Works by Artists of African Descent at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A master craftsman and person of color in a slave society, Thomas Day was born free to mixed-race parents in southern Virginia. He established his furniture making business in Milton, North Carolina, where he attracted customers from among the region’s white planter elite. In 1850 his shop was the largest furniture business in the state. His works, like this secretary, were rural adaptations of the fashionable Late Classical (or Empire) style of the day. But the dramatic scrolls on the front of the glass doors are a signature element of Day’s best designs.

In the Edgefield district of rural South Carolina, African Americans developed an outstanding tradition of pottery making between about 1815 and 1880. The craftsman who signed his work "Dave the Potter" is the foremost member of this group, which included both slaves and, later, freed blacks. Dave's thick-walled storage vessels are unusually monumental and made with great technical skill. He was also unique in inscribing his wares with often-amusing verse; the couplet on this pot reads: "I made this Jar for Cash- / though its called lucre trash."

Although made in the Edgefield district of South Carolina by enslaved potters who produced functional jars sold primarily to whites, these jugs were not commercial products. They are exceptionally rare examples of objects made by slaves for their own community and directly link West African practices with African American slaves. Scholars now believe that these were used for spiritual rather than practical purposes.

This is one of six Scottish subjects that Duncanson executed late in his career, probably after a trip he made to England and Scotland during the Civil War. With great detail and a subtle range of color, Duncanson depicted the aftermath of a storm and shipwreck under the looming cliff of the title. Even though in his work Duncanson, the son of biracial parents, rarely alluded directly to the trauma of the Civil War or to issues that faced African Americans, the clearing skies and upright vessel may be a reference to the end of the hostilities. This optimism is tempered by the severe landscape and still-choppy seas.

Established in 1872 as the first national park in America, Yellowstone became a popular destination for tourists in the 1880s. Courting these potential buyers, Brown distributed a brochure promising paintings with “all the truths in color of that famous locality, together with such artistic effect as will make them appreciable to all who have visited.” The first professional African American artist on the West Coast, Brown left a career as a lithographer to paint landscapes of the West and Pacific Northwest.

A freeborn African American, Bannister became an integral part of the artistic community in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with his Caucasian colleagues, he founded the Providence Art Club, and his Barbizon-inspired landscapes were purchased by both white and black patrons. Instead of the noble peasants that the Barbizon painter Jean-Francois Millet portrayed in his harvesting scenes, Bannister painted black workers reaping and gathering the hay, using the same loose brushwork and golden tones that he had admired in Millet's paintings.

Described as "expressive in its every stitch of a most fiery imagination," this quilt was created at the end of the nineteenth century by an African American woman, born a slave, near Athens, Georgia. The fifteen squares depict familiar biblical events and record local legends, such as the meteor shower of 1833. Narrative quilts are characteristically American, but Powers' textile is strikingly similar in design and technique to the appliqued cotton cloths made by the Fon people of Abomey in West Africa.

Tanner was captivated by North Africa, particularly the Moroccan port of Tangiers. It had long been a site of exploration for European painters interested in the exotic. Tanner may have used photographs of the architecture of Tangiers for earlier etchings and sketches, but he spent several months there in the spring of 1912, at just the moment a French government protectorate was established. During his stay he painted numerous views of the city's ancient alleys and gateways; he displayed several of his Tangiers canvases, perhaps including this street scene, in his solo exhibition at the Thurber Art Galleries in Chicago in 1913.

Johnson, an African-American artist working in Paris, saw painter Chaim Soutine’s first major exhibition in 1927. He was immediately drawn to Soutine’s wild, gestural expressionist work and began to absorb his style. Johnson made this contorted street scene in Cagnes-sur-Mer, an artists’ colony where Soutine had worked for several years. Studying Soutine’s style helped Johnson release his own emotional reactions to his surroundings. He wrote, “I am not afraid to exaggerate a contour, a form, or anything that gives more character and movement to the canvas.”

In 1935 Johnson proclaimed: "It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip, that characteristic hair, bearing and manner. I wish to show that beauty no so much to the white man as to the Negro himself." Yet, as the son of a Swedish man and a mixed Cherokee and African American woman living in San Francisco, Johnson had little access to the "pure American Negro" that he wished to represent. His exploration led him to traditional West African art. He borrowed formal elements of African carvings, such as ritualistic masks, to confer dignity, pride, and cultural heritage to typical African American physical characteristics.

Limiting himself almost entirely to gray, white, and black, Pippin shows a country doctor’s nighttime journey in winter. The grandson of slaves, Pippin was entirely self-taught as an artist, his desire to go to art school having been thwarted by a World War I injury that crippled his right arm. Even so, he achieved artistic—and eventually commercial—success, rendering astonishing effects despite a painfully slow and laborious painting process.


