“Untitled” (America) | Art & Artists

Archibald John Motley Jr. was a leading painter of Chicago’s Black community. By 1930 African American migrants from the South had dramatically transformed the neighborhoods on that city’s South Side into a culturally thriving quarter. Its inhabitants became Motley’s primary artistic inspiration, and in this night scene—almost hallucinatory in color—he captured the full spectrum of urban experience. Motley often made strategic use of visual stereotypes, such as those common to minstrel shows. He rendered the man standing on a platform emblazoned with “Jesus Saves,” for example, with exaggerated red lips. With such caricatures, Motley may have been poking fun at the ecstatic forms of worship he associated with recent arrivals from the rural Deep South. This approach would have been readily understood by African Americans at the time and was meant to be both sardonic and affectionate.