Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance
A Kansas native born in Topeka, Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) vividly captured the spirit of his time and established a new black aesthetic and utopian vision.

As the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, he combined angular cubist rhythms and a seductive art-deco dynamism with traditional African and African American imagery to develop a radically new visual vocabulary that evoked both current realities and hopes for a better future.

His forceful ideas and their distinctive artistic form produced the most powerful legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and had a lasting impact on the history of art.

Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance will present the first touring retrospective of the work of Douglas.

Traveling to three additional venues throughout 2008, this exhibition will interrogate the boundaries of American modernism in order to assess the seminal but often neglected role of the Harlem Renaissance and one of its most important artists.

It will also assess Douglas's achievements and enduring significance through an investigation of his work in New York and his subsequent teaching legacy at historically black Fisk University in Nashville.

In addition to an accompanying fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, diverse interdisciplinary programs arranged for the Spencer Museum of Art venue