ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on those practices marginalized by “Harlem Renaissance” taxonomies to propose a history of African American art of the thirties and forties that can account for Motley’s United States Mail no less than paintings like his Spell of the Voodoo. For black artists’ backlash against the perceived shortcomings of the “New Negro” movement characterizes much of the period. During the 1930s and 1940s, many African American artists tried to elude not just the institutional confines of the “New Negro Renaissance,” but also its demands on the content of their work. Even as the centrifugal integrationist impulses drew African American artists out into the mainstream, a simultaneous desire to create black-run arts infrastructure pulled them centripetally into tight-knit cooperatives that provided mentorship, camaraderie, advocacy, and mutual support. Absent from more integrated scholarship, African American artists may yet remain in the shadowed margins of art history.
