Double Consciousness in Black Portraiture

Double consciousness in Black portraiture is the painter's awareness that the sitter is being watched by two audiences at once, so the portrait has to answer a hostile outside gaze while still holding an inside truth. W.E.B. Du Bois named the feeling in 1903. Painters and photographers had already been working the problem for decades, and they solved it with the eyes.

What did Du Bois actually mean by double consciousness?

The phrase comes from the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Du Bois described a peculiar sensation of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, and of measuring your own soul with a measuring tape borrowed from a world that watches with contempt. He called the result a twoness. Two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body.

He paired it with two other images that matter for art. One is the veil, the thin separation that lets you see the other world without being seen accurately by it. The other is second sight, the strange compensation that comes with the veil. If you have spent your life reading how you are being read, you become an expert at it.

That expertise is a picture-making skill. A portrait is a negotiation about who gets to look and who gets looked at. Black artists have been running that negotiation with unusual precision because they had to.

Why did Du Bois hang photographs in Paris before he wrote the book?

Three years before Souls, Du Bois built an argument out of pictures. For the 1900 Paris Exposition, he helped assemble the Exhibit of American Negroes, working alongside Thomas J. Calloway, who had been named special agent for the fair. The full display included roughly 500 photographs, 32 charts, maps, and 200 books written by African American authors.

Du Bois himself compiled 363 images into albums with plain, almost clinical titles: Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. That material now lives in the Library of Congress collection of photographs assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The people in those photographs are well dressed, composed, looking directly into the lens. That was the point. At the time, race scientists were circulating photographs of Black subjects as physical evidence of inferiority, and popular caricature was doing the cruder version of the same job. Du Bois answered with faces that refused the caption.

Notice what he was doing. He was not making art for its own sake. He was picking the frame, the posture and the gaze, knowing exactly which audience would be standing in front of the wall in Paris. That is double consciousness converted into a curatorial method.

Frederick Douglass had worked out the same logic a generation earlier. Scholars who catalogued his likenesses count more than 160 photographs and portraits, and he is often described as the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. The National Park Service, which maintains his home in Washington, documents how deliberately he used the camera. He rarely smiled. He chose settings that read as dignity and authority, because the alternative images already circulating were designed to read as the opposite.

How does double consciousness actually show up in a portrait?

It shows up in four places, and once you know them you cannot stop seeing them.

The direction of the gaze. A sitter who looks out at you is claiming the position of subject rather than specimen. A sitter who looks away is often being framed as available for study. Black portraitists overwhelmingly choose the first, and they choose it with intent.

Borrowed authority. Artists quote the visual grammar that Western culture already reads as important, the icon, the throne, the state portrait, the artist's studio, and then put a Black figure inside it. The quotation does the argument for them.

Skin as a decision. Color is never neutral in these pictures. Some artists push skin toward true black. Others drain the color out entirely. Either move makes you notice that you were reading skin as information.

Refusal. Sometimes the work withholds. A turned back, a covered face, a sitter who will not perform legibility for you. That is second sight used defensively, and it belongs to the tradition just as much as the direct stare does.

If you want the longer version of how the figure itself became the argument, we covered that in our guide to Black figuration and why the figure carries the weight.

Which real artworks show this most clearly?

Archibald Motley, Self-Portrait (Myself at Work), 1933. Motley paints himself as a working professional in a beret, palette in hand, brush hovering over the outline of a nude figure on the canvas. He is looking straight out at you. The picture insists on two things at once: that he is a serious painter inside the European tradition of the artist's self-portrait, and that the painter in that tradition is a Black man. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University later organized the traveling exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, curated by Richard J. Powell, which brought this side of his work back into wide view.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Lawdy Mama, 1969. Oil and gold leaf on canvas, just under five feet tall, in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. The sitter is Hendricks's cousin. He borrowed the arched format and the gold ground from Byzantine and early Italian Renaissance religious icons, the exact visual language Western viewers were trained to read as sacred. Then he put a young Black woman with an afro inside it. Hendricks had learned the gold leaf process after returning from Europe in 1966, and this was his first large-scale painting to use it. The picture does not argue. It simply occupies the position.

Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995 to 1996, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Weems went into museum and university archives and pulled photographs that had been made to dehumanize, including daguerreotypes commissioned in 1850 by the naturalist Louis Agassiz as visual evidence for his theories of racial inferiority. She rephotographed them, toned most of them a deep red, framed them in circular mattes that read like a camera lens, and sandblasted her own text into the covering glass. You cannot look at the original photograph without also looking at her sentence about it. She put the second sight on top of the image, physically. Her better known Kitchen Table Series does the same job from the other direction, building an interior world where the outside gaze has no jurisdiction.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014, acrylic on PVC panels, about seven feet by ten feet, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met describes the painting as the discovery of a Black artist's workshop, a place of labor where the whole catalogue of picture making is laid out. Marshall is openly working inside a lineage of paintings about painting, and the Met names the precedents: Velazquez's Las Meninas, Vermeer's The Art of Painting, and Marie Victoire Lemoine's interior of a woman painter's atelier. Marshall extends that lineage to Black subjects and, just as importantly, to Black viewers.

Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018, oil on linen, accessioned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Sherald paints skin in grayscale. She has said the choice is meant to keep viewers from immediately sorting the person by color, so they have to look at the person first. It is a strange and effective solution to Du Bois's problem: instead of answering the outside gaze, she removes the piece of information the outside gaze wants most. Sherald and Kehinde Wiley were the first African American artists commissioned to paint presidential portraits for the Gallery. If you want more on how her work reads in a museum context, see our piece on Sherald's Smithsonian show, American Sublime.

Why do so many Black portraits look straight at you?

Because the direct gaze is the cheapest and strongest available correction.

For most of the history of Western picture making, Black figures appeared in the margins of somebody else's painting. Servant, attendant, background, type. Those figures almost never look out. They look at the main subject, or they look at nothing. Looking out is what important people do.

So when a Black portraitist moves the eyes, the whole hierarchy moves with them. The viewer stops being an unobserved observer. You are now in a two way exchange with a person who has already anticipated you. Du Bois's second sight, the skill built from a lifetime of being read, gets handed back across the frame.

This is also why the refusals land so hard when they come. A portrait where the sitter will not meet your eye, in a tradition where meeting your eye is the default move, is making a specific point about who has earned access.

Does double consciousness still apply to Black portraiture now?

Partly. The core condition Du Bois described has not disappeared, but the audience has changed, and artists have noticed.

For most of the twentieth century, a Black painter making a figure painting could reasonably assume the person standing in front of it in a museum would be white. That assumption shaped the work. A lot of mid-century Black portraiture is arguing with a viewer who is not sympathetic.

That is much less true now. Artists working today often paint for a Black viewer first and let everyone else look over that viewer's shoulder. The gaze in the painting is less defensive as a result. Less proving, more just being. Some critics read this as double consciousness loosening. Others read it as the same skill applied with more freedom, which seems closer to right. You do not lose second sight because the room got friendlier. You just get to use it for something other than defense.

How do you live with a portrait that looks back?

Practically, a portrait with a direct gaze needs room and it needs the right wall. It will run the space it is in. That is not a flaw, but it means the piece works better on a wall you approach head on, at a height where the eyes land near your own, rather than tucked above a sofa where you only catch it in passing.

It also changes the room's behavior. A landscape lets people talk past it. A face that meets you tends to get mentioned. If you want a piece that people actually respond to rather than one that reads as decoration, that is the argument for portrait wall art of Black subjects over something safer.

At Noirci Studio we sell African American art on archival canvas, printed to order in the United States, with the artist paid a royalty on every sale. Our founder, Robert Lawrence, has been painting since 2006. We do not sell AI generated images and we do not sell mass produced overseas prints, and the reason connects directly to everything above. A portrait made by a machine has no second sight. There is nobody behind the eyes who has ever been looked at wrong. The whole point of this tradition is that a person made a decision about how to be seen, and you can feel that decision when you stand in front of the work.

The artists named here are art history, not inventory. Go see Hendricks at the Studio Museum, Marshall at the Met, Sherald at the National Portrait Gallery. Then come home and look at what is on your own walls, and ask whether anyone in those pictures is looking back.

Sources

• Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition (the W.E.B. Du Bois albums, including Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.).
• The Studio Museum in Harlem. Collection record for Barkley L. Hendricks, Lawdy Mama, 1969, oil and gold leaf on canvas.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Collection record for Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014, acrylic on PVC panels.
• Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Collection record for Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018, oil on linen (NPG.2018.15).