The Harlem Community Art Center was a Federal Art Project community art center that operated from 1937 to 1942. It influenced various budding artists intent on depicting Harlem and led to the formation of the Harlem Arts Alliance. It became a countrywide exemplar for others, notably the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. [1]
Augusta Savage led various art classes in Harlem, and several other art leaders collaborated with the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in establishing community workshops. [2] The Harlem YMCA also held art classes between 1934 and 1935 led by sculptor William Artis. [3]
The idea for the Harlem Community Art Center came from African-American artists in the Harlem Artists Guild. They envisioned a community space free to all, making art instruction accessible. [2] The Harlem Community Art Center was based on the ideal that art was central to community, and aspired to be both a space for exposing people to art and an institution for developing African-American artists. [4]
The Harlem Community Art Center was a WPA-sponsored center in operation from November 1937 [5] to 1942. [6] The center was first directed by Augusta Savage, and Gwendolyn Bennett assumed the role afterward. [6] It is widely considered a focal arena for the Harlem Renaissance. [6]
In its first 16 months, 70,592 people attended Harlem Community Art Center activities [5] and more than 1,500 took part in day or evening classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and design. [3] Artists who taught or studied at the center include Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Romare Bearden, Selma Burke, Ernest Crichlow, Aaron Douglas, Elton Fax, Sargent Johnson, William Henry Johnson, Langston Hughes, Ronald Joseph, Robert Blackburn, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Claude McKay, James Lesene Wells and Richard Wright. [3]
The center also had the chance to influence more than just adults: "And who are these people who have been reached by the Center? Exactly 2,467 children and adults have registered in the art classes. More than 23,989 people have participated in the Center's extension activities, lectures, and demonstrations. Thousands of others come to the Center regularly to see the exhibitions and to attend other special events". [5] Psychiatric wards would send children with mental illnesses to the center and they flourished. [5]
The Harlem Community Art Center had a multiethnic faculty and a diverse student population was also diverse. Students ranged from established Harlem artists to children from New York psychiatric hospitals who benefitted from creative activities. [2]
Charles Henry Alston was an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Alston designed and painted murals at the Harlem Hospital and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building. In 1990, Alston's bust of Martin Luther King Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House.
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression. According to American Heritage, “Something like 400,000 easel paintings, murals, prints, posters, and renderings were produced by WPA artists during the eight years of the project’s existence, virtually free of government pressure to control subject matter, interpretation, or style.”
The Spokane Art Center in Spokane, Washington, was a community art school opened in 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. Its staff included many notable artists, and it was widely considered to be one of the nation's most successful FAP art centers. It closed in 1942.
Robert Hamilton Blackburn was an African-American artist, teacher, and master printmaker.
Gwendolyn Clarine Knight was an American artist who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in the West Indies.
Harry Gottlieb was an American painter, screen printer, lithographer, and educator.
Augusta Savage was an American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a teacher whose studio was important to the careers of a generation of artists who would become nationally known. She worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts.
The South Side Community Art Center is a community art center in Chicago that opened in 1940 with support from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in Illinois. Opened in Bronzeville in an 1893 mansion, it became the first black art museum in the United States and has been an important center for the development Chicago's African American artists. Of more than 100 community art centers established by the WPA, this is the only one that remains open.
Norman Wilfred Lewis was an American painter, scholar, and teacher. Lewis, who was African-American and of Bermudian descent, was associated with abstract expressionism, and used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles.
Georgette Seabrooke, was an American muralist, artist, illustrator, art therapist, non-profit chief executive and educator. She is best known for her 1936 mural, Recreation in Harlem at Harlem Hospital in New York City, which was restored and put on public display in 2012 after being hidden from view for many years.
Concetta Scaravaglione was an American sculptor. Her parents immigrated from Calabria, Italy, and Concetta was the youngest of nine children. She is known for her monumental figurative sculpture, her work for the Federal Arts Project (FAP), and her teaching career.
Elizabeth Olds was an American artist known for her work in developing silkscreen as a fine arts medium. She was a painter and illustrator, but is primarily known as a printmaker, using silkscreen, woodcut, lithography processes. In 1926, she became the first female honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship. She studied under George Luks, was a Social Realist, and worked for the Public Works of Art Project and Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. In her later career, Olds wrote and illustrated six children's books.
Elba Lightfoot (1910-1989) was an African-American artist known for her work on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals at Harlem Hospital.
Jolán Gross-Bettelheim was a Hungarian artist who lived and worked in the United States from 1925 to 1956, before returning to Hungary.
The Harlem Artists Guild (1935–41) was an African-American organization founded by artists including Augusta Savage, Charles Alston, Elba Lightfoot, Louise E. Jefferson and bibliophile Arthur Schomburg with the aims of encouraging young talent, providing a forum for the discussion of the visual arts in the community, fostering understanding between artists and the public through education towards an appreciation of art, focusing on issues of general concern to Black artists such as racism, poverty and unemployment, and cooperating with agencies to improve conditions and raise standards of living and achievement among African-American artists. It is said to have had its origins in the dissatisfaction of African-American artists with the activities of the Harmon Foundation, and was described by co-founder Alston as "a pressure group to get more black artists on the federal projects."
Anthony Velonis was an American painter and designer born in New York City who helped introduce the public to silkscreen printing in the early 20th century. He married Elizabeth Amidon, with whom he had four children.
Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as The Harp, was a plaster sculpture by African-American artist Augusta Savage. It was commissioned for the 1939 New York World's Fair, and displayed in the courtyard of the Pavilion of Contemporary Art during the fair at Flushing Meadow. The sculpture was destroyed along with other temporary artworks at the site after the closing of the exhibition in 1940.
Mary Perry Stone was an American painter, sculptor, and muralist. She is best known for her social protest artwork. Her archives are held in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Samuel Joseph Brown Jr. (1907–1994) was a watercolorist, printmaker, and educator. He was the first African American artist hired to produce work for the Public Works of Art Project, a precursor to the Work Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Brown often depicted the lives of African Americans in his paintings. He worked primarily in watercolor and oils, and he produced portraits, landscapes and prints.
Hyman J. Warsager (1909–1974) was an American artist known for his printmaking.
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This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Works Progress Administration .