Aaron Douglas

He developed a style that fused Synthetic Cubism with the flat, angular silhouettes of Egyptian reliefs and sub-Saharan sculpture. His figures appear as layered, translucent cut-outs set against concentric circles of light, a technique that gave his compositions both mystical depth and graphic punch. The approach was unlike anything else being produced in American art at the time.

In 1934^[1], the Federal Arts Project commissioned Douglas to paint four murals for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem. The series, Aspects of Negro Life, traces African American history from its African roots through slavery, reconstruction, and the Great Migration north. In From Slavery through Reconstruction, a man on a soapbox holds a ballot aloft while concentric rings radiate outward from the Emancipation Proclamation. Behind him, the Union Army marches away as the Ku Klux Klan rides in from the left. The painting condenses an entire era of hope and menace into a single composition.

Douglas also illustrated books of poetry by James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, and his graphic work appeared in The Crisis and Opportunity magazines throughout the 1920s and 1930s. He later founded the art department at Fisk University in Nashville, where he taught until 1966^[1].