plans; when L'Enfant was dismissed from the job owing to his bad temper, he took all the plans away with him, yet Banneker was able to re-create them from memory.

African American Artists and the New Classical Revival

By the mid-eighteenth century American furniture reached a level of elegance that rivaled European models. Many African Americans worked as furniture makers, although their accomplishments were rarely recorded, and as such the names of these artisans remain unknown. Thomas Gross was a free black active in cabinetmaking from 1805 to 1839. Based in Philadelphia, Gross was the author of the earliest piece of furniture signed by an African American, a chest on chest. The piece exhibits a more modern taste that privileged simple classicism rather than ornate and refined details.

Thomas Day, the son of a free black woman, was the most successful furniture maker and designer in North Carolina between the 1820s and the 1850s, when he went bankrupt as the result of a sharp increase in the price of wood. His furniture, made mostly of mahogany, was designed for the wealthiest families of North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia. Day was also commissioned to furnish the interior woodwork of one of the original buildings of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His unique style combined European and African elements, which Day probably came to know in depth through contact with his brother John, who worked as a missionary in Liberia. Most of his furniture pieces exhibit a distinctive S curve, symbolizing the Akan word sankofa, meaning “one must return to the past in order to move forward.” To stave off competition from white furniture makers, Day became a slave owner, although his ideological stance on slavery was ambiguous. He sent his children to an abolitionist Massachusetts school and refused to comply with the rule that whites and blacks were to sit separately in church.

The work of the African American silversmith Peter Bentzon, who was particularly active at the end of the eighteenth century, also shows the influence of classicism on American art. His Footed Cup, one of the nine pieces attributed to him, displays an unembellished form in its simple vaselike shape that is typical of the period.

Fine Art and Painting

Adverse economic and social conditions prevented African Americans from gaining recognition in the fine arts. Their efforts and their presence, however, are represented in the work of Scipio Moorhead and Joshua Johnson, both of whom—Johnson especially—were influenced by Puritan styles. Despite their suspicions toward fine arts, Puritans found that painters could serve an important practical function by portraying notable personalities for their descendants. Painters specializing in this genre, generally unknown by name, were called limners, and their pictures were clearly influenced by European artistic currents, especially the Elizabethan and Tudor styles. With the accelerated process of urbanization that marked the period after the Revolution, the number of American fine artists increased dramatically, and the flat style of limners became more complex and elegant. Yet the increases in the number of fine artists and the complexity of their styles did not eradicate the pre-Revolutionary conception of fine art as a means to communicate the values of hard work, individualism, and entrepreneurship.

Portrait of Adelia Ellender, c. 1803–1805, by Joshua Johnson; oil on canvas, about 26 by 21 inches. Johnson's portrait subjects include a number of children, whom he often posed—as here—standing, with decorative elements such as flowers and butterflies.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.

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Scipio Moorhead, the slave of a Boston minister, was the author of the portrait of Phillis Wheatley that appeared as the frontispiece for her collection of poems. The poet is shown in profile in a pensive mood typical of colonial portraiture. Wheatley devoted one of her poems to Moorhead and his paintings.

Joshua Johnson, active between 1796 and 1824, was one of the finest early American painters. The events of his life are still obscure, and his precise racial heritage is also a matter for debate, but the majority of scholars have identified him as the first successful African American artist. Johnson's place of birth has been traced to the French West Indies, whence he had come to Maryland as an indentured servant. After obtaining his freedom, he supposedly studied portraiture with the artistically renowned Peale family, based in Baltimore. By the late 1790s Johnson had established himself as one of the foremost portrait painters for well-off Baltimore families.

Contrary to the majority of American portrait painters of the time, Johnson was not an itinerant painter; the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 made itinerancy dangerous for African Americans, as fugitives and freemen alike ran the risk of being considered runaway slaves. The only sure reference to Johnson's race is found in an 1817 Baltimore city directory, where he is described as a “Free Householder of Colour.” In an earlier advertisement Johnson had defined himself as a “self-taught genius” and had celebrated his perseverance in overcoming “many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” This selfcharacterization may point to the hardships he would have faced as an African American pursuing an artistic career.

Eighty works, mostly realized between 1803 and 1814, have been attributed to Johnson, as they bear his distinctive three-quarter view of people whose posture appears particularly rigid. Indeed, Johnson's style, with its simple technique, its sharp chromatic contrasts, and the unnatural poses of the sitters closely resembles that of the early American painter Charles Willson Peale. Johnson typically painted his subjects, often family groups, against dark backgrounds. Their upper-class status is signaled by the objects they hold. Only two of Johnson's sitters have been identified as African Americans, both of them ministers. His Portrait of a Gentleman probably portrays Daniel T. Coker, the Methodist clergyman who helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Coker openly denounced the contradictions between the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery. Scholars have interpreted Johnson's two portraits of African Americans as evidence of his commitment to bringing free blacks and slaves together in the abolitionist cause.

