Hale A Woodruff Essay Research Paper At

Hale A. Woodruff Essay, Research Paper

At first African-American artist were known as slave artisans, there skills included iron work, cabinet makers, quiltmakers and silversmiths among others. The majority of these artists were using their talents to create useful items for their masters. In order to become a visual artist required talent, but it was a different for African-American artist back then. It was the nineteenth century, and race was a big issue, thus determining who could be trained in the arts. There were no schools or places where African-American could freely exhibit their work, these artist were excluded from all academies, schools and associations that were available for white artists. After the Civil War, many African-American artists began to be recognized. From 1865 to the beginning of the 1920 s African-American artists began creating paintings, sculptors, drawings that were acceptable for museums.

The challenge that many African American artists where facing after World War II was balancing their assimilation into the white cultural scene while maintaining their cultural identity and bringing about black issues such as civil rights. Hale Woodruff integrated African-design motifs into his colorful, large-scale canvases to portray his African ethnicity. The Renaissance Movement, as initiated by blacks in the 1920 s, is also referred to as the New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem was realized by a mix of American movers and shakers: social reformers, political activists, cultural elite s, progressives in public policy and education, and, of course, artists. Black Americans found it important to create in a manner true to their ethnic beliefs during the 1920 s. The Harlem Renaissance created a flowering of black talent of literary and artistic creativity that has left incredible cultural legacy. Among early 20th-century artists are important figures from the Harlem Renaissance era, including Aaron Douglas, James VanDerZee, William H. Johnson, Meta Warrick Fuller, and Hale Woodruff.

Hale A. Woodruff was born in Cairo, Illinois, on August 26, 1900. He studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana and went on to Harvard University. He was the recipient of a Harmon Foundation Award that permitted him to study in Paris from 1927-1931 at the Academie de le Grande Chaumiere. The economic depression forced Woodruff to return to the United States and he accepted a teaching position at Atlanta University. Thus in 1931 Woodruff became the first African-American artist with extensive and experience abroad to teach art in a black university. Woodruff s ideas about art changed quickly after he observed the plight of the African-Americans who struggled to exist in the South s crippled, one-crop economy and who had great difficulty obtaining relief allocations or jobs. This time of extreme hardship made Woodruff question the value of much that he learned during his stay in Europe. He concluded that cubism and modern art had little meaning for most Americans, and he began to encourage students to paint the social environment.

He started to paint around Georgia s rural areas and the style the represents his early works were Social Realist, like the Amistad Murals. He chose as subject matter the depiction of everyday life events and the relations of the people of that area. Woodruff spent the summer of 1938 studying mural painting with Diego Rivera in Mexico. In 1947, Woodruff left Atlanta University to accept a teaching position in New York University and he moved to Harlem. He then shifts his work style to that of Abstract Expressionism, Woodruff felt that abstraction [was] just another kind of reality. His main goal with this style was not to just verify what the viewer already knew, but to extend their vision and way of seeing. To Woodruff abstraction was an important pathway to artistic freedom and individual self discovery (Powell 102) .He continued to paint in an abstract manner for the rest of his life. Woodruff s European works were in the cubist mode. The Card Players was inspired by Pablo Picasso s cubist style and Cezanne s Two Card Players (1890-1892). The 16 paintings by Hale A. Woodruff in a Shared Heritage reflect many of the artistic trends popular in the 20th century, including cubism, regionalism, social realism and abstract expressionism. Woodruff was part of a group that formed in the 1960 s in New York called Spiral. Woodruff was promoted to professor of education at New York University in 1957, and in 1967, the university honored him with a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, he then retired in 1968. In the spring of 1979, the Studio Museum in Harlem held a retrospective of Woodruff s art, covering 50 years of his work. He died in 1980 at the age of 80.

The Amistad

The Amistad mutiny trial murals at Talladega College in Alabama (1938-1939) are Woodruff s most famous work. These murals were commissioned in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the mutiny by African slaves abroad the Amistad. Each of three panels represents a visual complex composition representing the historical events surrounding the mutiny, trial and return of slaves from the ship Amistad. The Amistad incident began off the coast of Cuba in 1839 with a shipboard rebellion by 54 Africans who had been illegally enslaved. Wandering up the Atlantic coast, the ship was seized by a United States reve