Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, author of
As a well-educated, middle-class African American woman, sculptor May Howard Jackson's (1877–1931) career was affected by racism and sexism at every turn. The social and class-based aspects of her larger artistic practice, which was formed in an era when a “New Negro” and the “Talented Tenth” politics of racial uplift were ascendant, are evident in her work, little of which survives. This essay examines Howard Jackson's place in a segment of a conservative Black art world that is today largely forgotten or ignored.
Sargent Johnson was the most highly lauded and successful African American artist of a generation that came to prominence during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. His art and his life story are especially compelling, for they reveal the complexity of being a modernist artist of African and European descent working with racial subject matter in the United States of the twentieth century. This essay focuses on Johnson's love of music and his fascination with poet Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts.
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