Samantha A. Noël - New Negro Movement, Cultural Nationalism, Black Diaspora

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

The discussion begins with the New Negro Movement in the United States and the rise of cultural nationalism in the Caribbean, highlighting how visual artists drew on diasporic aesthetics and political consciousness to shape a new sense of identity. Figures such as Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, James Vanderzee, and Archibald Motley are examined in connection to Harlem’s cultural flowering of the 1920s and 1930s. Attention then shifts to the Caribbean, where Pedro Figari, Victor Manuel, Antonio Gattorno, Edna Manley, Ronald Moody, and Wifredo Lam exemplified the search for national and regional identities through figuration and abstraction. The lesson also considers sculptors and painters such as Sargent Johnson, Alvin Marriott, and Petion Savain, whose practices situated art within wider currents of cultural affirmation and resistance. Finally, attention is given to Jacob Lawrence, Rose Piper, and Elizabeth Catlett, whose works crystallized themes of diaspora, social struggle, and modernist innovation, illustrating how artistic production articulated both formal experimentation and the politics of belonging.

Samantha A. Noël is Associate Professor of Art History and Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. Her research focuses on the art, visual culture, and performance of the Black diaspora, and she is the author of Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, Art Journal, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and has been supported by institutions including the Terra Foundation and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.