Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas was a pioneering and major figure in American art.  Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, in 1899 to Aaron and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Ross Douglas, Aaron Douglas was a painter, illustrator and art educator who worked closely with other Black artists and activists. A highly influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas’ public murals and illustrations appeared in widely circulated publications and exercised a Modernist influence during vibrant, turbulent and rapidly changing decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

His pursuit of art began at a young age. Douglas designed the cover of his high school yearbook in Topeka in 1917. His high school was integrated, and he was one of the few Black students in the school. He then attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, graduating in 1922 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts. Douglas also took classes at the University of Kansas at this time. He lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and taught art at Lincoln High School from 1923-1925, growing the art club to seventy students. 

Inspired by publications such as Survey Graphic by influential Black intellectuals including Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas moved to Harlem in New York City. Around this same time, he married Alta Mae Sawyer in 1926. His move to Harlem brought him in contact with German émigré studio artist Fritz Winold Reiss. He also worked with W.E.B. DuBois and collaborated with writer and poet Langston Hughes, who was also from the Midwest. In 1928 he was awarded a Barnes Foundation fellowship to study Modernist paintings and African art. He also created murals, including at Club Ebony in Harlem, Fisk University in Tennessee, and in Chicago and North Carolina.

Aaron Douglas moved to Paris in 1931 to study painting and sculpture at the Académie Scandinave. In the mid-1930s, he was commissioned by the Public Works Administration to paint the acclaimed cycle Aspects of Negro Life for the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library. He was highly involved with Harlem artists and was elected the president of the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935, the same year it was formed. He was twice awarded the Rosenwald Foundation travel fellowship (1937 and 1938) and traveled to the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the American South.

In the late 1930s, Douglas began teaching part-time at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a leading African American University in the U.S. He completed his master’s of arts degree in 1944 from Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City. Douglas then moved to Nashville to teach in the Art Department at Fisk University full time, where he worked until his retirement in 1966. During his time there, he was awarded the Carnegie Grant for the Advancement of Teaching in 1951 and 1952. He continued to frequent New York, taking art classes at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955. Aaron Douglas died in Nashville in 1979.