Edmonia Lewis's 1876 marble sculpture The Death of Cleopatra, showing a seated queen carved in white marble on a throne.
The most famous Black artists and painters span three centuries of American art, from Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1893 debut at the Paris Salon to Kehinde Wiley's 2018 portrait of Barack Obama at the National Portrait Gallery. Between those two points sits a history that museums spent decades refusing to hang, then scrambled to acquire once the market caught up to what artists already knew. Some of the names below were famous in their own lifetimes. Others were rediscovered only after their work turned up in a salvage yard or a private collection nobody had catalogued.
This roster runs chronologically, era by era, because that is the only way the story makes sense. A painter working in 1890s Philadelphia was solving a different problem than one working in 1970s Washington, DC, even when the subject, Black life rendered with dignity, stayed the same. Not every name here is strictly a painter. A few printmakers, collagists, and quiltmakers earned a place because you cannot tell this history honestly without them.
Who were the first Black artists to break into American museums?
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859 to 1937) enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879, where he studied under the painter Thomas Eakins, then left the United States for Paris in 1891 and rarely came back. His 1893 painting The Banjo Lesson, an old man teaching a boy to play, was accepted into the Paris Salon that year and remains in the collection of the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, which acquired it in 1894. It's one of the first paintings by an African American to depict Black life without caricature, a fact that mattered as much to Tanner's contemporaries as the brushwork did. Our full profile of the painting covers the rest of his story.
Edmonia Lewis (around 1844 to 1907) trained in Boston and built her career in Rome, carving marble at a time when almost no woman, and certainly no woman of Black and Ojibwe descent, was expected to run a sculpture studio. Her 1876 marble The Death of Cleopatra was a sensation at Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition, then vanished for a century. It resurfaced marking a racehorse's grave outside Chicago before conservators traced it and the Smithsonian American Art Museum took it in. Even her birth year is disputed. She gave three different ones on official records over her lifetime.
How did the Harlem Renaissance change who got to paint Black life?
Aaron Douglas (1899 to 1979) became the visual voice of the Harlem Renaissance almost by accident, illustrating magazines before he ever had a museum show. His four-panel mural cycle Aspects of Negro Life, painted in 1934 under a federal arts program, still hangs in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library on 135th Street. The panels trace Black history from Africa through Reconstruction into the Great Migration, and they were built to be looked at by the neighborhood, not just critics.
Augusta Savage (1892 to 1962) never got the institutional recognition her students did. Her 16-foot plaster sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing, built for the 1939 New York World's Fair and commonly called The Harp, drew an estimated five million visitors during the fair's run. There was no money to cast it in bronze or even move it afterward, so it was bulldozed when the fair closed. What survives is a small maquette, held today by the New York Public Library. Sometimes the record really is this thin, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.
Jacob Lawrence (1917 to 2000) was twenty-three when he finished The Migration Series, sixty small tempera panels tracing the Great Migration north. Both the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art wanted the whole set in 1942. Neither would fold, so they split it, odd numbers to Phillips, even numbers to MoMA, and that awkward compromise is still how the series is owned today.
Which painters turned the postwar canvas into open protest?
Romare Bearden (1911 to 1988) spent three decades in Harlem before he picked up scissors and glue in 1964, and collage changed everything about how he worked. Patchwork Quilt, a 1970 collage MoMA acquired the year Bearden made it, shows a reclining woman built from cut fabric patterns, a nod to Southern quilting traditions layered against African sculpture and Henri Rousseau in equal measure. Readers who want the fuller picture of his southern imagery can find it in our profile of Bearden's collage work.
Elizabeth Catlett (1915 to 2012) was turned away from Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race, so she enrolled at Howard University instead and never looked back. She made her 1952 linocut Sharecropper at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City, a print collective built around socially engaged art, and the Art Institute of Chicago added it to its permanent collection in 1992. She spent most of her working life in Mexico, which is part of why American museums were slow to catch up with her.
Charles White (1918 to 1979) drew and painted Black dignity through the Depression, the war years, and the civil rights era without much market attention while he was alive. That changed in 2018, when MoMA mounted the first full survey of his work in over three decades, a retrospective that later traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and LACMA. It arrived nearly forty years after his death, which says something about how long institutional recognition can lag behind an artist's own generation.
Who carried Black portraiture and abstraction through the 1960s and 70s?
