1934, Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label:
Widely acknowledged as the foremost history painter of the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas designed the mural series Aspects of Negro Life for display at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The four paintings were made under the sponsorship of the Works Progress Administration. Working on a monumental scale, Douglas populated the frieze- like format with his signature silhouetted figures and radiating tonal circles.
While the first panel imagines ancestral life in Africa, this painting depicts workers in a cotton field, some of whom turn to a speaker reading the Emancipation Proclamation and pointing to the proverbial city on the hill. Exultation among the newly freed is offset by the entrance of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures on horseback and the departure of Union soldiers. The following panel evokes the Jim Crow era and the racist terror of lynching, while the final work envisions the Great Migration out of the segregated rural South.
1934, Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label:
Widely acknowledged as the foremost history painter of the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas designed the mural series Aspects of Negro Life for display at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The four paintings were made under the sponsorship of the Works Progress Administration. Working on a monumental scale, Douglas populated the frieze- like format with his signature silhouetted figures and radiating tonal circles.
While the first panel imagines ancestral life in Africa, this painting depicts workers in a cotton field, some of whom turn to a speaker reading the Emancipation Proclamation and pointing to the proverbial city on the hill. Exultation among the newly freed is offset by the entrance of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures on horseback and the departure of Union soldiers. The following panel evokes the Jim Crow era and the racist terror of lynching, while the final work envisions the Great Migration out of the segregated rural South.