Contemporary interest in Thomas Day's works and the huge amounts paid for Dave the Potter's creations at auctions show a burgeoning reassessment of early African American contributions to American visual arts. As part of this reassessment, scholars have identified important links with African traditions as evidence of resistance to slavery, particularly in the objects that were more closely associated with rites and ceremonies. In spite of the cruelty and brutality of slavery, African Americans played an active role in the development of American visual arts. Their artistic contributions often challenged the assumption at the very base of slavery: that of their racial inferiority.

Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century

“The Negro,” an 1867 New York Herald Tribune article read, “seems to have an appreciation for art while being manifestly unable to produce it.” This statement embodies the racism and obstacles that African Americans had to face in their pursuit of an artistic career during the nineteenth century. Many white Americans thought African Americans incapable of producing valuable art, yet the achievements of black artists proved this pronouncement wrong. In addition, their accomplishments also countered stereotypical representations of African Americans in the visual arts. Caricatures of black people exaggerated their features and portrayed them in demeaning situations. These offensive representations prompted Frederick Douglass to comment in his “Tribute to the Negro” (1849) that it is “next to impossible for white men to take likeness of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. … Artists, like all other white persons, have developed a theory dissecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.”

Many African American artists, such as the painter Henry O. Tanner, were forced to leave the United States and find a new home in Europe to follow their creative vocations. Those African Americans who did not choose to migrate from the United States to Europe often were unable to earn a living solely through their art and had to seek other employment for additional income. These earliest African American artists often looked to European artistic currents for inspiration. Their works, however, can also offer a subtle and symbolic commentary on race in America. African American artists of the nineteenth century, such as the painter Robert Scott Duncanson, chose their images so that they could be read through a double code. Through metaphorical association, certain landscapes could come to signify racial unrest. Others were more explicit and selected subjects that were clearly connected to abolitionism. James P. Ball and Cornelius Marion Battey, for example, took photographs of Douglass and of other African American leaders.

Painting

American landscapes became popular subjects for nineteenth-century painters thanks to the Hudson River school. Led initially by Thomas Cole and then by Asher Durand, the Hudson River school was the first group of American painters who contributed to establish the myth of American landscape and wilderness. Active from the 1820s to the 1870s, the members of the school painted distinctively native sceneries. Their paintings, influenced both by American transcendentalism and European romanticism, are part of the larger cultural project of the nineteenth century to explore nature in its mediating relationship between the human and the divine spheres.

Duncanson was one of the first African Americans to obtain international fame in landscape painting. Though his main job was house painting, by 1842 his art, which he painted in his free time, had attracted considerable attention and his landscapes were exhibited in Cincinnati, Ohio, to the positive reactions of prosperous abolitionists. His engagement with abolitionist circles is also testified to in his painting Uncle Tom and Little Eva (1853), which Duncanson copied from an engraving of the original edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator, commented enthusiastically about Duncanson's paintings, “I had a great treat last evening in the view of some portraits and fancy pieces from the pencil of a Negro who has had no instruction or knowledge of the art.” Following his 1842 exhibition, Duncanson started to receive commissions from Cincinnati's upper-class citizens. In 1853 the members of the abolitionist group the Western Freedman's Aid Society raised funds to allow Duncanson to go to Europe to pursue his studies and work full time as a painter. In spite of international recognition (the London Art Journal named him one of the leading landscape painters in 1860) and financial success, Duncanson was plagued by identity problems that he never managed to overcome.

Pompeii by Robert Scott Duncanson, 1855. Duncanson was one of the first African Americans to become internationally famous for landscape painting.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.

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While he was in England, Duncanson met the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and based several of his paintings, such as The Land of the Lotus Eaters (1861), on Tennyson's poetry. The Lotus Eaters portrays an exotic and luxuriant environment that, through the use of clear light, sky, clouds, and a horizontal structure, conveys a sublime and reflective mood, yet the presence of naked, dark-skinned natives and of white men drugged by the intoxicating lotus may point to the social and historical realities of the time. The secession of the southern states from the Union opened a political crisis that would lead to the Civil War. The painting functioned as a warning to southern whites who were growing increasingly indolent because of their slaves' labor. When the Civil War broke out, Duncanson moved to Canada, where he continued to paint landscapes that offered different meanings for black and white audiences.

