Hammonds House Museum Celebrates Cultural Diversity And Legacy Of Artists Of African Diaspora

Robert S. Duncanson was a 19th century American artist of African and European ancestry. Renowned for his landscapes, he also painted portraits. This portrait of a mother and daughter is thought to be his oldest painting.

Folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe is known for her unique, colorful drawings and paintings. She grew up on her father's sharecropping farm where she showed an early propensity for drawing and crafts.

At the age of 48, after the death of her second husband, Nellie Mae Rowe became a full-time artist. She began setting up art in her front yard, inviting visitors to come look as she played gospel tunes on an electric piano.

Artist Arturo Lindsay is a cultural investigator whose work is informed by the scholarly research he conducts on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions, rediscoveries and re-inventions in America.

Bailey's mixed media work utilizes layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, and memory.

Hale Woodruff created paintings, prints, and murals that depict the historic struggle and perseverance of African Americans. Concerned with the living conditions black people were subjected to in the segregated South during and after the Great Depression, he produced a series of woodcuts on the subject while working for the WPA in Atlanta.

After moving to New York in the late 1940's, Woodruff's style shifted to what he described as "semiabstract, symbolic painting." He continued to paint in an abstract manner for the rest of his life.

Riddle's timeline images depict African people taken as slaves to America, and part of their history in the "new world."

Felix (Lafortune) Ponte-Sonde was a Haitian artist who was a farmer, and formerly a voodoo priest. It was said that his artistic inspirations came from his knowledge of the supernatural.

“I paint with an intention for revolution. Every stroke of my painting is a suggestion of destroying the enemies of humanity, particularly African humanity." LeRoy Clarke

"I paint for enlightenment, to bring us closer to parting the darkness and opening up the way to our origins." LeRoy Clarke

Clarke insists that his work is obeah, a deliberate evocation of untainted African energy and spirituality, both he claims – erased from modern consciousness.

Haitian artist Alberoi Bazile's colorful depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a bountiful apple tree and coiling snake. Before devoting himself to his art, Bazile was a soldier and a policeman.

Haitian artist Wilson Bigaud first tried sculpture before becoming a muralist and painter. He painted many everyday scenes like this colorful crowd at a cock fight

This vibrant painting of roadways with ribbons of people walking from a city to an island is by Haitian artist, Prefete Duffaut.

Of Caribbean extraction, Dunkley explores the lost narratives of the pan-African journey that have informed much of the history of the Americas.

Classic landscape painting of rural setting. A wide expansive field depicts a black couple picking cotton. Behind them is a modest wood home and out building.

Sowell's impressionist painting of the Santa Maria delle Salute which in English means Saint Mary of Health. Commonly known as The Salute, this Roman Catholic Church & Basilica is in Venice, Italy.

A native of Georgia, Freddie Styles is a committed abstractionist, although references to nature have been at the center of his paintings and collages throughout his long career.

“I grew up poor and felt I didn’t have a voice. I think as an artist there’s a responsibility beyond painting beautiful pictures...someone has to be a voice for those that don’t one.” Floyd D. Tunson

Tunson’s work is an exploration of American blackness, sometimes forcing us to confront personal prejudice. He's asking us, "what do you see and how does that make you feel?"

Jim Alexander took this photograph of American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and singer, Dizzy Gillespie, performing at the Atlanta Jazz Festival.

This photograph of American composer, pianist, and jazz band leader, Duke Ellington, was taken by Jim Alexander at the Atlanta Jazz Festival.

Originally from Philadelphia, PA, when Anderson moved to Atlanta, GA his career took off when his work was shown in the inaugural National Black Arts Festival in 1988.

David Driskell was an artist, author, and one of the world's leading authorities on African American Art. This colorful aquatint etching on paper reflects his earlier work, inspired by his first trips to the African continent.

Delsarte is often called a master of color and movement. While growing up in New York City, he was surrounded by music including jazz, opera, musicals, and blues. His parents were friends with entertainers like Lena Horne, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

Though Wood studied for a time under a portraitist in Boston and briefly in Paris, he had limited formal training, a remarkable fact given his exceptional technique. Many of his subjects are freed black people, before and after the Civil War.

Little is known about artist James Milton Green. He was prolific in the 1970's and this mixed-media collage is representative of his colorful images of African Americans of the day.

Holloway's artwork is often about the power of the human spirit. She was an arts professor at Spelman College for 38 years; a champion of African American artists and a mother who didn't allow her children to play with coloring books, instead insisting they make their own original art.

Well-known as a curator and artist, LaFalle-Collins' artwork focuses on collage. She mixes mediums including maps, wrapping paper,drawings and found objects to make statements on memory, family and tradition.

Haitian artist Sisson Blanchard’s brightly colored paintings feature fish, birds, animals, vegetables and flowers in orderly columns or disorderly groups.

This abstract gouache painting in warm coffee colors is by artist Oliver Jackson.

Artwork based on Lev Mills' book, I DO, a 1971 collaboration with Sierra Leone poet Mukhtarr Mustapha.

With just a few strokes of his pen, Andrews has captured the moment.

Though the work is economical, Andrews clearly shows the action of a pool game between the two men.

Gilliam is associated with the Washington Color School,a group of Washington, D.C. artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have been described as abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He works on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements.

Valerie Maynard is a sculptor, teacher, printmaker, and designer. The head, being a prominent part in many of her figures, reference the distorted quality of African art work made by the Igbo or Yoruba people.