Aaron Douglas (May 26, 1899 – February 2, 1979) was an American painter, illustrator, and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild. In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk University until his retirement in 1966. Douglas is known as a prominent leader in modern African-American art whose work influenced artists for years to come.
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Aaron Douglas (artist) in the context of Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeastern United States and the Midwestern United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Though geographically tied to Harlem, few of the associated visual artists lived in the area itself, while those who did (such as Aaron Douglas) had migrated elsewhere by the end of World War II. Many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris, France, were also influenced by the movement. Harlem had also seen significant Black immigration from British, French and other colonies in the Caribbean. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson described the Harlem Renaissance, took place between approximately 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a creative crucible for African-American art-making and its institutionalisation within white-dominated museums and cultural institutions.