Black Artists in the United States
Name
Institution Affiliated
WPA/FAP Grants had various effects on the Black Artists that are in the United States. After the occurrence of the Great Depression, the artists, lost employments, drastic declines in the outputs, and deflation that was so acute. The great depression struck countries that had market economies at the end of the 1920s (Temin, 2016). Black Printmakers and the WPA specifically look at the areas of beautiful prints, community art, and the center’s location. The WPA education and service from the community allowed the black artists to be supported in their work line, gaining new avenues for expression and contact, which to some level could never have occurred. The black artists, despite their activeness, had very few historical antecedents, recorded this, making it impossible to trace personal achievements. The black artists also had less access to the publication pages focusing on race relations issues. It was not until WPA emergence that black artists found viable conditions, helping them explore their creativity, develop printmaking processes, and have access to advanced and new technologies. With the WPA in the picture, the black artists developed more fine arts and had access to the magazines. Many of the artists that are employed under the WPA are associates of social realism, as its main aim is to reveal the tensions between its victims and the oppressive force (Herzog, 2019).
Economic changes in the United States made the prompting of the Social Realism age. The WPA is said to have supported the murals and prints created for easy access by the public. There was an end of the African American artists’ careers, which made them move towards the abstract in the 1940s and 50s. Abstract expressionism had a replacement of social realism in the 1950s. The movement lured many artists from the realist depictions of the working class towards t the complex imagery. Those who never embraced the new abstraction had the struggle to find a place in the world of it. The African Americans whose capabilities had been acknowledged during the 1930s lost their pillars in the art world. Fleeting of the opportunities that the African Americans had during the depression took place (Lewis, 2019). The WPA made an impact either directly or indirectly in education and developments in the profession of many artists, some of whom were African American. Without this program, many of these artists could not be known even today.
Black existentialism is a philosophical theory, which has a perspective that a set of categories governed by authenticity norm is necessary for human existence. It has empowerment on the black people around the globe. The black existentialism philosophy includes both the Africana philosophy and the black philosophical thought. In the 20th century middle decades, existentialism had a domination on the philosophy of Europeans and their literary scene. The prominent theorists put the history and body experience as the core of literary life. It is no surprise then that existentialism appealed to many African American thinkers of the same time and afterwards (Murphy, 2018). The black philosophical thought has the ideas that arise from the black designated individuals. The black artists had an appeal on this, considering that they had gone through a lot of racism problems in their artwork before the emergence of the WPA that came to their rescue and also their artwork at large. Various individuals bring out the factors that make the black existential philosophy. Many theorists have brought out the theme of black suffering and existence and also dealing with some contradictions on the theological beliefs.
Fanon wrote his book ‘Black Skin’ having its fifth chapter with the topic of ‘The Fact of Blackness’ during the time of decolonization, and determination of self among colonies was starting to gain momentum. Fanon tries to answer the question of what a black man want in this topic he had does. He possesses different questions concerning black man, and he, at one point, that the black is not a man, something which brought even more questions. In my opinion, Fanon, the black man, was trying to give out an illustration of who a black individual is. What are the various problems or challenges that are experienced being black? He shows how difficult it was to express himself with the rest of the blacks in front of the whites. Imagine you passing, and what comes out of the white individual is ‘look the dirty dark negro ‘with very pissing laughs. He explains that life being black is not easy (Hamilton, 2019). Tries to give out the various types of blacks that can be there but then remembers that during his time, the only thing that was considered to be black was the individuals who had the dark color skin. What he writes here correlates what the black artists faced, but then considering his perspective of trying to have self-identity, I see that he had never had the acceptance that he is black and ready to face the racial difficulties.
References
Hamilton, T. (2019, March). Embodying Resistance: Power as Internal Resistance in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In Inquiry@ Queen’s Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings.
Herzog, M. A. (2019). AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS AND MEXICO. The Routledge Companion to African American Art History.
Lewis, S. (2019). AFRICAN AMERICAN ABSTRACTION. The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, 16.
Murphy, J. P. (2018). Charles White: The Art and Politics of Humanism, 1947–1956. American Communist History, 17(3-4), 282-300.
Temin, P. (2016). Great Depression. In Banking Crises (pp. 144-153). Palgrave Macmillan, London.