Aaron Douglas (artist)

Aaron Douglas was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, on May 26, 1899, to Aaron Douglas Sr, a baker from Tennessee, and Elizabeth Douglas, a homemaker and amateur artist from Alabama. His passion for art derived from admiring his mother's drawings. After high school, Douglas moved to Detroit, Michigan, and held various jobs, including working as a plasterer and molding sand for automobile radiators at the Cadillac factory. During this time, he attended free classes at the Detroit Museum of Art. Douglas travelled further eastward, through East St. Louis to Dunkirk in upstate New York, working at the Essex Glass factory to earn money for college. He went on to attend college at the University of Nebraska in 1918. After graduating, Douglas worked as a waiter for the Union Pacific Railroad until 1923, when he secured a job teaching visual arts at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, staying there until 1925. During his time in Kansas City, he exchanged letters with Alta Sawyer, his future wife, about his plans beyond teaching in a high-school setting. He wanted to take his art career to Paris, France, as many of his aspiring artist peers did. ==Career==

1925–27 In 1925, Douglas intended to pass through Harlem, New York, on his way to Paris to advance his art career. Douglas was included in Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro as Reiss's pupil. Douglas also illustrated for Charles S. Johnson, then-editor at Opportunity, the official publication of the National Urban League. In 1927, Douglas was asked to create the first of his murals at Club Ebony, which highlighted Harlem nightlife. 1928–31 In 1928, Douglas received a one-year Barnes Foundation Fellowship in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Albert C. Barnes, philanthropist and founder of the Barnes Foundation, supported him in studying the collection of Modernist paintings and African art. While in Nashville, he was commissioned by the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, to paint a mural series. In addition, he was commissioned by Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, to create a mural with Harriet Tubman as its primary figure. During the height of his commissioned work as a muralist, Douglas served as president of the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935, an organization designed to create a network of young artists in New York City to provide support, inspiration, and to help out young artists during the Harlem Renaissance. 1937–66 In 1937, the Rosenwald Foundation awarded Douglas a travel fellowship to go to the American South and visit primarily Black universities, including Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1938, he again received a travel fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation to go to the Dominican Republic and Haiti to develop a series of watercolors depicting the life of these Caribbean islands. Upon returning to the United States in 1940, he worked at Fisk University in Nashville, while attending Columbia University Teacher’s College in New York City. He received his Master of Arts degree in 1944, and moved to Nashville, to found and sit as the chairman of the Art Department at Fisk. During his tenure as a professor in the Art Department, he was the founding director of the Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Arts, which included both White and African-American art in an effort to educate students on being an artist in a segregated American South. Douglas used his experiences as an artist in the Harlem Renaissance to inspire his students to expand on the movements of African-American art. He also encouraged his students to study African-American history to fully understand the necessity for African-American art in predominantly White-American society. Douglas retired from teaching in the Art Department at Fisk University in 1966. 1967–79 Aaron Douglas died in Nashville on February 2, 1979, at the age of 79. == Legacy ==

(1930), featured in the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Aaron Douglas pioneered the African-American modernist movement by combining aesthetic with ancient African traditional art. He set the stage for future African-American artists to utilize elements of African and African-American history alongside racial themes present in society. In 2016, with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an archive of artworks created by or having to do with Aaron Douglas became available on their website. Users can access the full references of these pieces of art to determine the creation date, subject of the art, and its current residence. ==Style==

Aaron Douglas developed two art styles during his career: first as a traditional portraitist, then as a muralist and illustrator. Influenced by having worked with Winold Reiss, Douglas incorporated African themes into his artwork to create a connection between Africans and African Americans. His work is described as being abstract, in that he portrayed the universality of the African-American people through song, dance, imagery and poetry. Through his murals and illustrations for various publications, he addressed social issues connected with race and segregation in the United States, and was one of the first African-American visual artists to utilize African-centered imagery. His work features silhouettes of men and women, often in black and white. His human depictions have characteristically flat shapes that are angular and long, with slits for eyes. Often, his female figures are drawn in a crouched position or moving as if they are dancing in a traditional African way. He adopted elements of West African masks and sculptures into his own art, with a technique that utilized cubism to simplify his figures into lines and planes. He employed a narrow range of color, tone and value, most often using greens, browns, mauves, and blacks, with his human forms in darker shades of the present colors of the painting. He created emotional impact with subtle gradations of color, often using concentric circles to influence the viewer to focus on a specific part of the painting. His artwork is two-dimensional, and his human figures are faceless, allowing their forms to be symbolic and general, so as to create a sense of unity between Africans and African Americans. Douglas’ paintings include semitransparent silhouettes to portray the struggle of African Americans and their relative successes in various aspects of social life. His work is described as unique in creating a link between African Americans and their African ancestry through visual elements that are rooted in African art, and thus give the African-American experience a symbolic aesthetic. ==Notable works==

• The February 1926 issue of The Crisis • Let My People Go, circa 1935–39 • The Judgment Day, created in 1939 • Mural series commissioned in 1934 by the Works Progress Administration. • Illustrations included in selected editions of Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk and Alain Locke's The New Negro. • Study for "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction", Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD ==References==