Archibald Motley

Archibald John Motley, Jr. (October 7, 1891 – January 16, 1981), was an American visual artist. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America—its local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance.

The Renaissance marked a period of a flourishing and renewed black psyche. There was a newfound appreciation of black artistic and aesthetic culture. Consequently, many black artists felt a moral obligation to create works that would perpetuate a positive representation of black people. During this time, Alain Locke coined the idea of the "New Negro", which was focused on creating progressive and uplifting images of blacks within society. The synthesis of black representation and visual culture drove the basis of Motley's work as "a means of affirming racial respect and race pride." His use of color and notable fixation on skin-tone, demonstrated his artistic portrayal of blackness as being multidimensional. Motley himself was of mixed race, and often felt unsettled about his own racial identity. Thus, his art often demonstrated the complexities and multifaceted nature of black culture and life.

Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr., never lived in Harlem. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Mary Huff Motley and Archibald John Motley Senior. His mother was a school teacher until she married. The family remained in New Orleans until 1894 when they moved to Chicago, where his father took a job as a Pullman car porter. As a boy growing up on Chicago's south side, Motley had many jobs, and when he was nine years old his father's hospitalization for six months required that Motley help support the family.

Motley spent the majority of his life in Chicago, where he was a contemporary of fellow Chicago artists Eldzier Cortor and Gus Nall. He lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, and attended majority white primary and secondary schools. He graduated from Englewood High School in Chicago. He was offered a scholarship to study architecture by one of his father's friends, which he turned down in order to study art. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received classical training, but his modernist-realist works were out of step with the school's then-conservative bent. During his time at the Art Institute, Motley was mentored by painters Earl Beuhr and John W. Norton, and he did well enough to cause his father's friend to pay his tuition.While he was a student, in 1913, other students at the Institute "rioted" against the modernism on display at the Armory Show (a collection of the best new modern art). Motley graduated in 1918 but kept his modern, jazz-influenced paintings secret for some years thereafter.

As a result of his training in the western portrait tradition, Motley understood nuances of phrenology and physiognomy that went along with the aesthetics. He used these visual cues as a way to portray (black) subjects more positively. For example, in Motley's "self-portrait," he painted himself in a way that aligns with many of these physical pseudosciences. The slightly squinted eyes and tapered fingers are all subtle indicators of insight, intelligence, and refinement.

In 1927 he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and was denied, but he reapplied and won the fellowship in 1929. He studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months. While many contemporary artists looked back to Africa for inspiration, Motley was inspired by the great Renaissance masters whose work was displayed at the Louvre. He found in the artwork there a formal sophistication and maturity that could give depth to his own work, particularly in the Dutch painters and the genre paintings of Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt. Motley's portraits take the conventions of the Western tradition and update them—allowing for black bodies, specifically black female bodies, a space in a history that had traditionally excluded them. He felt that portraits in particular exposed a certain transparency of truth of the internal self. Thus, he would focus on the complexity of the individual in order to break from popularized caricatural stereotypes of blacks such as the "darky," "pickaninny," "mammy," etc. Motley understood the power of the individual, and the ways in which portraits could embody a sort of palpable machine that could break this homogeneity. He took advantage of his westernized educational background in order to harness certain visual aesthetics that were rarely associated with blacks. Thus, he would use his knowledge as a tool for individual expression in order to create art that was meaningful aesthetically and socially to a broader American audience. By acquiring these skills, Motley was able to break the barrier of white-world aesthetics. The use of this acquired visual language would allow his work to act as a vehicle for racial empowerment and social progress.

In the beginning of his career as an artist, Motley intended to solely pursue portrait painting. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1918, he decided that he would focus his art on black subjects and themes, ultimately as an effort to relieve racial tensions. In 1919, Chicago's south side race riots rendered his family housebound for over six days. In the midst of this heightened racial tension, Motley was very aware of the clear boundaries and consequences that came along with race. He understood that he had certain educational and socioeconomic privileges, and thus, he made it his goal to use these advantages to uplift the black community.

Motley experienced success early in his career; in 1927 his piece Mending Socks was voted the most popular painting at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. He was awarded the Harmon Foundation award in 1928, and then became the first African American to have a one-man exhibit in New York City. He sold 22 out of the 26 exhibited paintings. Motley would go on to become the first black artist to have a portrait of a black subject displayed at Chicago's Art Institute.

Most of his popular portraiture was created during the mid 1920s. However, there was an evident artistic shift that occurred particularly in the 1930s. Motley strayed from the western artistic aesthetic, and began to portray more urban black settings with a very non-traditional aesthetic style. By breaking from the conceptualized structure of westernized portraiture, he began to depict what was essentially a reflection of an authentic black community. Ultimately, his portraiture was essential to his career in that it demonstrated the roots of his adopted educational ideals and privileges, which essentially gave him the template to be able to progress as an artist and aesthetic social advocate.

During the 1930s, Motley was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration to depict scenes from African-American history in a series of murals, some of which can be found at Nichols Middle School in Evanston, Illinois. After his wife's death in 1948 and difficult financial times, Motley was forced to seek work painting shower curtains for the Styletone Corporation. In the 1950s, he made several visits to Mexico and began painting Mexican life and landscapes.

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