Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
      When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
      When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
      When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals –
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
      Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
      For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
      And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting –
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
      When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, –
      When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
      But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings –
I know why the caged bird sings!

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

I came across this portrait back in 2009 when I was in Washington DC for President Obama’s first Inauguration. I visited the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery the day before the Inauguration ceremony, and it was the only portrait of an African American I could find on display in the gallery.  I was so shocked I photographed it there and then, and it is in The Development of Struggle (2021) from my series In Seven Days...Furthermore, I had never heard of Paul Lawrence Dunbar so, as he would forever have deep significance for me, I endeavoured to find out more.

This was eleven years ago, and according to Google Arts and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery’s collection is now home to more than 1,000 portraits of African American history-makers such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W E B Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr, and the Obamas as well as works by many African American artists.

This portrait, an oil painting, depicts Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet and the first recorded African American author to be able to support himself solely through his writings. Although he was a prolific writer, it was for his poetry, written in African American dialect, that Dunbar is best remembered. His poetry often shone a light on the racial segregation and discrimination so prevalent in American society in his lifetime. His poem Sympathy (above) expresses the plight of African Americans and is probably best known to a global audience because Maya Angelou chose the last line for the title of her autobiography: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The artist, William McKnight Farrow, was an African American curator and educator, who despite being recognised as a printmaker in his own right, is best known for promoting and inspiring fellow African American artists who became prominent in the mid-twentieth century. From 1917 to 1945 he was on the staff at the Art Institute of Chicago and was involved in curating exhibitions at the museum as well as creating exhibition opportunities for African American artists in the Chicago area. Farrow was instrumental in organising the Institute's 1927 exhibition The Negro in Art Week, a major early exhibition of African American art, at a time when American museums and galleries scarcely welcomed black visitors, let alone exhibiting artists.

A Selection of works featured in ‘The Negro in Art Week’ Exhibition:

With its label of “Negro Art”, this work was situated as somehow divergent or peripheral from the major canon of Western art - ironic and explicitly divisive given that much of the Modern art being produced by white artists at this time took direct inspiration from African art.

The painfully solitary nature of this portrait that I viewed on that historic day, as well as its deep, searching, poignant and moving pose has stayed with me to this day. Dunbar is dressed in evening clothes, which he often wore for performative readings; he looks pensive, he gazes through and beyond the viewer.  Farrow depicts Dunbar as an icon, which can be interpreted as an attempt to embed him in the consciousness and memory of black communities in order to inspire others and define what it means to be an African American outside of the dominant stereotypes and racial discrimination of its time. Henry Louis Gate writes “Posthumously, Dunbar was situated in a pantheon of “great Negros” by Farrow and others duty-bound to identify “race men” whose success, they hoped, would inspire the colored masses”.

This cover from Crisis (a magazine published by the NAACP) reveals Dunbar’s enduring importance and legacy.  The image shows an African American man looking up to the heavens (or maybe it is his thoughts or imagination). Dunbar sits alongside an ensemble of iconic black figures - W.E.B Du Bois, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Dumas, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. The men have a symbolic presence, they are the embodiment of black achievement. They are visible role models for the man in the picture, whose rural surroundings perhaps reference plantation life in the South. 

Created and published in the 1920s and 30s, both images represent a conscious effort to inspire a modern black identity. Creating portraits of inspirational black figures like Dunbar, was part of the shift from social disillusionment to race pride, known as the “New Negro Movement” and the exciting cultural explosion of the Harlem Renaissance and Bronzeville, the Black Metropolis. According to the Library of Congress, the “New Negro Movement” was a ‘renewed sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics” driven by the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. 

For me, this really embodies the importance of the visual image in our understanding of the world. In providing an alternative to the horrendous depictions of black people in Western art and culture - the artistic production of this period has had a vital impact on how African Americans are remembered, viewed and valued in society.

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/african-american-artists

https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.93.86 

https://archive.org/details/sim_crisis_1925-08_30_4 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23025189?seq=13#metadata_info_tab_contents

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/portraits-of-african-americans-national-portrait-gallery/xQJisgUMzpY9Lw?hl=en