“Untitled” (America) | Art & Artists

Already an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas traveled in 1930 to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee—a historically Black liberal arts college where he would later found the art department—to paint one of his most ambitious murals. The work here is a study for one panel of the mural, a narrative cycle that begins with a collective memory of life in Africa and follows the experience of Black people in America. This panel represents the critical contributions of Black Americans in building this country—from harvesting its land to the promise of new opportunity in industrialized cities during the Great Migration.