AARON DOUGLAS: AFRICAN AMERICAN MODERNIST
FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
JANUARY 18–April 13, 2008

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Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist presents the first nationally touring retrospective of the work of Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. A native of Topeka, Kansas, and a socially conscious artist, Douglas vividly captured the spirit of his time and established a new black aesthetic and utopian vision. Working from a politicized concept of personal identity, he combined angular cubist rhythms and seductive art-deco dynamism with traditional African and African American imagery to develop a radically new visual vocabulary that evoked both current realities and hopes for a better future. In paintings, murals, and illustrations for books and progressive journals, his forceful ideas and their distinctive artistic form produced the most powerful visual legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and made a lasting impact on the history of art and the cultural heritage of the nation.

The exhibition highlights this achievement, including Douglas's work in New York and his subsequent teaching at historically black Fisk University in Nashville. By considering Douglas and the work he created between the 1920s and 1940s as a prime example and test case, the exhibition will interrogate the boundaries of American modernism in order to assess the seminal but neglected role of the Harlem Renaissance and one of its most important artists. The substantial retrospective of approximately one hundred objects brings together many rarely seen Douglas works from public institutions and private collections. The exhibition features approximately ninety works by Douglas and incorporates several works by his contemporaries and students, as well as portraits of Douglas, printing plates and sketchbooks, and ephemera related to the Harlem Renaissance.

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is the first stop of the touring retrospective, following its opening at the Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kan.) The exhibition will subsequently travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York). The exhibition tour follows Douglas's trajectory with three of its venues closely related to the artist's career: northeast Kansas, where he grew up; Nashville, where he taught for 29 years; and New York, where he took center stage in the Harlem Renaissance.

Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist was organized by the Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Dr. Susan Earle, curator, and Stephanie Fox Knappe, exhibition coordinator. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are made possible in part with support from The Henry Luce Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

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