The Douglas Legacy

Aaron Douglas was a complex man. As artists often do, he expressed ambivalences, contradictions, and occasional inexplicable turns in the body of work he produced starting in his high school years (ca. 1915–17) and through the latter years of his life (mid-1970s). As a Black man whose life nearly spanned the turbulent twentieth century (1899–1979), such complexities may even seem reasonable. Upon closer inspection, however, key character traits that consistently guided Douglas's choices appear. His life story reveals a depth that is only just being discovered by scholars and an appreciative public audience.

The retrospective exhibition of Douglas, organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in 2007, provided a space for all of us to see first hand the breadth of this artist's work. I vividly remember the sublime awe I felt as I stood in the atrium of the Spencer Museum, surrounded by the large mural panels of Douglas's best known work, Aspects of Negro Life, completed in 1934 as part of the federal government's attempts to provide income to artists while beautifying public buildings. For any viewer, I think, Douglas's work seen first hand evokes a powerful response. On one hand, we see the sheer beauty of his modernistic designs of flattened patterns typically rendered in earthy, warm tones that play lyrically across the canvases. On the other, we realize the importance of his messages of aspiration, hope, determination, and historical connection in his stories of the fulfillment of American promise. Even in his single-color drawings and prints, the playfulness of the two-dimensional figures and objects harmonize into stories that are both ancient and modern, in a similar manner to the best of jazz music that typified the era in which Douglas came to maturity. (For more on this connection, see in this issue Robert O'Meally's "The Flat Plane, The Jagged Edge: Aaron Douglas's Musical Art.") For me, the exhibition and the conference on Douglas that marked the official opening of the nationally touring show in Lawrence, Kansas, represented even more.

The exhibition and the conference validated my own long struggle to bring more recognition to this deserving native son of Kansas. I had discovered Douglas for myself one fall afternoon in 1996 while wandering through my favorite section of the public library in Topeka, Kansas. As I randomly pulled art books from tidy rows, I came across the pages of a book on the artists of the Harlem Renaissance that introduced me to Aaron Douglas for the first time. The images I saw astounded me. Although I had taken nearly enough art history courses to earn an undergraduate degree, including a full array that covered both modernism and postmodernism in Western art, I had never seen any of these paintings before. As I quickly scanned the words in the columns adjacent to the pictures, my astonishment grew when I discovered that Aaron Douglas was born and raised in the same small city, Topeka, where I then lived.

That I had not heard of Douglas's connection with Topeka might not seem so surprising at first. His biography was, after all, generally relegated to books on African American art when I came upon him. Yet, for several years at that point, I had been actively engaged with a historic preservation group in Topeka and had read and learned about many key figures in the Kansas capital city that remain obscure to most. Moreover, with my own strong interest in visual art, I would have taken note had I come across Douglas's story before. Why, I wondered, had I never before heard of this wonderful artist? What factors excluded him from my education in both art and Topeka history? What could be done to change this omission? When I applied to the graduate program in American studies at the University of Kansas that winter, I knew I had my research topic. I also had a mission that I confess I took up with some zeal.

By the time I began my first graduate courses in 1997, I had perfected my...