ABSTRACT
In 1925, Harlem Renaissance logician Alain Locke extolled in his edited volume The New Negro what he perceived as, “The promising beginning of an art movement instead of just the cropping out of isolated talent”. The fundamental need for black self-representation and the generation of complex, humanizing, and varied understandings of black lives and individuals continues to have relevance as a global theme in contemporary and art and visual culture. The range of approaches to representing blackness and the dissensus over how African Americans should be represented is foundational to the Renaissance and is perhaps its most enduring statement of black complexity and humanity. Like Augusta Savage, Chicago artist Archibald J. Motley Jr., celebrated everyday African American life and people and exhibited particular sensitivities for the markings of socioeconomic class. Florestine Perrault Collins produced an extensive body of portraiture and group shots of Creole New Orleans, deepening the body of images that defines the Negro Renaissance.
