Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, on the twenty-sixth of May 1899. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln (1922), taught high-school art for two years in Kansas City, and moved to Harlem in 1925.

He apprenticed in Harlem under the German immigrant artist Winold Reiss, whose modernist illustration style — angular silhouettes, Egyptian-revival geometry, two-dimensional flat color — Douglas extended into his own distinctive idiom over the next two decades. His silhouette figures, set against geometric concentric-circle backgrounds and integrated with stylized motifs drawn from West African sculpture and Egyptian relief, became the defining visual signature of the Harlem Renaissance in print media.

He produced major illustration commissions for Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones (1927), W. E. B. Du Bois's The Crisis magazine throughout the 1920s, and Charles S. Johnson's Opportunity magazine. He produced the murals at Fisk University Library (1930) and at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (the four-panel Aspects of Negro Life, 1934) under the federal Public Works of Art Project — the latter remains one of the most-studied American mural cycles of the New Deal era.

He took his MFA at Columbia University in 1944 and founded the Department of Art at Fisk University the same year. He chaired the Fisk art department from 1944 to 1966 — twenty-two years — training successive generations of African American visual artists.

He died in Nashville on the twenty-second of February 1979, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the painter whose silhouette geometry gave the Harlem Renaissance its visual voice.