Aaron Douglas
May 26, 1899 – February 2, 1979
Harlem Renaissance Painter, Illustrator, And Educator, Harlem, NY
Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator, and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career by painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild. In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk until his retirement in 1966. Douglas is known as a prominent leader in modern African-American art whose work influenced artists for years to come. Aaron Douglas died at the age of 79 on February 2, 1979.
Aaron Douglas pioneered the African-American modernist movement by combining aesthetics 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 2007, the Spencer Museum of Art organized an exhibition called Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist. It was held in Lawrence, Kansas, at the Spencer Museum of Art between September 8 to December 2, 2007, and traveled to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, from January 18 to April 13, 2008. It was then on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C,. between May 9 and August 3, 2008. Finally, it traveled to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, New York, from August 30 to November 30, 2008. An exhaustive catalog of this exhibition was put together through a collaboration between the Spencer Museum of Art and The University of Kansas and is entitled Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.
Douglas’ work was featured in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.
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, the subject of the art, and its current residence.