African American Artists

In this issue of History Now, we are reminded that artists play a critical role in narrating the story of the Black experience in America. These portraitists, sculptors, painters, and collage makers provide us with a visual interpretation of Black life just as historians, novelists, and poets tell the story through the written word. In the five essays below, museum curators and historians introduce us to the lives of some of these talented artists and to the work they have created.

In “Painting Independence in Boston: Prince Demah,” Jennifer Van Horn explores the life and work of an enslaved African portrait painter during the Revolutionary era. Demah was intentionally trained as an artist by his owners, the Barneses, who saw his talent as a source of income for themselves. They invested in his training, even taking him to London to study how to prepare oil paints and canvases and to hone his natural talent in the art of portrait painting. While in London, Henry Barnes policed Demah, keeping him away from the free Black community there for fear that he might attempt to seek his freedom. When they returned to Massachusetts, Demah was provided with a studio in Boston. Barnes advertised him in the local papers, touting Demah as a “Negro Man” with “extraordinary genius.” Clients came; Demah painted them; Barnes kept the clients’ money. When the Revolution came, the Barneses, who were loyal to the Crown, fled the colony and Demah became a free man. In 1777, he enlisted in the Massachusetts militia to fight for the freedom of the colonies. He died the following year, probably the victim, like many soldiers of the era, of infectious disease. In his will, he identified himself as “Prince Demah, limner” [painter]. Although few of his portraits remain, Prince Demah’s legacy is the challenge his artistry made to the domination of painting by White men.

Soon after independence was won, a second African American portrait painter appeared. In “Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Federal-Era Baltimore,” Daniel Fulco introduces us to a bi-racial painter, son of a White man and an unknown enslaved Black mother. Freed in 1782, Joshua Johnson did not hesitate to promote his own talents; he described himself in the local newspaper as “a self-taught genius” who had overcome insuperable obstacles and prejudices to achieve success. At the turn of the century he had, in fact, established himself as one of the leading portraitists of middle-class Baltimoreans, including merchants, tavern keepers, and religious leaders. His success rested on his ability to portray these Americans as they wished to be seen—as men of prosperity, material success, and optimism. Johnson was equally successful in winning commissions from Black patrons from the free Black population of the city. Thus he captured the spirit of post-revolutionary America. As Fulco notes, Johnson paved the way for later nineteenth-century African American artists.

In “Shaping the Public Imagination: The Sculpture of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller,” Chenoa Baker takes us to the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when the teenaged African American sculptor Fuller dazzled twenty-seven million people who saw her wood-carved sculptures at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Her career in public art continued into the twentieth century, as her subject matter came to include historical events. In 1899 she moved to Paris, where her experience with racism pushed her to create sculpture that focused on human emotion and suffering. While she was in Paris, W. E. B. Du Bois encouraged her to create works that advanced her race. Back in the US, her work continued to win awards. Her sculpture was shown alongside the work of artists like Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins. And in 1907 she became the first Black woman to obtain a federal commission to produce works for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. Here she created a diorama that dramatized the history of African Americans since their arrival at Jamestown. The diorama was, Baker points out, “gendered, raced, and classed,” and thus far different from the dioramas in a field dominated by White men.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson introduces us to a twentieth-century portraitist in “Laura Wheeler Waring: A Luminous Palette.” Waring faced challenges as a Black woman in a racially segregated society, but she was determined to build a career as an artist. Like Fuller, she went to Paris to study and was the only Black female artist to have a solo exhibition in France and in American institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. She also reached a broad audience through her illustrations in journals like the NAACP’s The Crisis. Sherrard-Johnson focuses attention in this essay on four of Waring’s paintings that show her versatile talents: a portrait of the great African American contralto Marian Anderson; The Girl in a Red Dress, a portrait of a Black girl on the cusp of womanhood that recalls a scene from a novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen; an award-winning painting of Anna Washington Derry, an elderly Black woman; and Jazz Dancer I, a painting of a stylish dancing couple that is said to epitomize the look of the era’s “New Negro”—attractive, cosmopolitan, and fashionable.

In her essay, “The Cubist Collage Aesthetic and the Historical Narratives of Jacob Lawrence,” Patricia Hills examines the life and work of “a giant in the field of American art,” Jacob Lawrence. His work, she notes, focused not just on heroes and heroines but on important moments in the chronicle of a people and their social and political struggles. Lawrence was born in New Jersey, the child of parents who were part of the Great Migration from the American South to the North. His parents divorced and Jacob and his sister joined their mother in Harlem. Here his artist’s eye observed that the homes of the poor people of Harlem were awash with color—and color became a major element of his work. As Hills notes, his work was defined by patterns of light and dark, and a palette of unmodulated colors. Lawrence learned about the history of Black Americans, reading books and attending lectures on the subject; he spent time in Schomburg Library doing research, and he began to paint scenes focused on the histories of people such as Harriet Tubman working for the freedom of the enslaved. As Hills notes, “All through Lawrence’s life the operative word for humanity was ‘struggle.’” And that struggle, he believed, was a beautiful thing, a thing he captured in his art.

In addition to the essays, this issue includes educational materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute: previous issues of History Now on related topics, videos, and spotlighted primary sources from the Gilder Lehrman Collection. The issue’s special feature is a January 2023 episode of Book Breaks featuring Erin I. Kelly and Patsy Rembert discussing their Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South.

If you have access to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, be sure to see the special exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, which is on view until February 17, 2025.

Nicole and I wish you the happiest of holidays and a happy new year.

Carol Berkin, Editor, History Now
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now
Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History