Jeffrey C. Stewart – författare

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In the prize-winning The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man. Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became--in the process--a New Negro himself.

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the twentieth century to mentor a generation of young artists like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the gender ambiguous, transformative, artistic African Americans whose art would subjectivize Black people and embolden greatness. Alain Locke (1885-1954) believed Black Americans were sleeping giant that could transform America into a truly humanistic and pluralistic society. In the 1920s, these views were radical, but by announcing a New Negro in art, literature, music, dance, theatre, Locke shifted the discussion of race from the problem-centered discourses of politics and economics to the new creative industries of American modernism. Although this Europhile detested jazz, he used the Jazz Age interest in Black aesthetics to plant the notion in American minds that Black people were America's quintessential artists and Black urban communities were crucibles of creativity where a different life was possible in America. By promoting art, a Black dandy subjectivized Black people and became in the process a New Negro himself.

'We have to-morrowBright before usLike a flame'The New Negro: An Interpretation is a multidisciplinary anthology of poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, art, and philosophy woven together into a seamless statement of Black agency in the arts and humanities that became, upon its publication in 1925, an instant publishing success. Edited by Alain Locke, a man known as the father of the Harlem Renaissance, the text is a powerful, provocative, and affecting anthology of writers who shaped the Harlem Renaissance movement and who help us to consider the evolution of the African American in society. With works by Black voices such as Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and W. E. B. DuBois, Locke constructed a vivid look at the changing African American, finding their place in the ever shifting sociocultural landscape that was 1920s America. With an introduction from Jeffrey C. Stewart, leading biographer of Locke, this collection explores the literary strength as well as the historical context of a monumental and fascinating time in the history of America.

A collection of illustrated essays highlights the works of influential Black artists from Washington, DC, from the 1920s to the presentIn a twentieth century during which modern art largely abandoned beauty as its imperative, a group of Black artists from Washington, DC, made beauty the center of their art making. This book highlights these influential artists, including David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Lois Mailou Jones, and Alma Thomas, in the context of what Jeffrey C. Stewart describes as the Washington Black Renaissance. Vibrant histories of key District institutions and the city’s communities of educators, critics, and collectors animate a nuanced consideration of the evolution of an aesthetic dialectic from the 1920s up to the present day. The 15 essays in the volume are grounded by voices from a live artist panel at the National Gallery of Art in 2017, which included Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall.Published by the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts/Distributed by Yale University Press