Program to examine art movement of African Americans

The migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the rural South to the urban North due to the demand for labor during World War I led to an arts movement in the 1920s and 1930s that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black painters and sculptors, writers, musicians, architects and others working in the arts congregated in cities where the arts were fostered. They also found financial support for their work in the white community because the 1920s economy was thriving.

"It was an explosion," says Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller, an associate professor of art at the University of Cincinnati.

Thursday night, Leininger-Miller will speak about the phenomenon also known as the "New Negro" Movement as part of Southeast Missouri State University's celebration of Black History Month. The event starts at 7 p.m. at Crisp Hall on the Southeast campus.

At the beginning of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the "double consciousness" of black people, the sense of being both an American and Negro at once, and rejected stereotypes of blacks. In a 1925 anthology, Alain Locke invoked the arrival of the "New Negro," educated and sophisticated blacks who had left their homes and moving to cities. "The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem," he said.

Centered around Harlem

Harlem was the epicenter of this movement, but it occurred in other American cities as well as in the Caribbean and Europe, Leininger-Miller said by phone from Cincinnati. That is the reason the term "New Negro" Movement is preferred to Harlem Renaissance now.

Black representation in popular art forms and folk art also blossomed. Locke called on black artists to look to African art for inspiration, noting that Picasso and Matisse and other artists already were. But black artists each sought their own inspirations.

"They were creating something distinctively American," Leininger-Miller said.

Aside from artists and intellectuals, few realized a renaissance was occurring. "Both blacks and whites didn't have a decent understanding of it," Leininger-Miller said.

The Harlem Renaissance ended in the 1930s, when the Great Depression dried up sources of funding for the arts.

A exhibition of art and books associated with the Harlem Renaissance and Black History Month has been set up in the lobby at the University Museum.

Leininger-Miller will show slides of some of the art created during this period. She recently received a a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on her next book, a biography of black sculptor Augusta Savage. Her first book was about African American painters and sculptors in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182