By African American artist Romare Bearden (1911−1988), Guitar Magic, 1986, collage & watercolor on board, The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. © 2025 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society. #art #blackart #blackartist #blackartists #collage

From the Bearden Foundation: ‘Bearden takes us backstage to the glamour, grit, and grace of Black performance. Bearden understood that jazz wasn’t just sound. It was a repository of memory—a form of Black historical consciousness. The improvisational nature of jazz mirrored the adaptability required of Black Americans, who had to continuously remake identity and community in the face of change and displacement. Much of Bearden’s art functions the same way. His collages are full of migrating trains, front porches, street corners, and jukeboxes—images loaded with the weight of history. In these works, jazz becomes a stand-in for cultural endurance. He once said, “The artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.” Bearden devoured both visual and musical traditions, then recombined them in ways that felt utterly new.’

An article about the art presented at the new Obama Presidential Center. Quote: “When the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) opens on June 19, the 19.3-acre campus, located in Chicago’s Jackson Park, will feature an arts program on a scale to rival many contemporary art institutions.” #blackart #blackartists #art #obama

https://www.artbasel.com/stories/obama-presidential-center-art-institutions-us

"Angelica Peale Robinson," Moses Williams, 1802-05.

Williams (c. 1770 - c. 1830) was a formerly enslaved Black silhouette artist active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Williams' parents were acquired by artist Charles Willson Peale, who later freed them, and Moses was raised along with Peale's children in his very artistic household. Some reports claim Williams was mixed-race and could pass, leaving unanswered questions about his parents.

Williams grew up to be a successful silhouette artist, and became one of few Black men in Philadelphia to own property when he bought his own house He married a former Peale servant and fathered four children, but further details of his family are unknown.

I love silhouettes, and the detail work on this is exquisite when your realize this is black paper cut with scissors and perhaps with detail cut with a knife.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

#Art #MosesWilliams #Silhouette #BlackArtists #BlackHistory #PortraitMonday

By African-American artist Laura Wheeler Waring (1877-1948), After Sunday Service, ca. 1940, oil on Canvas, 30 x 14 1/2 inches (76.2 x 36.8 cm), collection of the Petrucci Family Foundation. #arthistory #art #blackartists #blackart #womanartist #womenartists

From The Art Story: “With Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick, and Augusta Savage, Waring is one of the foremost Black American female artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Taking her stylistic lead from the likes of Monet, Manet, Corot and Cézanne, Waring emerged, with Aaron Douglass and Beauford Delaney, as one of the most influential portrait painters associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the influential movement in African American literary, artistic, and cultural history that thrived between 1918 and the late 1930s. Challenging racial stereotypes, she built her reputation on portraits of prominent African Americans which she executed with consummate skill and imagination. Waring is equally respected for her life-long dedication to the advancement of Black culture and history through her role as director of arts education programs at America's oldest Black teaching institutions.”

Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), Woman with Bouquet, ca. 1940, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum. #arthistory #blackartists #blackartist #blackart #womanartist #womenartists

From the museum: “With hand on hip and confident bearing, this woman is self-assured and elegant. She was probably from the Philadelphia area, where the artist Laura Wheeler Waring lived and worked. Like Waring’s other portraits of sophisticated or dignified working-class African Americans, this painting countered the many racial stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. Waring’s work, with its strong color palette and energetic brushwork, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, a period of great African American artistic and cultural production.”

By Nigerian artist Wole Lagunju (born 1966), Black Girl V (Ibori), 75 x 57.5 inches, oil on canvas, 2025, ©️ Wole Lagunju. #art #blackartist #blackartists #AfricanArt #africanartists #africanartist

From Montague Contemporary: “Wole Lagunju practices a visually stunning form of Onaism, wherein he appropriates Western cultural artifacts and combines them with Yoruba cultural artifacts, notably Gelede masks, to challenge the audience to consider how we often look at culture through a Western lens.

The Gelede masquerade is a performance celebrating motherhood, fertility, and femininity - and combining these themes with Western cultural icons, he evolves our understanding of the role of Yoruba culture - and broadly African art - to reframe our perspective.⁣ Sampling from a wide variety of cultural iconography across history - from Dutch Golden to Elizabethan to fifties Americana to Nigerian adiré batik - Lagunju’s paintings are both fashionable but also imbued with layers of inspiration and meaning.

Lagunju’s cultural references, mined from the eras of colonization and decolonization of the African continent critique the racial and social structures of the 19th century whilst evoking commentaries on power, femininity and womanhood.
Wole Lagunju is a 1986 graduate of Fine arts and graphic design at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Lagunju has exhibited widely in Nigeria, United States, Europe, and the Caribbean.

His works are included in various private and public art collections including the Denver Art Museum, St Louis Art Museum, the Toledo Art Museum, The Virginia Museum of Fine Art (promised), the World Bank, the Norval Foundation, The United States Art in Embassy Collection in Nigeria, the Africa First Collection, the Ashley Longshore Collection, the Mack Collection, the Glasser Collection, the Chinn Collection, amongst others.”

By African-American artist Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923), Pink and Red Roses in Clear Vase, ca. 1880, watercolor, 13 5/8 × 10 in. (34.6 × 25.4 cm), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. #art #blackart #blackartists #painting #oilpainting #blackhistory

From the museum: “Charles Ethan Porter has often been left out of the history books, but his contributions to American art deserve recognition. A contemporary of sculptor Edmonia Lewis, Porter is considered the first known professional Black artist to focus on still lifes. His works, featuring delicate floral arrangements and fruit, built on earlier American still life traditions with incredible detail and realism.

After taking drawing lessons as a child and studying painting in high school, Porter was accepted to the National Academy of Design in 1869. He is believed to be the first Black student to attend the premier art school. Aware of the racial barriers in the art world, Porter remained determined to showcase the skill and talent of Black artists.”

By Kehinde Wiley (born 1977), “Shantavia Beale II,” 2012, oil on canvas, 60x48 inches, private collection. #blackart #blackartist #blackartists #oilpainting #painting

From the Saint Louis Art Museum: “Kehinde Wiley’s vibrant paintings actively engage with the traditions of European art. In his work, Wiley replaces historical depictions of white figures with images of contemporary African Americans, Africans, and people of the African diaspora. His work is widely recognized for calling attention to significant absences and erasures in Western art history, exposing the lack of representation of black individuals in figurative painting.”

Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Charles Ethan Porter (1847–1923), Floral Still Life, ca. 1880-1890, oil on canvas, 16 1/8 × 20 3/8 × 13/16 inches (41 × 51.8 × 2 cm), Detroit Institute of Arts. #ArtHistory #blackart #blackartists #blackartist #BlackHistory

Information on the artist from the National Gallery of Art: ‘In 1881 Porter decided to travel abroad to continue his development as an artist…

Less than two years into his time in France, Porter’s money ran out. He wrote to Mark Twain, asking him for help. His letters to the writer are the only known first-person accounts from Porter. On April 4, 1883, he wrote:

Now I am aware that there are a goodly number of my Hartford friends and others who are anxious to see how the colored artist will make out, but this is not the motive which impresses me. There is something of more importance. The colored people—my people—as a race I am interested in, and my success will only add to others who have already shown wherein they are capable the same as other men.

Conscious of his place in an art world dominated by white men, Porter was eager to show what he, and other Black artists, could do.’