The Art of Black History

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens presents “Black Artists in America: From the Great Depression to Civil Rights.”

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“People have a sort of mythological thinking about the arts — that, oh, it’s open and it’s free and it’s inclusive. But the art world is not,” says Earnestine Jenkins, professor of art history at the University of Memphis. “It has the same issues with exclusion of many artists who do not happen to be white, just like any other discipline or sector.”

Jenkins continues, “It was really HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities], Black community centers, Black churches — these were the cultural institutions within Black communities that were the main supporters of Black American art and art history in the twentieth century. And unless you were a part of those communities, because of segregation, Jim Crow, you really didn’t see this work because African-American artists were not being shown in mainstream galleries.”

“So many of these artists were really important in their community, and in their moment they were really well-known in the American art scene but have been forgotten largely because of their race. We’re hoping to change that through this exhibition.” — Julie Pierotti

This, in turn, led to Black artists being left out of the canon, despite their vital artistic practices which reflected and often subverted art movements of the time. As scholars work to rectify this gap in art history, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ latest exhibition — “Black Artists in America: From the Great Depression to Civil Rights” — brings this conversation about racism in the arts to Memphis and the Mid-South.

The exhibition of more than 50 pieces — sculptures, drawings, prints, and paintings from private and public collections in Memphis and throughout the states — walks through the Black artistic response to the social, economic, and political movements of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s in chronological order. This exhibit will be the first of its kind to cover such a range of Black art history. “It is important to gather all these works of art into one place, instead of them being a sidebar when talking about the greater canon of American art history,” says Julie Pierotti, Martha R. Robinson curator at the Dixon. “So many of these artists were really important in their community, and in their moment they were really well-known in the American art scene but have been forgotten largely because of their race. We’re hoping to change that through this exhibition.”

Pierotti says she has learned so much about the nuances of the Black artist experience while curating this exhibition alongside Jenkins, who served as guest curator. Similarly, Kevin Sharp, the Linda W. and S. Herbert Rhea director at the Dixon, says, “As someone who is a little bit older, whose education was quite a few years ago at this point, a lot of these artists weren’t taught when I was in school.”

Initially, the exhibit was going to travel before the pandemic intervened. “But we realized very quickly and largely through Earnestine’s leadership that this gave us an opportunity to look at Memphis in the context of the national conversation about Black artists in America,” Sharp says. “And then we saw it as a real opportunity.”

Two artists who lived and worked in Memphis shine in this exhibit: Vertis Hayes and Reginald Morris. After coming to Memphis in 1938, Hayes started the art department at LeMoyne-Owen College, where he taught until the 1950s. Morris succeeded him and continued Hayes’ work of establishing a Black artistic community in Memphis.

“Almost every Black artist in this show taught in a Black college somewhere,” Jenkins says. “They gave back and taught at community centers or HBCUs when they weren’t going to be hired by white institutions. A lot of these artists, like Vertis Hayes, ended up founding and establishing these art departments at HBCUs.”

Without this cycle of artist-turned-educator, Jenkins says, “You would not have had the decades of learning and exposure to the arts for Black students interested in the arts. … Even though Black American artists had this habitual issue to deal with, which was racism in the broader mainstream of the art world, they were always, at the same time, very much engaged in the art movements at the time.”

The exhibition begins with the Great Depression — the years following the New Negro Movement, or the Harlem Renaissance. “The Harlem Renaissance was one of the most important creative flowers of aesthetics that this country has ever produced,” says Sharp. “And the Great Depression kind of winds that flowering down. And so, there’s a fair amount of literature on the Harlem Renaissance, but by 1930 that literature gets more and more thin. We felt like that was a really useful moment to pick up the study.”

The art of the Great Depression centered around social realism — representational art with an easily understood social message that exposes the inequalities and sufferings in American society. For the artists featured in this exhibition, these inequalities evinced themselves in the surge in racism, white supremacy, and racial violence. In Vertis Hayes’ painting The Lynchers, for instance, a menagerie of white men and women, young and old, stand in witness of a lynching that some of them perpetuated — their faces a startling dose of indifference.

In this show, a painting by Archibald Motley hangs beside this painting by Hayes’ — bringing out the dramatic differences in subject matter seen throughout the exhibit. While Hayes’ work elicits fear and discomfort, Motley’s Brown Girl after the Bath depicts a nude woman gazing into a mirror, her reflection making direct eye contact with the viewer and thus conveying a sense of self-confidence and bodily autonomy.

“You have the whole emotional experience,” Pierotti says. “There are works of art that show really difficult subject matter, and others that are meant to be joyful. But all the works of art invite you to spend time with them and really learn something from them.”

From the Great Depression, the exhibit moves on to the Black artistic response during World War II, when African Americans served as soldiers for a country where Jim Crow enforced segregation. In response to this dehumanizing social irony, Black artists turned to the canvas to compare the violence of the Nazi regime with America’s legacy of systemic racism and racial violence, as can be seen in John Wilson’s Deliver Us from Evil.

In the postwar years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, artists turned to abstract expressionism. “I think that artists begin to experiment with abstract because they see it as a type of freedom of expression that goes with not having to be so literal, so it doesn’t need to be exact,” Jenkins explains. “But also, it’s not a negation of representation; it’s just that abstraction allows you to be even more expressive and bring the strong emotional content to the work.”

The largest work in this part of the exhibition is Reginald Morris’ series of surrealist murals, which were removed from the walls of Second Congregational Church in Memphis and restored for the sake of this exhibit. The murals depicting Creation, Christ, and the Crucifixion blend African, Asian, and Mexican religious symbols with Euro-American representation, creating a dreamlike sense of universality. This is the first time the murals have been on display outside of the church.

In fact, Jenkins says, “Most of the works in this exhibition have never been shown — not only in Memphis but in this entire region. To be able to finally see a lot of these works was a thrill even for me.”

Through discourse spurred by exhibitions like these, Jenkins continues, Memphis has the opportunity to position itself as a leader in the arts, especially the arts associated with Black artists and artists of color. “We need a strong base of scholarship,” she says. “People have this nebulous idea of what the arts are, and it usually doesn’t include scholarship or the study of the visual world. Human beings made images before they learned to write, so studying the visual world is extremely important [to understand the human experience at all points of history, from a range of perspectives].”

“There’s a whole lot more work to be done,” Sharp adds. “We’re standing on the shoulders of our colleagues, like Earnestine, who have done great projects before us.” In the coming years, the Dixon will continue tracing Black American art history with two planned future exhibits: The first, in fall of 2023, will cover the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s through the Bicentennial in 1976; the second, in the fall of 2025, will pick up with the Bicentennial and end with the September 11th attacks.

“Black Artists in America: From the Great Depression to Civil Rights” will be on display at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens until January 2, 2022. Admission to the museum and gardens is free until the end of 2021.