As the MFA celebrated its centennial year in 1970, this work became the museum's first painting by an African American artist to enter the collection.

The life and career of Augusta Savage epitomize the struggle, sacrifice and resolve of many African American artists during the 1920s-30s, a period known as the Harlem Renaissance. After defying her family to pursue her artistic career in New York, Savage gained national recognition when she was denied a scholarship to train in France on the basis not of her talents but of her race. The controversy brought her powerful new friends, who ultimately helped Savage win a two-year Rosenwald Fellowship to study in Paris. Upon her return to Harlem in 1932, she devoted herself to advancing the possibilities for African American artists through teaching and mentoring.

Delaney first studied art in Boston, but in 1929, he moved to New York, settling in 1936 at 181 Greene Street. His Greene Street subjects mark the beginning of a movement toward an increasingly abstract approach to his cityscapes, and of those, this image is one of the most experimental. It indicates his beginnings as a sign painter; he has distilled the essence of the street to shapes with vigorous outlines and repeating concentric forms that energize the composition. Delaney, with his friend and fellow painter Stuart Davis, shared a love of jazz and something of the music's rhythm is made visible in the color and shape relationships of Greene Street. In their work, they found a comparable abstracted reality with which to capture the vibrancy of New York City.

Born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem, Charles Alston traveled to the American South to document African American life. Touring rural areas in 1938 with Giles Herbert, a Farm Security Administration inspector, Alston had access to the homes of black families, whom he photographed as inspirations for future artwork. The paintings that emerged from this experience reflect both formal artistic concerns with composition, color, and balance, and social attention to representations of the black family. The strength and unity of the black family are quietly conveyed through this group portrait, where Alston has rendered the figures in simple shapes that reflect a more abstract approach to form.

Dos Santos’ work makes references to both Afro Brazilian and Catholic beliefs, but in many instances his sculptures simply represent what they are: a child, a head, or a seated figure. This work could be seen as an example of the latter, but the artist may also be alluding to the messenger god Exú, an orixá (or deity) of the Candomblé religion often depicted smoking a pipe. Dos Santos does not draw on one specific culture, however, and his sculptures were created solely as works of art, not as ceremonial objects.

Today associated with Carnaval, the pre-Lenten street festival, samba originated in the communities of enslaved Afro Brazilians in the late 19th century and combines music, poetry, and choreography. Dos Prazeres, a pioneering composer of samba music, turned to painting in the 1930s and largely based his lively, rhythmic works on this experience. Here he likely depicts the Samba de Roda, performed after a ceremony in the Candomblé religion, which is a polytheistic faith based on African gods and brought to Brazil by slaves.

Born in Cuba to Jamaican parents, Smith moved with his family to New York and there became a leading pioneer in the American studio jewelry movement. He was one of a handful of black students admitted to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the 1940s, and he apprenticed in the ship of a Harlem jeweler, Winifred Mason. He later described Mason's shop as "a little Bauhaus," an informal salon where black intellectuals and artists gathered to share conversation. Through this experience, Smith was involved with a wide network of African American visual and performing artists, many of whom became his clients.

The séance plays a major role in the Umbanda religion. Leal was a pai-de-santo, a priest in the faith, and the ritual he depicted here may have been based on both observation and experience. The seated individual at the right undergoes an intense psychic experience, locking eyes with the white-suited man, probably the priest and facilitator of the interaction. Leal’s image emphasizes the spiritual over the material through transfixed gazes and gravity defying hair that help to convey the presence of an other-worldly being.

With its subtle contrasts between opaque and nearly transparent areas of paint and its “allover” composition, this work epitomizes Lewis’s elegant response to Abstract Expressionism. The painting tells no explicit story, but the clusters of marks can be read as small figures that may hint at questions about individuals, groups, and the relationships between them. This interpretation would be in keeping with Lewis’s career and approach to art: in the 1930s he was part of Harlem’s 306 Group, which encouraged emerging African American artists, and in 1963 he helped found Spiral, an artists’ discussion group dedicated to the civil rights movement.

Valentim worked in a geometrically abstract style, yet his compositions also drew on imagery from the Candomblé religion. Within a grid-like framework the artist has placed the abstracted shapes of three attributes associated with Candomblé orixás or deities: the staff of Oxalá, god of the sky and universe; the trident of Exú, the messenger god of communication and way-finding; and the double-headed axe of Xangô, the warrior god of thunder and fire. Some critics have claimed this appropriation of religious symbols was out of context, but for Valentim, the Candomblé references are personal and part of his heritage.