Alma Thomas (1891 to 1978) didn't paint full time until she retired from teaching at sixty-nine. She made up for the delay fast. In 1972, at eighty-one, she became the first African American woman given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her 1966 painting Resurrection later became the first work by a Black woman to enter the White House's permanent collection, installed there in 2015 in the Old Family Dining Room.
Faith Ringgold (1930 to 2024) painted, wrote, and sewed her way through six decades of American life, and her story quilts are the form she's remembered for. Tar Beach, from 1988, tells of a girl who flies above Harlem rooftops in her sleep, and the original hangs at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She died in 2024 at ninety-three, still working. Our longer profile on her story quilts covers the rest of that career.
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945 to 2017) painted life-size portraits of ordinary Black people in the late 1960s with a swagger nobody else was putting on canvas at the time. Lawdy Mama, painted in 1969 with oil and gold leaf, frames its subject like a Byzantine icon and has been part of the Studio Museum in Harlem's collection since 1983. We go deeper on his approach to cool in our Barkley Hendricks profile.
How did Kerry James Marshall put Black figures back into the canon?
Kerry James Marshall (born 1955 in Birmingham) grew up in South Central Los Angeles during the years of the civil rights movement and has spent his career arguing, on canvas, that Black figures belong at the center of Western painting rather than its margins. His 1997 painting Past Times later sold at auction for over twenty million dollars, a record for a living Black artist at the time. But the work that anchors his reputation may be School of Beauty, School of Culture, a 2012 canvas painted in acrylic and glitter that the Birmingham Museum of Art now owns. In 2016 and 2017, a 35-year retrospective called Mastry traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to the Met Breuer in New York and finally to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the kind of three-city survey usually reserved for artists who have been gone for decades. Marshall was, and is, very much alive for his. Marshall gets a full profile of his own in our piece on his place in the canon.
What happened when two Black artists painted the Obamas?
Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) built a career on taking men he met on the street and painting them into the compositions of Old Master portraiture, swords, horses, and all. That practice reached its widest audience in 2018, when his portrait of Barack Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery, and the following year when his equestrian sculpture Rumors of War debuted in Times Square before its permanent installation at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. We cover his method in full in Kehinde Wiley: Heroic Black Portraiture.
Amy Sherald (born 1973 in Columbus, Georgia, and a Clark Atlanta University graduate) was chosen by Michelle Obama the same year, and her portrait of the former first lady, rendered in Sherald's signature grisaille skin tones against a pale blue dress, hangs a few rooms away in the National Portrait Gallery. Attendance at the museum roughly doubled in the two years after both portraits went up. That is not a small thing for an institution that had spent most of its history ignoring painters who looked like its two newest stars.
Which contemporary artists are redefining Black portraiture right now?
Mickalene Thomas (born 1971 in Camden, New Jersey) works in rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel to build portraits that argue directly with European painting. Her 2010 piece Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, staged as a photograph in MoMA's own sculpture garden before Thomas rebuilt it as a wall-sized collage, was commissioned for MoMA PS1's On-Site series that year. Her full story, and how she uses pattern to do it, is in our Mickalene Thomas profile.
Bisa Butler (born 1973) turned quilting into large-scale portraiture, piecing dyed and printed African fabrics into life-size figures instead of stitching them onto canvas. The Safety Patrol, a 2018 quilt depicting a group of schoolchildren, was the first Butler work to enter a museum collection when the Art Institute of Chicago acquired it in 2019. It took roughly four hundred hours to make. Read more on her technique in Bisa Butler: Quilted Portraits in African Textiles.
Jordan Casteel (born 1989 in Denver) paints the people she actually knows, neighbors, students, men on Harlem sidewalks, at a scale that makes them impossible to walk past. In 2019 the Denver Art Museum gave her Returning the Gaze, her first major museum exhibition, timed to bring a hometown artist home. She was thirty. Our profile on her community portraits covers what came after.
Where do you start if you want to live with this history?
Every artist on this list worked the same way at some point: alone, at an easel or a worktable, deciding what a Black face or a Black body deserved to look like on a surface built to last. That is still how original art gets made, and it's the standard we hold ourselves to. Every piece of Black artwork on canvas we sell is an original painting by a single working artist, reproduced on archival canvas rather than mass-printed overseas, with an artist royalty attached to every sale.
You don't need a museum budget to start. You need a wall and a reason. The reasons above have held up for a hundred and thirty years so far.
Sources
Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.