Ma Bad Luck Card, Aaron Douglas; Opportunity Magazine; Langston Hughes

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.