Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and literary giant, perhaps best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In both her research and writing, Hurston's work centered on Black stories, experiences, and culture, both in the American South and in the African diaspora.
As a young adult, Hurston attended Howard University to pursue an associate's degree. Her legacy at the institution is still felt to this day as she was the co-founder of The Hilltop, the nation's oldest still-running Black collegiate newspaper. Though Hurston was posthumously celebrated for her contributions to literature, during her life she was often underpaid and remained in poverty for much of her career and up until her death in 1960.
This quiet, refined 1926 portrait by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas shows Hurston sitting in a chair wearing a brown cloche hat and burnt orange coat with a fur stole. Her tremendous energy for life was legendary, but here she’s calm, relaxed, and at ease in the company of a friend.
Douglas's paintings and illustrations often pulsate with the energy and optimism of the Harlem Renaissance, that extraordinary flowering of African-American culture that burst forth in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. While he was not the first black artist to find inspiration in his African heritage, he was the first to consistently blend African imagery with contemporary subject matter and in modernist forms. Douglas, who has been called "the father of black American art," became a premier visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance.
Miss Zora Neale Hurston by Aaron Douglas (American) - Pastel on canvas / 1926 - Fisk University Galleries (Nashville, Tennessee) #womeninart #art #pastelart #AaronDouglas #artwork #pastel #FiskUniversityGalleries #fineart #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #HarlemRenaissance #FiskUniversity
