Jordan Casteel's Brothers Art Analysis

William H. Johnson was a successful painter who was born on March 18, 1901 in Florence, South Carolina. Johnson began exploring his level of creativity as a child, and it only amplified from there because he discovered that he wanted to be an artist. After making this discovery he attended the National Academy of Design in New York which is where he met his mentor Charles Webster Hawthorne who had a strong influential impact on Johnson. Once Johnson graduated he moved to Paris where he was exposed to different artists, various artistic abilities, and evolutionary creations. Throughout Johnson’s time in Paris he grew as an artist, and adapted a “folk” style where he used lively colors and flat figures. Johnson used the “folk” style to express the experience of most African-Americans during the years of the 1930s and 1940s.

In art, there are qualities that speak louder than words. It expresses many different messages and emotions and each person has an experience different from the next. In this paper, I will be discussing two artworks I encountered. The piece is a good example of how people can encounter different experiences in one piece. I attended the Orlando Museum of Art a while back with family and overall enjoyed my experience. On my visit, I found the museum quite impressive and felt a deep connection with specific pieces.

Black No More and “The Negro Art Hokum” give important insight into how George Schulyer views race and identity, the importance of essences, and his stance on racial anti-essentialism. Black No More does clearly challenge Schulyer’s ideas in his essay that race in the way it is construed in the U.S. is not a meaningful essential part of who a person is because although our main protagonist Max Disher was able to be white in appearance thus being able to fit into white society, in essence he was still a black man and found his social kinship with members of Harlem’s black community. Essence makes a person who they are in conjunction with their physical racial attributes. In some cases who a character is on the inside does not always match up with their outward appearance, as in Black No More with Disher’s white skin and his black mentality.

In the context of physical appearance, black woman are only featured with body parts- mainly their “large, rotund behind” (Perry 137). The presentation of the face is mainly limited to white or lighter-complexioned women. The highest idealization of women is one that possesses a “‘high-status’ face combined with a highly sexualized body read by the viewer as the body of a poor or working-class woman” (Perry 137). Perry further substantiates her claim by stating that “women are created or valued by how many fantasy elements have been pieced together in their bodies” (137). She debunks the opposition arguing that the bodies of black women are appreciated by pointing out that only a minority of black women have such attributes, and those without are pressured and struggle to achieve such proportions.

“Images” that are dedicated to humanism, conceived by, and based on African Americans and their encounters.

The Black Arts movement refers to a period of “furious flowering” of African American creativity beginning in the mid-1960’s and continuing through much of the 1970’s (Perceptions of Black). Linked both chronologically and ideologically with the Black Power Movement, The BAM recognized the idea of two cultural Americas: one black and one white. The BAM pressed for the creation of a distinctive Black Aesthetic in which black artists created for black audiences. The movement saw artistic production as the key to revising Black American’s perceptions of themselves, thus the Black Aesthetic was believed to be an integral component of the economic, political, and cultural empowerment of the Black

Each part of the United States had their different standpoints towards blacks and the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance were devoted to crushing the negative attitudes placed upon the Afro-Americans. During this time race was a social construct. Everyday lives were affected by skin color whether people were aware or not. For years African Americans were shunned into a classification that viewed their society as less than human. Toomer’s novel shows the ability race has to affect and intersect different aspects and domains of society and life, as well as dismantle it. Jean Toomer created this piece of art for a reason. Cane suggests that the social construct created upon race should be avoided, for people of all different social classes have equal potential for success.

In Blueprint for Negro Writing, Richard Wright makes the argument that all black artists have a social and moral responsibility to use their art to improving and uplifting African Americans and their culture. Wright believed that black artists should use their work to advocate for their race and to help address social issues and make changes for the better. Wright also believed that black artists were too caught up in trying to appeal to white audiences. Wright wanted African American artists to create work for African Americans instead. Wright’s stance on black art being made for a black audience and to address social issues is supported by the celebration of black heritage and beauty in Beyoncé’s “Formation” and Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”.

The intersection of social movements and Art is one that can be observed throughout the civil right movements of America in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The sixties in America saw a substantial cultural and social change through activism against the Vietnam war, women’s right and against the segregation of the African - American communities. Art became a prominent method of activism to advocate the civil rights movement. It was a way to express self-identity as well as the struggle that people went through and by means of visual imagery a way to show political ideals and forms of resistance. To examine how a specific movement can have a profound effects on the visual art, this essay will focus on the black art movement of the 1960s and

Kehinde Wiley’s early works were of people he pulled off the streets of Harlem. His art blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of the masculinity of black and brown men. Generally, western art has and does not focus on the narratives of people

In general appropriation in the art movement of postmodernism, borrows, copies, and alters preexisting images and objects to challenge traditional notions in art. In artist Kehinde Wiley newest art exhibit, “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” he appropriate cultural images, and characters from one context and places them it in another. Using juxtaposed inversions to challenge traditional elitist, white male-dominated, “high” historical art culture. As a self-identified homosexual African American man raised in Los Angeles in the 80’s, it is evident a significant part of Kehinde Wiley artists inventions derive from his own personal experiences and beliefs. By appropriate white

Fred Wilson is an art activist for minority groups, especially the African American population, which in today`s generation, is looked upon as the unseen minority group (Grinberg 2012). Wilson creates innovative exhibitions to display art and artifacts found in museum collections with arrangements that represent minority contemporary artists. His ideas lead the audience to acknowledge that changes in the perceptive view transform the whole meaning of what is presented.

African Americans are no stranger to discrimination. Children across American are taught about the horrific times of slavery. Following slavery, we learn about the discrimination African Americans face in the light of their bittersweet freedom. Due to this unstability, many amazing young African American artist emerged with breathtaking stories to reveal; the stories weren’t easy to expose because publishing companies and the alike were very

Richard Hunt is a sculptor whose work largely draws on abstraction, crafting organic shapes with industrial materials. His approach to his art is one that is based on compulsion, as he combines various curvilinear and angular forms to form an ambiguous hybrid that captures the African American experience. By crafting an unconventional layering of different shapes, Hunt is able to create a conceptual piece that is open to interpretation. Similarly, Betye Saar aims to promote thought-provoking reflection. By carefully utilizing racial stereotypes into her artistic vision, Saar is able to manipulate racist devices into a more positive message. Her exaggeration of certain caricatures of African American life served as a new symbol for

Du Bois and his NAACP colleague James Weldon Johnson asserted that the only uniquely “American” expressive traditions in the United States had been developed by African Americans. They, more than any other group, had been forced to remake themselves in the New World, Du Bois and Johnson argued, while whites continued to look to Europe or sacrificed artistic values to commercial ones. (Native American cultures, on the other hand, seemed to be “dying out,” they claimed.) African Americans’ centuries-long struggle for freedom had made them the prophets of democracy and the artistic vanguard of American culture.