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Spencer's Douglas exhibit on display at Smithsonian

Art will show in D.C. museum until Aug. 3

Acclaim continues to come in for the Spencer Museum of Art-organized exhibition celebrating the life, art and legacy of Aaron Douglas, an African-American artist from Kansas who went on to become the most important visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. The exhibit is now on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Susan Earle, the Spencer museum's curator of European and American art, oversees the exhibit "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist" is the first-ever national traveling retrospective of Douglas' work, and it brings together nearly 100 works from public institutions and private collections across the country. In the May 23 issue of Antiques and the Arts Weekly, reviewer Stephen May called the exhibition "a fitting tribute to the breadth, vigor, innovation, inspiring example and remarkable artistic impulses of this singular figure in American art history." In the June 1 Washington Post, art critic Blake Gopnik compared Douglas' work with Jacob Lawrence's Migration series, which is currently on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

The exhibition debuted last fall at KU's Spencer museum and traveled this spring to Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts. It will remain on view at the Smithsonian through Aug. 3. The national tour concludes this fall at New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where it will be on display Aug. 30-Nov. 30.

For more information on the display, visit Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.

AARON DOUGLAS

Born to laborer parents in Topeka, Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) overcame many obstacles to pursue his passion for art and ideas. He was one of the first African-American artists to portray racial themes within the context of modern art, and his ambitious pursuit of justice through his paintbrush continues to influence artists today. After earning a bachelor's degree in 1922 from the University of Nebraska and teaching at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, he migrated to New York in 1925 to join in the cultural flourishing that has variously been called the New Negro Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance. He later taught art at historically black Fisk University in Nashville.

A socially conscious artist, Douglas vividly captured the spirit of his time and established a new black aesthetic and vision. Working from a politicized concept of personal identity, he combined art-deco dynamism with African and African-American imagery to produce a new visual vocabulary that evoked not only current realities but also hope for a better future. His work is the most powerful visual legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on the art and cultural heritage of the nation.

Of special interest to the Spencer museum's exploration of Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance is the Midwestern origin of artists associated with what seems a distinctly urban and East Coast phenomenon. Douglas and his good friend Langston Hughes spent their childhoods in Kansas, and other important writers such as Claude McKay and Countee Cullen had Midwestern ties. The exhibition will illuminate not only the Midwestern roots of the "New Negro" outpouring in Harlem, but also how Douglas' influence extended far beyond the Harlem neighborhood and the years most closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

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