The same strategy would be later employed by Grafton Tyler Brown, the first African American artist to paint on the West Coast. Brown produced most of his works between the 1880s and 1890s at the height of racial discrimination. Thus, his paintings can be read as commenting on the freedom that, though embodied by the vastness of the American landscape, was constantly denied to African Americans. The art historian Sharon Patton describes Brown's landscapes as representing two distinct significances according to their audiences' points of view: while vistas such as Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone at Hayden Point (1891) “reflected whites' ideas of nationhood, for African Americans they were ironic images about freedom and a process of cultural colonization.”

Edward Mitchell Bannister also worked in the field of landscape painting, though he was forced to hold a variety of jobs, such as janitor, hairdresser, and handyman. After moving from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1870, he quickly became a leading member of the art community and one of the founders of the prestigious Providence Art Club. Under the Oaks, now lost, was his major work, whose display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 won him the first-prize bronze medal. The prize was withdrawn when the judges discovered the race of the painter, but the judges had to concede the prize once the solidarity of all the other artists at the exhibition became apparent. Thanks to this prize, Bannister's commissions increased so that he could finally work full time as a painter.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Henry O. Tanner spent most of his life in France, claiming that American racism proved stifling for his artistic career. He initially studied under the American realist painter Thomas Eakins, whose influence is clearly detectable in Tanner's use of live models for his compositions. In 1890 two white patrons, Bishop Joseph Crane Hartzell and his wife, organized Tanner's first solo exhibition in Cincinnati. Tanner failed to sell a single painting. However, Hartzell decided to buy all of them, thus granting Tanner enough money to travel to Europe in 1891. The Banjo Lesson (1893), which shows an old black man teaching the instrument to a child, and The Thankful Poor (1894) focused entirely on black life at a time when African American culture was almost erased from the visual arts. Tanner exposed this erasure in his speech “The Negro in American Art” at the Congress of Africa at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Contrary to the popular belief that black artists could not produce art, Tanner claimed that their achievements showed African Americans' ability to compete with white artists. In 1894 he left America for France, where he obtained prestigious awards.

On the Saint Annes, East Canada, by Robert Scott Duncanson, c. 1863–1865. The artist had moved to Canada when the Civil War began.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.

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Tanner's reputation rests mostly on his biblical paintings, such as Daniel in the Lion's Den (1895), Resurrection of Lazarus (1896), Annunciation (1898), and Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (1899). These biblical scenes were understood by the author allegorically as carrying messages about social justice, redemption, and future rebirth that could be relevant for Tanner's generation.

Sculpture

The nineteenth century witnessed a revival of classicism in American visual arts, particularly in sculpture. Neoclassicism, with its precepts of balance and abolishment of superfluous ornamentation, was compatible with American Puritanism, which prized simplicity and plainness of style. It was also in tune with the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which, in America, took a less extreme stance against religion than in Europe, to focus instead on a decisive rejection of absolutism and inherited privileges.

Like most American sculptors in the first half of the nineteenth century, the African American slave Eugene Warburg started his career as an artisan. He then developed from stonecutting and tomb sculpting to portraiture. Only one of his works, Portrait of Young John Mason (1855), a bust of the U.S. minister to France, has survived. Warburg closely applied the precepts of classic portraiture. He spent the last two years of his life in Italy.

Working in a genre that was thought of as male territory, Edmonia Lewis rose to national and international fame. Still, she was plagued by financial insecurity, particularly in her last years and probably because of her marginal topic: the lives of African Americans and American Indians. Her choice reflected the heritage of her parents: her father was a free black, and her mother was a Chippewa Indian. Because her parents had died when she was still young, she had been raised by her mother's tribe. Thanks to her brother's support, Lewis was able to attend Oberlin College in Ohio. There, she became the target of racist attacks, which climaxed in two arrests and consequent trials. Though she was acquitted, Lewis was not allowed to graduate, and these negative experiences left an indelible mark on her.

Garrison introduced her to the famous Boston sculptor Edward Brackett, who offered to train her. Lewis's early works depict well-known abolitionists and personalities respected by African Americans. Her busts of John Brown (1863) and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1864), the white leader of the all-black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, were all sculpted in neoclassical style. The profits from the replicas of Shaw's bust allowed Lewis to go to Europe and settle in Rome in 1865. There, she attended a circle of women sculptors, including Emma Stebbins, Anne Whitney, and Harriet Hosmer—“that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors,’” according to the art historian Henry James's definition, “who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white, marmorean flock.” She remained an expatriate artist for the rest of her life and returned to the States only for occasional visits.

