"This guide lists the numerous examples of government documents, manuscripts, books, photographs, recordings and films in the collections of the Library of Congress which examine African-American life. Works by and about African-Americans on the topics of slavery, music, art, literature, the military, sports, civil rights and other pertinent subjects are discussed"--

An exhibition catalog presenting all 188 prints artist Dox Thrash is known to have made showcases his use of the carborundum process and his mastery of various other methods of printmaking such as etching, aquatint, lithography, and woodcut.

This handsome book focuses on the work of African-American artists during the Depression and the war years, when government-sponsored programs led to a resurgence in artistic production throughout the United States.

Publisher Description

This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

Beginning in the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of an explosion of art, writing, and ideas that has since become legendary. But what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the first movement of international modern art led by African Americans, extended far beyond New York City. This volume reexamines the Harlem Renaissance as part of a global flowering of Black creativity, with roots in the New Negro theories and aesthetics of Alain Locke, its founding philosopher, as well as the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Featuring artists such as Aaron Douglas, Charles Henry Alston, Augusta Savage, and William H. Johnson, who synthesized the expressive figuration of the European avant-garde with the aesthetics of African sculpture and folk art to render all aspects of African American city life, this publication also includes works by lesser known contributors, including Laura Wheeler Waring and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., who took a more classical approach to depicting Black subjects with dignity, interiority, and gravitas. The works of New Negro artists active abroad are also examined in juxtaposition with those of their European and international African diasporan peers, from Germaine Casse and Ronald Moody to Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. This reframing of a celebrated cultural phenomenon shows how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism.

While social concerns have been central to the work of many African-American visual artists, painters