Below is a brief biography of one of the youngest African American artist Kara Elizabeth Walker. Walker was born in November 26, 1969 in Stockton, California, US. Currently, she lives in New York, NY. Walker’s dad Larry Walker is an art professor and her mother Gwen Walker is a clothing designer. In 1996, Walker married Klaus Burgel, who is a jewelry designer and they both gave a birth to a daughter name Octavia. Walker has been educated at Atlanta College of Art, BA, 1991 and Rhode Island school of design, 1994. Just right after she graduated in 1994, she started a career as a professor. However, the time when she traveled to New York City to join a meeting, her friend persuaded her to hand in her work in the Drawing Center. That was the turning point of a professor to an artist (“Kara Walker” Contemporary). Walker worked in a several of medium such as: “Paper cutouts, gouache mixed with coffee, brass rubbing and overhead projectors” (Harvey). Through the article “Black and White, but Never Simple” in The New York Times, 2007, Walker inspired by many artists. Those people include Andy Warhol, Robert Colescott and Adrian Piper. Walker was in to Andy Warhol because of his voracious look and ethical (Cotter). Next is Robert Colescott, “who inserted cartoon blacks, grinning Dixie sharecroppers into van Gogh’s Dutch peasant cottages” (Cotter). The last one was Adrian Piper, who is a conceptualist and her works are focus on racism (Cotter).
Andy Warhol, Robert Colescott and
Postmodern American artist’s Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker critique and question grand narratives of gender, race and class through their work and art practice. Cindy Sherman, born 1954, is well renowned for her conceptual portraits of female characters and personas that question the representation of women, gender identity and the true (or untrue) nature of photography (Hattenstone 2011). Kara Walker, born 1969, is known for her black silhouettes that dance across gallery walls and most recently her sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, address America’s racist slavery past (Berry 2003). These practitioners differ in their practical application of different mediums, Sherman constructs characters and scenes of stereotypical female personas in her photographs where she operates as the actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman (Machester 2001). Simone Hatenstone, writer for The Guardian, states “She 's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we 've barely started.” (Hattenstone 2011).Whereas, Walker creates paper silhouettes that are installed into a gallery space, as writer Ian Berry describes,
At 11, Wiley’s mother enrolled him and his twin in a small art conservatory program at Cal State, and in the summer of 1989, he was sent to Russia for training in classical painting. After excelling in this program, he went on to earn his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA for the Yale University School of Art. Although Wiley achieved things beyond his neighborhood, he did not forget the black struggle he was familiar with growing up.
Feminist artist Betye Saar was born on July 30, 1926 in Los Angeles, California. Her father died when she was five years old; after that her family moved to Pasadena, California. To make a living for the family, Saar’s mother became a seamstress and also recycled and reused a lot of daily scraps that weren’t used to make things that her children needed. The remaking and looking over everyday house things influences some of Betye Saar’s later work. Betye Saar’s art career began in 1945 where she went to The University of California Los Angeles and majored in design. She received a bachelor’s in design in 1949 but worked as a social worker and continued design on the side. She back to college, California State University at Long Beach, in 1958 to get a degree in education in which she was very successful in receiving. In Long Beach, Saar was introduced to and got very acquainted with printmaking. This was the start of her artistic career and soon she began to do artwork that incorporated various themes such as
Langston Hughes expresses racial pride from fold art as “black pride came not from imitating whites, but from strengthening one’s identify as black”. In a folk art, it celebrated African American culture and the lives of everyday people, writers and authors also sometime wrote in dialect. In high arts black artist wants to show that they, themselves are the same as the whites did. One example of the artist is W.E.B DuBois, he finds that in order to end racial discrimination black artist should create high
Society seems to change and advance so rapidly throughout the years but there has always seemed to be a history, present, and future when it comes to the struggles of the African Americans. The hatred of a skin tone has caused people to act in violent and horrifying ways including police brutality, riots, mass incarcerations, and many more. There are three movements the renaissance, civil rights, and the black lives matter movements that we have focused on. Our artist come from different eras but have at least one similarity which is the attention on black art.
