Jacques Jefferson

This study attempts to find, evaluate, reinterpret, and generate new knowledge regarding African American visual culture between the 14th amendment and Jim Crow's departure. My aim is to present a more comprehensive understanding of postbellum Black Art in order to fill the void in the visual culture of blackness in America between 1865 and 1939. My research examines the visual narratives in relation to the historical and cultural significance of Black America. I argue that when confronted with Post-Bellum and Pre-Harlem art today, the likelihood of encountering anti-black imagery increases due to a lack of curatorial interest in the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts of Black Modern Art. At that time, deplorable caricatures of the African American diaspora were the primary representations of the black experience. Openly implementing imagery that is now considered unusual, exaggerated, or othered, American culture was primed to assume that African Americans were unoriginal, incapable of expressing, and without the capacity for creating art. An entire section of the American population has been portrayed as being less than human. Despite their widespread reproduction and dissemination, these images and ideas were far from accurate depictions of Black identity, black representation, or the black visual arts in the United States. Contesting this anachronistic propaganda, my exploration of the expressions of artists Samella Louis (1867), Edward Mitchell Bannister (1886), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1893), James Van Der Zee (1924), alongside Bill Traylor will show the cultural ramifications of de facto slavery through the arts. Produced within America's history of segregation, they more accurately exemplify the cultural narratives of African American artists who have survived through the Jim Crow era of this country's history. Even though Jim Crow was significant enough to motivate America's great migration, which culminated in the Harlem Renaissance, only a small amount of African American art and literature exists from this early period. For the better part of the last century, the annals of American art history have been deafeningly silent in regards to this lack of representation. To aid in the deconstruction and exposure of Jim Crow racialization and reductive concepts that have historically served to marginalize interest in African American modern art, critical race theory must now be applied to reevaluate our current consensus on modern black art.