Emma Cohen

Painting

Although it does not adopt the painting styles employed by Benton in “America Today,” this painting is intended to act as the missing panel of his mural. Thomas Hart Benton’s mural “America Today” highlights the paradoxical nature of the 1920s as each panel illustrates another contrast whether that be social change and the return to tradition, prosperity and hardship, or optimism and fear. However, the one contrast Benton largely overlooks is the contrast between resistance and oppression in the 1920s. While the decade is known for its bustling cities and declining economy, it was also marked by immense racial violence and a struggle against systemic oppression. Furthermore, central to this theme was the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement centered in of Harlem, New York in which African American artists, writers, and musicians such as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, and Zora Neale Hurston pushed for social progress through their poetry, art, folklore, music, theater, and literature. The Harlem Renaissance was largely a strategic, cultural movement of resistance aimed to reshape the representation of African Americans in order to rehabilitate the community and dismantle the color line. In the bottom half I have painted African American musicians, artists, and writers, as well as The Crisis, the newspaper for the NAACP, in order to illustrate the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. The color erupting out of the trumpet is intended to represent a force created by the movement that is breaking through the brick. The brick ceiling or floor represents the color line which acts as a foundation of white America and so the force breaking through that alludes to the way in which the Harlem Renaissance aimed to strategically dismantle or at least challenge racism in America. Above the brick is a dance hall and to the right a man attempting to repair the brick he stands on. This, as well as the buildings that are on fire in the background, are intended to allude to the violence that resulted from this disruption as many were unwilling to confront this foundation and/or feared the dissolution of white supremacy. To the left is a glimpse at rural America during the 1920s. The houses to the far left are intended to represent the American Dream and traditional American values as resting or dependent on the color line. Amidst this idyllic scene, however, is a farmer who is standing on exposed brick and holding the words of Langston Hughes’s poem The Colored Soldier. The Harlem Renaissance challenged arguably the foundation of American society and culture and in doing so exposed the fallacy of the American Dream which this farmer has been confronted with. Additionally, the train to the left of him alludes to the Great Migration which helped fuel the movement. Ultimately, my painting is intended to illustrate the resistance of the Harlem Renaissance and continued oppression that characterized the 1920s.