Visual Arts

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is creating a comprehensive collection of fine art to include painting, sculpture, works on paper, art installations, photography, and digital media by and about African Americans. We intend to present American art history through the lens of the African American artist. We also will re-contextualize artwork depicting African Americans by non-black artists. The collection will showcase the various strategies visual artists have used for more than three centuries to comment on significant historical moments, as well as to reflect upon or promote political and social change. By collecting and featuring artworks that encompass a broad range of historical eras, stylistic genres, and regional movements within the context of American art history, we will shift the focus of art by and about African Americans from the periphery of the canon to its core.

The painting above right, Slave Trade (Execreble Human Traffick, or the Affectionate Slaves), was created by English artist, George Morland, an eighteenth-century landscape, genre, and animal painter. Morland painted the The Slave Trade during the early phase of the British abolitionist movement. The painting may have been inspired by a 1788 William Collins poem. The poem tells the story of a noble African family torn apart by the slave trade, focusing upon the experience of the wife (Ulkna) and her child as they are taken into bondage by brutish white slavers and sold on the coast. It offers a powerful visual statement in support of the anti-slavery cause that finally brought about the end of the slave trade in Great Britain (1807), and the United States (1808).

Robbing the Eagle's Nest, 1856

Robert Scott Duncanson (1821-1872)

Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 45.5 inches

Museum Purchase

Duncanson played a key role in the School of Ohio landscape painters, a loose association of artists whose accomplishments rivaled the better-known Hudson River School. In addition to the picturesque compositions inspired by the Ohio countryside, he painted landscapes of the then American frontier such as Robbing the Eagle's Nest. Born in upstate New York of mixed black and white heritage, Duncanson identified most strongly with Ohio, finding many of his subjects there, as well as important patronage from abolitionists such as Nicholas Longworth. A series of murals painted for Longworth in the 1840s are still intact and on view in Longworth's former residence, now Cincinnati's Taft Museum.

Behold Thy Son, 1956

David C. Driskell (b. 1931)

Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

Museum Purchase

Behold Thy Son is David Driskell's tribute to the brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was savagely beaten to death for allegedly whistling at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Driskell presents the bruised and battered body of Emmett Till as a Christ-like figure with his arms outstretched in the position of a crucifixion. Driskell biographer Julie McGee describes the painting this way: "The figure behind the body, a woman, seems to both hold and present the crippled figure, as Mary might have presented her son Jesus in lamentation." Created a year after his murder, Behold Thy Son reflects upon both the heinous and sacrificial nature of Till’s death.

Phillis Wheatley, 1973

Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1919)

Bronze sculpture on wooden base, 19.5 x 12 x 13 inches, Edition of 4

Museum Purchase

Elizabeth Catlett is known for her sculpture in bronze, wood, stone, and terra cotta, as well as her prints and paintings that, in particular, venerate the female figure. Catlett has been a major influence in the American and Mexican art worlds for decades. During the early 1970s, representatives of Jackson State University (Jackson, Mississippi) commissioned Catlett to create this bronze, life-size bust of Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), the first published African American poet. Her seminal work, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in 1773, brought her critical acclaim in both the United States and Great Britain. Born in Gambia, West Africa, Wheatley was brought to the United States as a slave at the age of seven. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, Mass., who taught her how to read and write and encouraged her interest in poetry. Although Wheatley was emancipated by her owners after her literary success, she died in poverty.

Increase Risk with Emotional Faith, 2008

Kevin Cole (b. 1960)

(Part of the Fragment of Frozen Sound Series)

Mixed Media on wood, 58 x 77 x 9 inches

Gift of Greg and Yolanda Head

Increase Risk with Emotional Faith is part of a body of work artist Kevin Cole has created entitled Fragment of Frozen Sound Series. This large-scale wall sculpture features Cole's iconic necktie motif. Cole's introduction to the dual symbolism of the male necktie occurred during his eighteenth year when his grandfather explained the importance of voting, particularly as it related to the African American male. As part of that lesson, Cole's grandfather took him to a tree in their neighborhood which, he explained, was the tree that white supremacists had used to hang African American men when they attempted to vote. Ironically, his grandfather added, many of those men were hung by their neckties. This story inspired Cole to incorporate the necktie in his work as a way to transform the legacy of the necktie from something haunting and negative to a more contemporary vision of transformation, strength, and change.

A Lie is Not a Shelter, 1989

Lorna Simpson (b. 1960)

Silver Gelatin Print, 59 x 48 inches

Gift of Billy E. Hodges

This large-scale photograph is a fine example of Simpson's photo-based art. The image and text offer her familiar deconstruction of an image meant to foster in the viewer a fresh perspective on the challenging issues of race, class, and representation. Simpson's politically charged pictures have the power to make us uncomfortable by raising awareness of situations and attitudes that are as commonplace as they are unacceptable. Here she asks us to confront our personal prejudices and assumptions that make us who we are as well as determine who we expect others to be.