Empowered Realities

Throughout the 20th century, African American artists understood their role as cultural workers and agents of social change. Employing expressionistic graphics and printing techniques, they emphasized the ideas of empowerment in their visual imaginary to uplift the poor and working-class people, challenging the mis-en-scene of segregated spaces.

Poverty, racial terrorism, legal injustices, lynching, women presence, and police brutality became elements of their visual narratives, along with patterns, colors, enlarged bodies, and rural and segregated neighborhoods. Linoleum cuts, lithographic, and wood block techniques facilitated the massive edition of prints, as art became an avenue for expressing social realities and making culture more accessible to communities.

Empowerment must be interpreted as the subjective emotions generated by the awareness of the possibility to utilize one’s own Black potentiality.

genesis_empowered_Catlett — Elizabeth Catlett, American, 1915 - 2012, Madonna II, 1991, Silkscreen, 19 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.

genesis_empowered_RonAdams — Ron Adams, American, born 1934, Little Neptune, Washington, 1961, Lithograph, 29 x 21 1/2 in.

genesis_empowered_JohnBiggers — John Biggers, American, 1924 - 2001, Waiting, 1954, Etching and aquatint, 19 1/2 x 12 in.

Artists Included:

James L. Wells, American, 1902 – 1993

Elizabeth Catlett, American, 1915 – 2012

Reginald Gammon, American, b. 1921

Ron Adams, American, born 1934

Elizabeth Catlett, American, 1915 – 2012

Aaron Douglas, American, 1899 – 1979

Joseph Holston, American, born 1944

John Biggers, American, 1924 – 2001

Allan Rohan Crite, American, 1910 – 2007

Herbert Gentry, American, 1919 – 2003

Frederick D. Jones, American, 1913 – 1996

Dox Thrash, American, 1893 – 1965

Hale A. Woodruff, American, 1900 – 1980

Kerry James Marshall, American, born 1955

Ernie Barnes, American, 1938 – 2009

Charles White, American, 1918 - 1979