6 African American Artists to Celebrate During Black History Month

For centuries, African American artists have helped shape the visual culture of the United States. Often channeling their familial backgrounds and personal experiences in their work, these creative figures have influenced and inspired much of American art’s evolution.

Unfortunately, throughout history—both in the United States and beyond—artists of color have not aptly been recognized for their talents, achievements, and contributions. This has culminated in a popular history of art paved mostly by white artists. Fortunately, however, contemporary audiences are becoming increasingly interested in diversity in the arts, prompting museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions to shine an overdue spotlight on the work of African American artists.

Here are 6 groundbreaking African American artists who have made history.

Joshua Johnson was a portrait painter living and working in 18th and 19th-century Baltimore. While little is known about his background (there are conflicting reports regarding whether or not he had been a slave), over 100 portraits are attributed to the artist. All of these pieces are rendered in a characteristically naive style and most share a distinctive composition: a sitter positioned in a three-quarter view, against a plain backdrop, and among props ranging from fruit and flowers to parasols and riding crops.

Today, Johnson is celebrated as the earliest known African American who worked professionally as an artist, forging a path for numerous creatives to come.

Augusta Savage 

In 1918, a groundbreaking movement emerged in New York City. Known today as the Harlem Renaissance, this “golden age” of art, literature, and music transformed the Harlem neighborhood into a cultural hub for African Americans, with Augusta Savage‘s many contributions at its core.

Augusta Savage was a Florida-born sculptor. In 1921, she moved to New York City, where she attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a scholarship-based school. After earning her degree (an entire year early), she was asked by the Harlem Library to create a bust of civil rights activist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois—a piece that put her on the map.

Today, Savage’s role in the Renaissance is mostly attached to teaching and advocacy. In 1935, she co-founded the Harlem Artists Guild, an organization that advised the neighborhood’s African American artists; and, in 1937, she established the Harlem Community Art Center, where she led sculpting classes and helped launch the careers of African American artists, including Jacob Lawrence.

Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence was born in New Jersey in 1918. At just 23 years old, he completed his Migration Series. This colorful collection of paintings tells the story of the Great Migration, a mess exodus of over 6 million African Americans fleeing the segregated South to urbanized areas across the country.

Imagined as avant-garde shapes and rendered in bright tones, this work is celebrated as much for it subject matter as its Harlem-inspired aesthetic. “Lawrence’s work is a landmark in the history of modern art and a key example of the way that history painting was radically reimagined in the modern era,” the Museum of Modern Art explains.

After the success of this 60-panel series, Lawrence continued to artistically document the African American experience in a number of projects. He also taught at several universities and received numerous accolades and awards. In 1941, for example, he became the first African American artist to have work featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, and in 1990, he received the U.S. National Medal of Arts.

Jean-Michele Basquiat

New York City would continue to serve as a catalyst for African American artists for decades, with Jean-Michel Basquiat among the Big Apple’s most famous artists—and contemporary art’s most universally recognized figures.

Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father in 1960. As a teenager, he helped pioneer and popularize street art, first with SAMO©, a tag serving as shorthand for “the same old sh-t,” and eventually with his distinctive “chicken-scratch” designs. As a young adult, he brought graffiti into the gallery, first in exclusive group shows and eventually as a sought-after solo artist.

Though he tragically died at just 27 years old, Basquiat’s decade-long career led to a prodigious legacy. Today, he remains both a celebrated creative and a cultural icon, recognized for his approach to themes like slavery and oppression. His works can be found in top museums and galleries around the globe, and sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction.

Kara Walker

Like Lawrence and Basquiat, Kara Walker, a California-born artist, explores issues of race in her work. Rather than opt for a bright color palette, however, Walker often works in monochrome, whether crafting a faux-stone fountain, a sugar sphynx, or, most prominently, her signature silhouettes.

Walker began creating silhouettes in 1994. Since then, she has continued to use these large-scale vignettes to creatively address the prevailing history of racism in the United States. Often, she imagines scenes set in the Antebellum South—a fitting focal point considering the roots of the cut-paper craft.  “I had a catharsis looking at early American varieties of silhouette cuttings,” she said. “What I recognize, besides narrative and historicity and racism, was very physical displacement: the paradox of removing a form from a blank surface that in turn creates a black hole.”

In addition to silhouette-making, Walker also dabbles in other mediums, creating everything from paintings and animated works to shadow puppets and “magic-lantern” projections.

Kehinde Wiley

In 2017, Nigerian-American portrait painter Kehinde Wiley made history when he became the first black artist to paint an official presidential portrait. Selected by President Barack Obama himself, Wiley was commissioned to complete the painting for the National Portrait Gallery, whose collection of presidential portraits is among its most important holdings.

Since this major project, Wiley has continued to reimagine traditional portraiture. Most recently, he challenged the expectations of equestrian painting with Rumors of War, a monumental sculpture that offers a contemporary response to confederate statues. With this piece, Wiley rethinks the concept of a “hero”—and of American identity.

“Today,” he said during the sculpture’s unveiling in Times Square, “we say yes to something that looks like us. We say yes to inclusivity. We say yes to broader notions of what it means to be an American.”

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