Aaron Douglas

There were different points of view, and I think that's a mark of a civilized community.

Aaron Douglas is an Afro-American artist.

I'm calling him an artist.

Period.

Photographer James Van Der Zee provided some of the most complete documentation of African American life during this era, especially the emerging Black middle class in New York.

Muralist and artist Aaron Douglas used Egyptian and West African sources in his art to depict segregation and race.

His innovative techniques drew the attention of Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, who would ask him to provide illustrations for their journals.

And there was Mita Vo Warwick Fuller, an interdisciplinary artist and sculptor who portrayed the Black American experience using African themes.

All around the world, storytelling in art has highlighted parts of history that have been overlooked, or purposely hidden, by people in power.

Like in 1934, Black American artist Aaron Douglas completed this series of murals during the Harlem Renaissance.

a time period that saw an explosion of painting, music, literature, and poetry by Black artists centered in and around the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.

The four panels of the mural show overlapping scenes from Black American history, like emancipation from slavery, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emergence of hate groups.

Fifty years later, his son David Greaves has turned his father's vision and footage from that summer afternoon into a full-length film with help from his daughter, producer Leonie Greaves.

Guests at the party included artist Aaron Douglas, who's often referred to as the father of African-American art, portrait photographer James Van Der Zee, who captured much of the Harlem Renaissance on camera, activist Louise Thompson Patterson, who famously used her own apartment to start a left-wing salon called The Vanguard, and librarian and activist Jean Blackwell Hudson.

I feel very definitely that the Harlem Renaissance did not die.

I think that some of the activities which were possible during that period were cut off by the economic plight which the Depression represented.

So there are a lot of nods in the text, but there are equally as many, at least, nods in the art.

There are nods to Aaron Douglas.

There are nods to the Dylans.

the illustrators, the Dylans, Diane, and I can't remember his first name.

Zora was also at the center of the movement's most radical aesthetic revolution.

In 1926, alongside Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman Aaron Douglas, and Richard Bruce Nugent, she co-founded the legendary literary journal, Fire.

They called themselves the Niggerati, a self-mocking rebellious collective of younger black writers who were thoroughly disgusted by the polite middle-class respectability politics of the Black establishment, leaders like W.E.B. Dubois and Alan Locke believed that Black art should act as political propaganda, clean, sanitized and respectable.

Designed to prove to white America that Black people were civil and educated.

The official trailer is out for a documentary that's been generating a lot of buzz on the festival circuit, titled Once Upon a Time in Harlem.

Aaron Douglas is an Afro-American artist.

I'm calling him an artist.

Period.

Exactly.

And we put that work in conversation with Aaron Douglas's Noah's Ark and thinking about Moses as this sort of biblical patriarch figure.

This figure associated with the liberation of the people of Israel in the Old Testament.

And so in a way, there's this sort of close connection between her religious faith and this sort of activist spirit that suffuses her entire artistic lifetime.