Tania Tribe

Slavery to Hiroshima and beyond: African-American art and the apocalypse

In his book of poems God’s Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson revealed his debt to Black preachers, whose powers of oratory and apocalyptic beliefs were conveyed in sermons that he remembered from childhood. Congregations had been ‘moved to ecstasy’ by visions of an anthropomorphic God and a belief in a millennial order that offered solace and strength in dealing with the abuses of the slave condition. Such values had also been put across in direct and unmediated visual language in two quilts by Harriet Powers expressing her visionary gaze and her belief that human beings are at the mercy of both cosmic circumstances and divine intervention. Clothed in consciously aesthetic overtones, the same faith in millennial redemption permeated Johnson’s poems and Aaron Douglas’s visual interpretation of them, providing a paradigm for Harlem Renaissance ‘New Negro’ aesthetics, as seen in the work of William H. Johnson and Archibald Motley, for instance. The conceptual world embodied in Harriet Powers’s quilts remained a cornerstone of the African-American experience throughout the twentieth century. As the social circumstances of African-Americans began to change in the 1960s, the use of such biblical texts also changed, to endow a much wider range of human experiences with meaning. Particularly in his later work, Jacob Lawrence extended his apocalyptic concerns beyond immediate racial questions to concentrate on wider ethical issues, including environmental ones, making them relevant to humankind as a whole.

Visual Narrative and the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world. … (James Weldon Johnson, 19251)Abstract Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world. … (James Weldon Johnson, 19251)

Memory and Wonder: Our Lady Mary in Ethiopian Painting, 15th - 18th Centuries

Representations of the Virgin Mary are among the most important iconographic themes in Ethiopian painting, and stand as testimony to the fundamental theological, devotional and symbolic role the mother of Jesus has played in the construction of Ethiopian religious beliefs, identity and cultural memory. During early Solomonic times (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) her role was essentially Christological and salvific, as seen in the paintings in Biet Maryam, Lalibela. Perceptions and representations of Mary changed with the extensive theological reforms implemented by King Zara Yaeqob (reigned 1434–1468). With this royal patronage for her cult, Mary’s role as a maker of miracles became predominant and apocalyptic metaphors and narrative gained importance in pictorial representations, such as those in the Lady Meux A manuscript. Her eschatological role continued to evolve until the eighteenth century, when she was portrayed in an icon as a celestial empress.