Little Known Talent Black artist Archibald John Motley, Jr. (1891 - 1981) Archibald John Motley, Jr. was born in New Orleans and spent the majority of his life in Chicago. Motleys studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded the Harmon Foundation award in 1928, and then became the first black artist to have a one-man exhibit in New York City. He sold twenty-two out of the twenty-six exhibited paintings. In 1929, Motley won the Guggenheim Fellowship and he studied in France for a year. While many Harlem Renaissance artists looked back to Africa for sources of inspiration, Motley was inspired by work of Renaissance painters, Dutch painters (especially Rembrandt). Motley’s portraits update, that is modernize, the conventions of the Western tradition--allowing for black bodies, specifically black female bodies, a space in a history that had traditionally excluded them. Motley was incredibly interested in skin tonalities, and did numerous portraits documenting black women historically defined as octoroons, quadroons, and mulattoes. These works celebrate skin tonalities as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic. Motleys night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture, are perhaps his most popular and most prolific. His vivid, urban black cultural scenes bear little resemblance to the conventional and marginalizing rustic images of black Southerners so popular in the cultural eye. Note: Motley was among the affluent and elite black community of Chicago
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 08:22:55 +0000