A Cultural Revival

At the turn of the 20th century Black artists and intellectuals reclaimed the importance of connecting to traditional African cultures and artistic practices. Creating pathways to ancestral ways of remembering, they developed new cultural vocabularies, ways of sensing, seeing-thinking, and perceiving. A new cultural identity of Blackness transcended, founded on the actualization of self and the collective through genetic ancestral memories.

Artists living in Harlem, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kentucky, North Carolina, along with Afro Caribbean immigrants in New York City, took upon the task of interculturally expressing the multiplicity of socio political and cultural experiences of African American communities. Throughout visual arts, literature, and music, the artists imagined alternative African based patterns, colors, volumes, rhythms, and narratives.

Reviving, revitalizing, and remembering the spectrum of Black life and its ancient roots, the artists interrupted colonial stereotypes by addressing the complexities of the African American experiences. In doing so they forged the cultural revival of collective experiences such as the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, Social Realism, and Black Chicago.

Lois Mailou Jones, American, 1905 - 1998, Houdain Pas de Calais, 1947, Watercolor on paper, 17 x 22 3/4 in.; Framed: 32 x 37 x 2 in., The Ronald W. and Patricia Walters Collection

Delilah Pierce, American, 1904 - 1992; Angel Wing Begonia, no date, Watercolor on paper, 17 1/2 × 23 in., The Ronald W. and Patricia Walters Collection

genesis_revival_SargentJohnson — Sargent Johnson, American, 1888 - 1967, Untitled, 1957, Enamel on steel, Framed: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm), The Ronald W. and Patricia Walters Collection

Artists Included:

Ernest T. Crichlow, American, 1914 – 2005

Sargent Johnson, American, 1888 - 1967

Romare Bearden, American, 1911 – 1988

Louis Delsarte, American, 1944 – 2020

Aaron Douglas, American, 1899 – 1979

Palmer Hayden, American, 1890 – 1973

Lois Mailou Jones, American, 1905 – 1998

Jacob Lawrence, American, 1917 – 2000

Delilah Pierce, American, 1904 – 1992

Charles Sebree, American, 1914 – 1985

James van der Zee, American, 1886 – 1983

Laura Wheeler Waring, American, 1887 – 1948

Richmond Barthé, American, 1901 – 1989

Selma Burke, American, 1900 - 1995

Augusta Savage, American, 1892 - 1962