Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist: The Exhibition, the Artist, and His Legacy

On September 8, 2007, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, opened the first nationally traveling retrospective to commemorate the art and legacy of Aaron Douglas (1899–1979), the preeminent visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist reaffirmed his position in the annals of what remains the largely white epic of American modernism and focused new attention on lesser-known facets of the lengthy career of the indefatigable artist. The retrospective of nearly one hundred works in a variety of media from thirty-seven lenders, as well as its accompanying catalogue, conference, and myriad complementary programs, declared the power of Douglas's distinctive imagery and argued for the lasting potency of his message.

This essay provides an opportunity to extend the experience presented by Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist during its fifteen-month tour. Beginning at the Spencer Museum of Art and continuing on to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, and Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition closed on November 30, 2008, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Many of the works that were gathered together for the traveling retrospective with the purpose of showcasing Douglas, his role in American modernism, and his enduring legacy are discussed in this essay. Additionally, to acknowledge that rare is the artist whose work may truly be understood when divorced from the context in which it took root, the art that composed Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist is presented here in tandem with key biographical elements. Knowledge of Douglas's life experiences, passions, and the routes he traveled in order to achieve his clearly defined goals enhance the appreciation of his ouevre.

Presented chronologically and thematically, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist offered a compendium of half a century of Douglas's artistic achievement. The narrative detailing the native Midwesterner's monumental career recounted by the exhibition commenced with a seemingly quotidian object, a yearbook. Revelatory of Douglas's intrinsic abilities while only an eighteen-year old senior at Topeka High School, the 1917 yearbook cover with its distinctive typography surrounding a stylized Sunflower motif not only discloses Douglas's Kansas roots, but also his latent modernist tendencies and avant-garde design sense. Easily overshadowed by the power of his mature work on view in the exhibition, the 1917 Sunflower cover nevertheless unassumingly foreshadows the development of Douglas's signature style that earned the artist great acclaim and for which he is immediately recognized today.

Following his graduation from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1922 with a bachelor of fine arts degree, Douglas quickly realized that "the joy of sitting around with an empty stomach in a studio filled with unpurchased pictures held little glamour and no satisfaction."¹ In the fall of 1923, he accepted a position as an art instructor at the elite, segregated Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, where he led seventy students through classes in drawing, painting, stenciling, and batik and served as a mentor to the Art Club.² In March of 1925, while still in Kansas City, Douglas poured over a special issue of Survey Graphic dedicated to "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." This issue, edited by one of the architects of the New Negro Renaissance Alain Locke, chronicled the Harlem boom that was precipitated by African American intellectuals, writers, musicians, and artists flocking to a little known part of upper Manhattan roughly two-square miles in size.³ As the poet Langston Hughes so eloquently wrote, "Harlem was in vogue," and the vibrations of this phenomenon traveled all the way to Douglas in the center of the country. "I can't live here. I can't grow here," Douglas avowed. "[Kansas City] is not the way the world is. There are other places where I can try to be what I believe I can be, where I can achieve free from the petty irritations of color restrictions. I've got to go, even if I have to sweep floors for a living."^4...