Chicago’s African American Visual Arts Renaissance

This chapter examines the history of black visual arts in Chicago and highlights the distinctive influence of the Art Institute of Chicago, formed in 1879, in the emergence of a black visual artistic tradition. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the Art Institute of Chicago was one of a handful of arts schools that admitted black Americans. Among the earliest black students to attend the school was figurative painter Lottie E. Wilson, who created the famous picture of Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth that appeared on the cover of the NAACP's Crisis in August 1915. Meanwhile, William Edouard Scott attended the Art Institute from 1904 to 1907 and won acclaim from 1912 to 1914 in Paris. In 1927, Scott received the Harmon Foundation's gold medal for his work as a muralist.