cover, Opportunity Art Folio

Aaron Douglas, artist

1899–1979

Opportunity Magazine, publisher

Langston Hughes, author

1902–1967

cover, Opportunity Art Folio, 1926

Portfolio/Series title: Opportunity Art Folio

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: wove paper; relief print

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 500 x 335 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 11/16 x 13 3/16 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 28 1/2 x 22 x 1 1/4 in
Weight (Weight): 10 lbs

Credit line: Museum purchase: Helen Foresman Spencer Art Acquisition Fund, Lucy Shaw Schultz Fund, and Office of the Chancellor

Accession number: 2003.0012.01

Not on display

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Images

Label texts

Art and Activism: 50 Years of Africana Studies at KU

“The experience of everyday life constitutes a constant contribution to the artist’s experience.”
–Safia Farhat, La Presse, January 16, 1970

Artists across Africa and the African Diaspora sought to reconcile modernist binaries such as art/craft, high/low, and modern/traditional in various media and imagery. Two-dimensional graphic arts such as postcards, illustrations for literary journals, and postage stamps enabled wide circulation. The artist group École de Tunis (Tunis School) formed in 1948 to forge a Tunisian artistic modernism collective. Its members included Jellal Ben Abdallah, whose early drawings illustrated the feminist publication Leïla in the 1930s; Ali Bellagha, who opened a gallery to elevate Tunisian arts; and Safia Farhat, the first Tunisian director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis.

The Topeka-born artist Aaron Douglas also shaped pan-African philosophies of uplifting African and African American art and society. Like artists of the École de Tunis, Douglas evoked African design elements to create murals and graphics. Soon after he moved from the Midwest to Harlem in 1925, Douglas began creating graphic work for two important civil rights journals, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. In 1926, Douglas collaborated with poet and fellow Kansan Langston Hughes on a group of six prints for Opportunity. Their image-and-text collaboration proved so popular that Opportunity made the prints available to subscribers in the form of an art folio. Douglas’s angular, silhouetted forms are starkly rendered, creating a visual equivalent to Hughes’s poems.

Race, Gender, and the "Decorative" in 20th-Century African Art: Reimagining Boundaries

“The experience of everyday life constitutes a constant contribution to the artist’s experience.”
—Safia Farhat, La Presse, January 16, 1970
Artists across Africa and the African Diaspora sought to reconcile modernist binaries such as art/craft, high/low, and modern/traditional in various media. Two-dimensional graphic arts such as postcards, illustrations for literary journals, and postage stamps enabled artists to widely circulate such imagery. The artist group École de Tunis (Tunis School) formed in 1948 to forge a Tunisian artistic modernism collective. Its members included Jellal Ben Abdallah, whose early drawings illustrated the feminist publication Leïla in the 1930s; Ali Bellagha, who opened a gallery to elevate Tunisian arts; and Safia Farhat, the first Tunisian director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and professor of tapestry and decorative arts. The stamps and postcard on display reveal the group’s engagement with artistic heritage such as embroidered wedding costumes, spinning wool, pottery, woven fans and hats, and musical instruments. The Topeka-born artist Aaron Douglas also shaped pan-African philosophies of uplifting African and African-American art and society. Like artists of the École de Tunis, Douglas evoked African design elements to create murals and graphics. His 1926 cover illustration for the magazine Opportunity accompanied poems

Exhibition Label:
"Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist," 2007-08, Susan Earle
Soon after he moved from the Midwest to Harlem in 1925, Douglas began creating graphic work for two important civil rights journals, "The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races" and "Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life." In 1926, Douglas collaborated with the poet and fellow Kansan Langston Hughes on a group of six prints for Opportunity. Their image-and-text collaboration proved so popular that Opportunity made the prints available to subscribers in the form of an art folio. Douglas’s angular, silhouetted forms are starkly rendered, reminiscent of both German Expressionist art and the rhythms and content of the blues, creating a visual equivalent to Hughes’s poems.

Archive Label 2003:
In December 1926 the African-American journal, Opportunity Magazine, advertised a special gift suggestion for the holiday season, an “Opportunity Art Folio” containing six poems by Langston Hughes with drawings by Aaron Douglas. Hughes and Douglas were leading members of the African-American cultural revolution known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The arrangement of image and text found in the portfolio first appeared in the October, 1926, issue of Opportunity Magazine under the title, “Two Artists/ Poems by Langston Hughes/Drawings by Aaron Douglas.”

The Douglas-Hughes portfolio is a brilliant example of the collaborative spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The formal elements of the portfolio were chosen with great care and thought. The use of blue paper conveys the blues, as do Hughes’ poems. The clear reference to the relationship and awareness of both artists to African art is evoked by the cover of the portfolio (Douglas was one of the first African-American artists to use African-derived images in his artwork), and the use of silhouetted forms suggests a nocturnal life as well as a strong contrast of black and white.

This is one of five known copies of the compete portfolio.