Printmaking

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Printmaking

Historically, printmaking has fallen into the category of graphic arts, and includes relief printing, engraving, etching, aquatint, silkscreen printing, and lithography. Although the African forebears of African Americans had their own traditions of printed and/or multiple arts (as seen in the relief and resist textile-printing techniques of numerous West African peoples), there is no evidence that these printing traditions survived in the Americas. Therefore, a discussion of African Americans in the graphic arts rightfully belongs within the larger historical picture of printmaking in America.

Occasional African-American graphic artists emerged from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Possibly the earliest known black American printmaker—and the most obscure—was Scipio Moorhead. Moorhead's talents were praised by a fellow black Bostonian, the famous Senegalese-born poet Phillis Wheatley, in her poem "To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Work." A copperplate engraving of the poet, which appeared as the frontispiece to the 1773 London edition of her volume of poetry, has been attributed to Moorhead.

Moorhead, like many of the African-American artists who came after him, learned to paint and/or make prints through an apprenticeship with a sympathetic white artisan. Numerous black artists during the antebellum period, such as Robert M. Douglass Jr. and Patrick Reason, trained with artisans and cultivated clients from the growing ranks of northern white abolitionists. Reason's skillfully realized 1848 copper engraving of the runaway slave and antislavery lecturer Henry Bibb demonstrates that these black artists were capable of both mastering the intricacies of the various graphic arts techniques and making their work a part of the abolitionist movement.

In contrast to those antebellum black artists whose careers were linked with the struggle for black emancipation, many nineteenth-century artists of color avoided social issues altogether, choosing instead to do common portraiture, picturesque landscapes, and other forms of nonracial art. For example, Jules Lion in New Orleans and James P. Ball in Cincinnati both headed thriving lithography businesses that catered to largely white clienteles. After the Civil War and continuing into the first decade of the twentieth century, African-American lithographer Grafton Tyler Brown produced numerous stock certificates, street maps, and landscapes, mostly of California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Nevada territories.

Henry Ossawa Tanner and his student William Edouard Scott, although known primarily as painters, were the first African-American graphic artists to move beyond commercial work and create fine art prints. Working through the first two decades of the twentieth century, Tanner and Scott borrowed art techniques learned from the French impressionists and applied these to their respective etchings and lithographs of landscapes, marine settings, and occasional portraits and genre scenes. Etchers William McKnight Farrow, Allan Randall Freelon, and Albert Alexander Smith, though active at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression, also subscribed to this belated/modified form of visual modernism.

Two graphic artists who, during the period of the Harlem Renaissance, broke away from European-American artistic conventions and embraced more avantgarde, African design sensibilities were Aaron Douglas and James Lesesne Wells. Douglas's bold, angular renderings of African Americans, as seen in his series of relief prints illustrating the Eugene O'Neill play The Emperor Jones (1926), recalled the highly stylized and distorted representations of human anatomy found in traditional African sculpture. Similar approaches to the human figure and to two-dimensional design appeared in Wells's graphic works, such as his relief print African Fantasy (1929).

With the onset of the Great Depression, Douglas and Wells continued their experiments in design and form, but their innovations were tempered by the social and economic realities of the times. Consequently, these graphic artists and others turned toward an art of social realism, an approach that placed humanity, social concerns, and the environment at the center of artistic matters.

A more socially engaged art scene in America, with the graphic arts playing a major role in this ideological shift, was further encouraged by the creation of the Works Progress Administration/Federal Arts Projects, or the WPA/FAP, in 1935. This government program, apart from helping to put Americans back to work, provided support for the creation of art in public places, the implementation of scholarly inventories of American design, the development of community art centers, and the establishment of artists' workshops. Significant numbers of African-American artists participated in WPA/FAP graphic workshops in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. A few of these black print-makers—such as the Philadelphia-based Dox Thrash, who helped develop a new printmaking process—were considered major figures in their respective art communities, regardless of race.

From the end of World War II to the historic signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, African-American art and culture underwent numerous shifts and emphases, which are reflected in the graphic arts of those transitional years. Toward the end of the 1940s, visual commentaries on the racial inequities in America were present in the prints of several black artists, most notably Elizabeth Catlett in works such as her relief print I Have Special Reservations (1946). Concurrent with these images of black protest were the more idealistic and uplifting representations of an artist such as Charles White, whose relief print Exodus #1 (1949) focuses on black aspirations and Afro-America's sense of racial pride.

By the 1950s and early 1960s many African-American graphic artists worked with themes and stylistic approaches that differed radically from the political and/or culture-specific works of Catlett and White. Etcher/engraver Norma Morgan and relief printmaker Walter Williams, though two very different artists, developed essentially nonracial formulas for their work. Williams subscribed to a figurative expressionist sensibility, as seen in his relief print Fighting Cock (1957), while Morgan's copper engraving David in the Wilderness (1956) illustrates her adherence to a romantic realist agenda.

Beginning in the late 1960s the rumblings of the civil rights movement and the strong identification with an African heritage propelled many African-American artists to revisit social themes and ethnic styles that had been pioneered by Catlett and Wells. The results were works that spoke to the issue of black solidarity, such as the silkscreen Unite (1970) by Chicago artist Barbara Jones-Hogu, and works that recalled African colors and imagery, such as the relief print Jungle Rhythms #2 (1968) by New York artist Ademola Olugebefola.

This atmosphere of a heightened racial consciousness ushered in an abundance of work from about 1968 to 1976 that reflected African-American sensibilities, most often in the form of a race-specific figurative art. This new black imagery among artists, coinciding with a newfound enthusiasm within the greater art world for the art of the print, resulted in many different examples of African-American graphic art. Among the many artists who produced important graphic works during this period were Samella Lewis, Ruth Waddy, Lev Mills, and Leon Hicks. Injustice Case (1970), a relief "body" print by David Hammons, and The Get-A-Way (1976), a lithograph by Margo Humphrey (b. 1942), show the wide range of approaches to the figure, as well as to issues of culture, that African-American graphic artists grappled with during the 1970s. Nonfigurative art was explored in depth during this period as well, as seen in the abstract prints of etcher and lithographer John E. Dowell Jr.

The 1970s and 1980s, like the Depression years, were a period in which graphic workshops among black artists proliferated. Apart from the important printmakers and printmaking activities based within college and university art departments (such as the printmaking department at Howard University, headed by etcher Winston Kennedy [b. 1944]), several African-American-managed graphic arts workshops produced major works. These include Workshop, Inc., in Washington, D.C., founded by silkscreen artist Lou Stovall; WD Graphic Workshop, also in Washington, founded by etcher Percy Martin; Brandywine Graphic Workshop in Philadelphia, founded by lithographer Allan Edmunds Jr.; and the Printmaking Workshop in New York, founded by master printmaker Robert Blackburn. Major African-American artists known primarily as painters and sculptors, such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Betye Saar, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, and Mel Edwards, have all produced prints under the supervision of these workshop founder/directors. Since the 1980s these workshops and others have provided many African-American artists with the opportunity to explore new graphic-arts techniques, as well as traditional printmaking media, in service to contemporary issues and ideas in the visual arts.

See also Art in the United States, Contemporary; Folk Arts and Crafts; Harlem Renaissance