Kofi Bailey was deeply involved in the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to gain social freedom and equality of African Americans. Closely associated with civil rights luminaries, Bailey used his art to express both his frustration with the present and his hopes for the future. Bailey's painting of George Jackson, a vociferous equal rights activist, effectively communicates both Jackson's anger and his intense desire to spread his beliefs to help create a fair society.

Auxiliadora da Silva captures the vibrant life of Brazil’s largest city just as the skies have opened up over a neighborhood, possibly her own. A keen observer with a great sense of narrative, she included individuals with a range of skin tones in a variety of dress indicative of the country’s diverse classes and ethnic heritage. The carefully wrought composition draws on the self-taught artist's earlier experience as a seamstress in the vivid patterns of color, as well as in the tiny details on clothing and the designs on the car tires that resemble stitching. The result has a rich physical and visual texture, much like embroidery.

“[I] worked with what's around me,” Cortor said, “though sometimes I reach back for something out of my memory.” In this monumental still life, an abundance of worn objects transmits layers of memories, not only of the artist’s personal history, but also the shared experiences of black America throughout the early 20th century. The items depicted refer both to triumphs and to failures, from the successful business empire of Madame C.J. Walker to the racial injustice of the 1932 Scottsboro trial. Painted at the height of his powers, Still-Life: Past Revisited shows the fifty-seven-year-old artist looking back on his life as a black man in America.

Using beads as her medium of choice, Joyce Scott creates polemical assemblages of well-known imagery and stereotypes to address controversial topics like sexism and racism. Descended from at least three generations of quilters, woodworkers, and other artisans, she celebrates the improvisational "make-do" qualities of African American arts. In this necklace, Scott is concerned with the Old Testament creation story, questioning the meaning society has attributed to the protagonists’ gender roles. Scott asks her viewer: “Does my work deserve perusal because it cools your anger with humor or because it fans the flames?”

Ligon's paintings present quotes that expose the dangers of speaking simplistically about African American identity in art and life. The text here features words spoken by James Baldwin (1924-1987) in an interview late in his life. Baldwin states the difficulties and restrictions faced by African American artists who feel obliged to create "an official version of the black experience" for the white cultural establishment. Ligon's skinny canvas makes it difficult to read, and seems to be a metaphor for the limitations of communication.

Supermodel is emblematic of Marshall's earliest exploration into his now iconic super-black figure. Inspired by Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, in the 1980s Marshall started developing larger-than-life images of black figures in an effort to challenge stereotypical depictions of black people as continually enslaved. The painting is a soft nod to high fashion and celebrity, but the centrality of the figure and the supreme contrast between his black skin and the light background also call to mind traditional religious icon painting. These two facets shed light on just how wide Marshall has cast his net of influence, culling everything that he imagines could be used to reposition the black image from one of poverty to one of strength and power.

Puryear is known for shape-shifting, hand-hewn forms that evoke ideas of deliverance. Constructed of wire mesh, tar, and wood, Confessional reveals his interest in the transcendent potential of common materials. Here the title suggests a secret or sacred interior space, like a Catholic confessional, where sins of the mind, body, and soul are laid bare. Does its hollowness seem heavy or uplifting, damning or saving? The artist deliberately seeks this ambiguity: “The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in a tense coexistence.”

The caricatured and stylized figures in Walker's provocative tableaux evoke racial stereotypes in acts that are perplexing, violent, and suggestive. The zones of shameful and uncomfortable relationships-both literal and fantastic-force the viewer to consider issues of race and sexuality. Although the figures are detailed, their forms and the narrative remain essentially ambiguous. For the artist, the silhouette was a near-perfect solution to her effort to "try and uncover the often subtle and uncomfortable ways racism, and racist and sexist stereotypes, influence and script our everyday lives."

Iago's Mirror reflects Shakespeare's Othello, the story of a black Muslim military commander who is tragically undone by his soldier Iago's racist manipulations. Here, Wilson represents Iago's duplicitous double-dealings, desire for recognition, and evil nature by reimagining the concept of a Venetian mirror. Working with Murano glassmakers, he reverses tradition by painting the glass's flip side black rather than silver, and deepens the darkness with multiple layers. The result is an ominous portrait of an iconic villain.

Soon after arriving in New York in 2001, the painter Kehinde Wiley came across a discarded FBI wanted poster that triggered a seismic shift in his thinking about portraiture. Wiley found the standard mug shot of an African American youth especially compelling, because its straight, uninflected style was such a contrast to the portraits of European aristocracy that he had been drawn to since childhood. As a result, Wiley began a series of large-scale canvases of young men that he encountered on the streets of Harlem (and photographed in the studio) in poses and settings appropriated from Old Masters' works.