The miraculous life of Jacob Lawrence’s is said to be the most distinguished and accomplished African American Artist of his time. At a young age, Little Jacob Lawrence was introduced to art in Harlem, New York. He had always had a love for the arts, He began to develop his craft at an after-school program and further moving on to the Harlem Art Workshop then securing a scholarship to the American Artists School located in New York. He had the odds stacked against him; he further perfected his art during the great depression years which also at a time when African Americans had a harsh struggle with segregation and just trying to stay alive. His paint brush has captured everything from slave revolts to ghetto life to the destruction of the war.
Songs like “Ain’t no mountain high enough”, “My Girl”, and “ABC” have shaped American history in ways that people don’t even realize. We wouldn’t be listing to artist like Beyoncé, Drake, and John Legend if these former artists didn’t write and/or perform these songs. They have allowed African American music to blossom to what it is known for today. If these artists did not continue to write and produce music, they would have never gotten anywhere and we wouldn’t have the African American artist we love today. This paper will now go into more specific African American singer, songwriters, and composers.
"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black...let 's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let 's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let 's do the impossible. Let 's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic." - Aaron Douglas.During the time of the harlem renaissance Aaron Douglas used his artwork to take pride in his african american culture. All of his artwork conveyed one common message and that was the role that African Americans played in society. All of this was seen in one of his major artworks which was the “Aspects of Negro Life,” mural on the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.
Kara Walker was born on November 26, 1969, in Stockton, California. Her father is an artist and professor while her mother is an administrative assistant. She was inspired by her own father’s work and wanted to do the same thing that her father has done for his life, art. She went to Atlanta College of Art, Rhode Island School of Design and Georgia State University for her education as an artist. Today, she is a painter, silhouettes printmaker, installation artist and also a filmmaker who is interested in what makes up someone identity as a person. Many of her work today is mostly of cut paper silhouettes. She uses these cutouts to represent the racism of the country. She uses different types of art to also represent the silhouettes that
In a city that 's rich in ethnic diversity, has deep ties to it’s past and its roots, that embraces a wide range of artistic practice, and is looking for ways to support and nurture young and emerging artists in the community, who better to speak you today than me - a past-middle-aged white guy from Vancouver who 's working in an art form which hasn 't fundamentally changed in the last 2500 years.
Johnson was born in the town of Wethersfield Connecticut on August 10th, 1942 and was raised in Terryville Connecticut. She was in dance for her younger years, and she loved her recital costumes. In fact, she spent a lot of her free time designing new costumes for herself. She loved designing them, and finally came to the realization that designing and creating clothing completes “what a drawing can’t
Chicago-native jazz poet, Gil Scott-Heron decided it was time to say something about the racial cruelty happening throughout America. He created a work of art voicing how change needs to happen and that a revolution won’t take place until the people wake up.
She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking from the school in 1991. Soon after in 1994, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. The year she graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, Kara Walker created a mural at the Drawing Center in New York City. It is titled “Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.” This mural launched her career and caught the critics attention not just because of the theme but because its form, silhouette figures made of black paper against a white wall. This mural also made her a artistic voice on racism.
I like to believe that art was a way for Blacks to express their pain, hopefulness, and love that everything Black wanted and could just outright say was put into art; therefore, art was a happy place even though it expressed pain but in pain there is its own beauty. DuBois (1925:53) stated that even though Black art has both personal and universal aspects, that those two things are “combined with certain groups compulsion.” meaning that there was a Black person that spoke for the group through art. His thoughts would lead to black Aesthetic.
Art is something that can only be achieved with the manipulation of the imagination. This is successful when using objects, sounds, and words. Richard Wright and Amira Baraka brought the power of art into the limelight. Wright’s perception of art was for it to be used as a means of guidance, one that could uplift the Negro towards bigger and better goals. Baraka’s perspective of art was for it to be used as an active agent, one that could kill and then imprint society permanently. Baraka and Wright both wanted the Negro to see that there was a much brighter future ahead of them. Both wanted art to leave a stain, a stain that could not be easily erased, washed, or bleached. Both believed that Black Art had no need to be silent but instead daring.