From Ambiguity to Identity: Silhouettes and Silhouetting in the African American Art of the Harlem Renaissance and its Afterlife

“Silhouette, On the face of the moon, Am I”. With these words African American artist Richard Bruce Nugent expressed in his poem Shadow a double kind of lonesomeness: that of being both racially and sexually stigmatized. It was 1925, the very dawn of the heyday in African American modern history known as the Harlem Renaissance. The following years Nugent adopted the motif of the silhouette in the visual realm of his sinuous graphic art to express both vibrant scenes from Harlem’s night life and queer circles, as well as chilling illustrations of lynching murders. In so doing, he conjured ambiguous, fluid, and intersecting identitarian experiences through the visual and verbal metaphor of the silhouette and the shadow.

These glimpses into Nugent’s artistic production introduce us into the ways in which various artists of the time, from Aaron Douglas to Jacob Lawrence, from Lois Mailou Jones to Romare Bearden, adopted the silhouetted shape as popular visual motif for the representation of both selfhood and community. Yet it is striking to notice how, through its inherent features of reduction, generalization, and anonymity, the silhouette seems to visually and conceptually counteract the goals pursued at the time of opposing negative stereotypes about the African American community, of affirming its multifaceted contributions to the wider American society, and of establishing a compositeness of Black identities. For silhouettes seem to completely suspend identity due to their aesthetic of ambiguity. By specifically highlighting this aesthetic of ambiguity and taking transatlantic modernism as overarching research framework, this dissertation project investigates how the adoption and reception of the ambiguous visual motif of the silhouette negotiated with the socio-political aspirations of the time and contributed to the imaginations and creations of new African American individual and collective identities.

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Bio:

Rosa Sancarlo is an Italian-born, internationally educated art historian. She is conducting her PhD studies at the University of Zürich, where she is the research and teaching assistant of the Chair for Modern and Contemporary art at the Art Historical Institute. Previously, she has completed a Bachelor in Cultural Heritage at the University of Trento and a Master in Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. She was a visiting researcher at the Art and Archeology Department of Princeton University and has worked at the intersection between art historical research and the museum realm in Vienna. Her current research explores the artistic expressions born out of the interactions between African Diasporic communities, their cultures, and diverse Western contexts, through the pursuit of de-colonizing, anti-discriminatory, and self-critical approaches. She is active also as independent curator and she is a founding member of CARAH – Collective for Anti-Racist Art History.

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