During
his youth, Robert Blackburn was mentored and shaped by Harlem
Renaissance artists including Charles "Spinky" Alston, Augusta
Savage, and James Lesesne Wells. From age thirteen, he created
and studied art at the 135th Street Branch of the New York
Public Library and the Harlem YMCA. At DeWitt Clinton High
School, he contributed artwork, stories, and poetry to the
school's literary magazine, The Magpie. He also
participated in the Harlem Arts Workshop, the Uptown Art
Laboratory, and the Harlem arts salon known as "306." Lithography
classes offered at the WPA-sponsored Harlem Community Art
Center introduced him to the art of printmaking.
The center, initiated by
Savage and artist and writer, Gwendolyn Bennett, became
a model for Blackburn's own workshop years later. Among
his colleagues at this time were artists Romare Bearden,
Ernest Crichlow, Roy DeCarava, and Jacob Lawrence. Also
key to his artistic development were his lithography teacher,
Riva Helfond, and his friend, the artist Ronald Joseph.
Blackburn's drawings and lithographs from this period won
national acclaim in exhibitions from Chicago to New York
and were cited and praised by such art critics as Alain
Locke and James Porter.
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Robert Blackburn (1920-2003)
Man With Load (or The
Toiler, Toil),
1936
Charcoal, ink, and graphite
Prints and Photographs Division (1)
| Robert
Blackburn absorbed the lessons of the Mexican muralists through his teacher
Charles Alston (1907-1977), who met Diego Rivera (1866-1957)
in 1933 at Rockefeller Center. Man with Load reprises a "burden carriers" theme
that also appeared in Rivera's works. Many of Blackburn's early drawings
draw on the conventions of monumentalism found in Mexican mural painting,
as well
as social realist iconography. This drawing came to the Library from the
Harmon Foundation, a New York-based sponsor of African American artists. |
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Born in the British West
Indies, Ronald Joseph moved to New York at the age of thirteen.
During the 1930s he studied printmaking along with Robert
Blackburn under Riva Helfond at the Harlem Art Center, where
Joseph also later taught. He worked in the mural section
of the WPA and was a representative of the Harlem Artists'
Guild to the New York Worlds Fair (1939-1940). By 1943,
prominent art critic James Porter considered him the 'foremost
Negro abstractionist painter' in New York.
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Ronald Joseph (1910-1992)
Untitled, 1955
Lithograph
Prints and Photographs Division (2)
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Ernest Crichlow (b. 1914)
Lovers, 1938
Lithograph (reprint, ca. 1990s)
Prints and Photographs
Division (3)
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Ernest Crichlow went to Harlem
around 1932 to work with artist Augusta Savage. Crichlow
met Blackburn both at Savage's Uptown Art Laboratory and
at the Harlem Community Art Center. He founded the Cinque
Gallery with Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis and still lives
and works in Brooklyn. Lovers can be seen as part
of the targeted activism against racism on the part of the
Harlem artists of this time.
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Early in his career, Hale
Woodruff studied painting at the the Art Institute of Chicago
and drew political cartoons for The Indianapolis Ledger.
In 1925, his work won the Spingarn Competition sponsored
by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People's Crisis magazine, inspiring, the magazine's
editor, W.E.B. Du Bois to commission from him future cover
designs. In 1931, Woodruff accepted a position at Atlanta
University, where he founded the first art department and
taught for fourteen years. By Parties Unknown, a
powerful indictment against lynching, is from a series of
woodblock prints about the American South.
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Hale Woodruff (1900-1980)
By Parties Unknown, ca. 1935
Linocut
Prints and Photographs
Division (4)
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Roy DeCarava (b. 1919)
Pickets, 1946
Serigraph
Prints and Photographs
Division (5)
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Master photographer Roy DeCarava
studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and
the Harlem Community Art Center. He recalls: "Now, the Harlem
Art Center was a wonderful place. That's where I met all
the young artists . . . Paul Robeson had an office there,
and Langston Hughes was a familiar presence." During this
period, Blackburn and DeCarava first met and shared artistic
circles. It was also at this time that DeCarava joined the
WPA, where he learned silkscreen printing. By the end of
the 1940s he had stopped making prints to focus on photography.
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