Harlem Renaissance Art: 6 Visual Artists of the Era

The Harlem Renaissance was a multidisciplinary artistic movement celebrating Black culture. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the era took place approximately between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II.

Artists of the Harlem Renaissance helped shape Black American culture, and American culture at large, for decades to come. Here are a few key figures:

• Painting: Aaron Douglas, Charles Alston, and Jacob Lawrence
• Photography: James Van Der Zee
• Sculpture: Augusta Savage
• Music: Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington
• Literature: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay
• Dance: Josephine Baker and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson
• Acting: Paul Robeson
• Activism: Marcus Garvey and James Weldon Johnson

The Harlem Renaissance sprung up organically, as Black artists and intellectuals descended upon the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem.

• The Great Migration: Some intellectuals, like the Harvard-trained W.E.B. Du Bois, joined the Harlem Renaissance movement. Others came from the rural south and migrated north during the Great Migration—this informal, multigenerational movement when Black Americans began moving out of the Southern United States and relocating to Harlem, as well as the West, Midwest, and Northeast.
• The name: Initially, creatives produced art under the banner of “the New Negro Movement,” a term that writer and activist Alain LeRoy Locke coined. Poet-novelist Langston Hughes, largely considered the cultural lynchpin of the period, helped coin the term Harlem Renaissance and proselytized about the movement during his travels through the South.
• Government grants: Later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) gave formal support to the Harlem Renaissance artists in the form of grants, particularly the Federal Art Project. Painters like Jacob Lawrence and William H. Johnson used WPA commissions to document milestones in Black history and culture. Murals celebrating African heritage sprung up in Harlem and beyond, bringing politics and racial pride to a community of artists. WPA-commissioned murals spanning the walls of the Harlem Hospital and the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library are among the most important artworks of the era.

Many Harlem Renaissance paintings had political underpinnings and helped inspire America's nascent civil rights movement. Still, others focused more on formalism and storytelling through visuals.

Many of the most enduring works of the era embrace a flat, two-dimensional aesthetic that European modernists popularized. Aaron Douglas—one of the most renowned Harlem Renaissance painters— drew inspiration from masks from Africa. Painters Jacob Lawrence and William H. Johnson merged stark flatness with bold pigments in their 1930s artworks. Sculptors like Richmond Barthé and Augusta Savage, as well as the photographer James Van Der Zee, took care to depict Black Americans as nuanced, thoroughly human figures.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance is apparent in the work of prominent painters, sculptors, and photographers, including:

1. 1. Aaron Douglas: Often called “the father of African American art," Douglas drew inspiration from African masks and sculptures from Senegal and Benin.
2. 2. Archibald Motley: The modernist, who spent most of his life in Chicago, became prominent during the Harlem Renaissance.
3. 3. Augusta Savage: A prominent sculptor known for works like Garmin, Savage received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for study in Paris in 1929. Upon returning to the United States, she opened the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts to educate the next generation of Harlem artists.
4. 4. Jacob Lawrence: Among the most renowned of the Harlem Renaissance painters, Lawrence is particularly known for his Great Migration series.
5. 5. James Van Der Zee: The photographer took portraits of middle-class Black Americans in cosmopolitan settings.
6. 6. William H. Johnson: An artist on the fringe of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson received many commissions from the Works Progress Administration. Following extensive study in Europe, he combined both urban subjects (Street Musicians c. 1939) and rural ones (Sowing c. 1940) toward the tail end of the era.

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