Lewis's later works exhibit her pride for her dual ethnic inheritance. She made a trilogy based on the legendary Native American warrior Hiawatha (Hiawatha, The Marriage of Hiawatha, and The Death of Hiawatha). Forever Free (1869), titled after the famous phrase of the Emancipation Proclamation, was sculpted in honor of Garrison, and is composed of two figures. A man stands facing upward with his right arm lifted and broken shackles around his wrist, while his left hand rests on the shoulder of a kneeling woman. The woman gazes upward, too, and her posture, with her clasped hands, suggests that she is praying. Lewis thus combines abolitionist politics with Christian concepts about salvation and redemption as well as issues of race and gender to heighten the impact of her work.

The figure of the female slave comments not only on the condition of captive women but also on nineteenth-century womanhood in general. Women were supposed to comply with the standards of modesty and domesticity. Given her position beside the black man, the female figure in Lewis's sculpture conforms to nineteenthcentury ideas about femininity. Yet, on a more subtle level, white women could interpret the kneeling woman as a metaphor of their own enslaved condition as wives, mere properties in the hands of their husbands. Black women, on the contrary, could detect irony in the pious woman: black men and women were rendered equal by their mutual enslavement. Lewis's last major work was The Death of Cleopatra, which was exhibited in the Women's Pavilion at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. The sculpture subverts the usual iconography of the Egyptian queen. Lewis's Cleopatra is shown at the moment of her death: her standard reflective composure is replaced here by a depiction of her dismay. The sculpture represents both female power and female vulnerability. Lewis's Cleopatra is a woman who, though defeated by society, insists on being in control of her own destiny.

Photography

Photography was an immediately popular medium for African Americans, who, according to Deborah Willis, started practicing the art form in 1840, the year after the daguerreotype was invented. Black photographers were particularly interested in subverting images of African American helplessness and celebrating instead their successes. In addition, African American photographers took pictures of abolitionists and their activities, thus conferring a political nuance to their work. The names of many early black photographers have been lost, but three have been identified: Jules Lion, James P. Ball, and Augustus Washington. No known daguerreotypes by Lion survive, although evidence suggests that his work focused on the architecture and people of New Orleans, the city where he lived.

Contrary to Lion, both Ball and Washington were active in abolitionist politics and put their photographic skills to the service of antislavery campaigns. After setting up an important photography studio in Cincinnati, Ball published his antislavery pamphlet Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States (1855), which was illustrated by a six-hundred-yard panorama. His studio soon started to attract well-known abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and Union soldiers. Leaving Cincinnati for Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ball was the official photographer for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation held there in 1887.

Washington's political stance against slavery is clear in his choice of sitters for his portraits. Many of them were famous abolitionists, such as John Brown, whom Washington portrayed standing next to the American flag with his right hand raised. The image represented the abolitionist as a passionate campaigner for justice who swears his commitment to the democratic ideals embodied by the American flag. In 1853 Washington immigrated to Liberia, believing that black people's home could only be Africa, “I can see no other spot on earth where we can enjoy so much freedom.” There, he continued to work as a photographer for his fellow émigrés, who were keen to send photographs to their families back in the United States.

African American artists working in the visual arts during the nineteenth century tried to represent black life by departing from the stereotypes to which blacks had been confined. Their works are pleas to include African American existence in American society. Because of the difficulty of this task, artists found it easier to live and work in large, cosmopolitan cities. Nonetheless, many of them chose to spend relevant parts of their lives abroad, far from the constrictions of American racism. Given the difficulties to achieve national and international recognition, patronage was essential. The disappearance of abolitionist patronage, for example, was one of the main causes for the end of Lewis's career. The techniques used to offer this alternative rendition of black life in America differed according to the individual. Lewis directly confronted racial and gendered stereotypes by sculpting black men and women in idealized forms that stressed their nobility and heroism. Others, such as Duncanson and Tanner, chose a more oblique way, centering their works on familiar images that could be read differently by white and black audiences. Alain Locke's charges against Tanner of having never “maturely touched the portrayal of the Negro subject” are representative of the new, more race-conscious directions that African American art would take in the twentieth century.

See also Abolitionism; Africa, Idea of; African Diaspora; African Methodist Episcopal Church; Africanisms; American Revolution; Antislavery Movement; Antiquity; Architecture; Artisans; Arts and Crafts; Banneker, Benjamin; Brown, John; Civil War; Coker, Daniel T.; Declaration of Independence; Douglass, Frederick; Emancipation Proclamation; Emigration to Africa; Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; Free African Americans to 1828; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Garrison, William Lloyd; Gender; Indentured Servitude; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Liberia; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Marriage, Mixed; Monuments, Museums, Public Markers; Native Americans; Native Americans and African Americans; Oberlin College; Occupations; Painting; Race, Theories of; Racism; Segregation; Stereotypes of African Americans; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Tanner, Henry O.; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Urbanization; Visual Representations of Slavery; Wheatley, Phillis; Women; Work; and World's Columbian Exposition.

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