The Toiler
Oil or tempera on board
8 3/4 x 6 5/8 inches
Circa 1935
As published in:
Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century
As exhibited in:
Uptown Triennial 2020, 2020, Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York, New York
Aaron Douglas and Arna Bontemps: Partners in Activism, 2015–2016, Alexandria Museum of Art, Virginia
Southern Gothic: Literary Intersections with Art from the Johnson Collection, 2019, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 2023–2024, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, 2023, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2024, Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, 2024, Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2024–2025
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2023, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023
Armed with two undergraduate degrees, Kansan Aaron Douglas moved to New York City in 1925 to take part in the exciting cultural movement galvanized by the teachings of Alain Locke, an African American philosopher and social activist. The New Negro Movement emphasized self-respect and pride among African Americans, and the enormous creative outpouring that resulted became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
When Douglas arrived in Harlem, he was painting in an academic style grounded in European precedent. His contemporaries encouraged him to look to traditional African art and motifs as he developed his aesthetic voice; for the balance of his career, Douglas strove to capture the complexity and grand scope of the African American experience. Following study abroad in Paris and Haiti, in 1937 Douglas received a Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship which funded brief residencies at three historically black schools: Tuskegee Institute, Dillard University, and Fisk University.
Douglas returned to Fisk the next year as an assistant professor and remained a member of the faculty until his retirement in 1966. His broad campus influence was especially evident in the inter-disciplinary activities of the university’s Van Vechten Gallery. Throughout his tenure, he clearly and consistently exhorted students to be global ambassadors of African American culture. Writing of Douglas’s impact on generations of students, artist Terry Adkins described his elder’s oeuvre as a beacon for African Americans’ “under-known contributions to and influences on aspects of life and culture in the Western Hemisphere in subtle defiance of their untimely exclusion from that historical fabric. Aaron Douglas’s art heroically transcends the Harlem Renaissance that dates it.”
Fisk, along with Spelman College in Atlanta and Hampton University in Virginia, was one of a handful of HBCUs that displayed the Harmon Foundation’s traveling African American art exhibitions between 1928 and 1933. When the foundation dispersed its assets in 1967, the art inventory was divided between four institutions: the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Hampton, and Fisk. Many credit Aaron Douglas with the gift to Fisk, which numbered approximately two hundred objects.
Other works by this artist