Archibald J. Motley, Jr.

One of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century, Archibald John Motley, Jr. broke new ground in the portrayal of contemporary urban African Americans in his portraits and scenes of everyday life. The son of a railroad porter and a school teacher of Creole (mixed African, European, and Native American) heritage, Motley was born in New Orleans and grew up in Chicago in a largely white neighborhood, visiting popular spots in nearby Black communities to sketch locals. Rejecting an opportunity to train as an architect, Motley attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1914 and 1918, while working as a museum janitor to help support his family. At the school he won several honorable mentions as well as the support of his teachers and the museum's director, Robert B. Harshe.

Motley aspired to a lucrative career as a portrait painter, but he found Chicago's prosperous Black middle-class indifferent to art, while racial prejudice precluded portrait commissions from white sitters as well as opportunities for commercial work. Yet his portraits of family members and of mixed-race women he encountered in Chicago's so-called "Black Belt" brought him positive notice in the Art Institute's annual exhibitions beginning in 1921. He also began to paint upbeat scenes of Black life, from church meetings to cabaret crowds. As white Americans grew increasingly fascinated with the flowering of Black urban culture known as the Harlem Renaissance, Motley drew attention beyond his hometown. In 1928, he was given a solo exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, and the following year he traveled on a Guggenheim Fellowship to Paris, where he studied the works of famous artists in the Louvre Museum and painted the people and haunts of Paris's African and Caribbean expatriate community.

Back in Chicago, Motley painted the lively street scene of the Black South Side with brilliant color, dramatic light effects, and stylized, streamlined forms that evoke the influence of jazz and blues music. Aimed at the expectations of white viewers and buyers, his largely upbeat images hint little of the privations of the Great Depression or the concerns of younger artists and writers more closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Motley himself remained somewhat aloof from that movement by staying in Chicago. Moreover, while dedicating his art to the elevation of Black subject matter and artistic taste, he insisted on the primacy of artistic professionalism, refusing to participate in Black artists' exhibitions unless they were of sufficient quality. Meanwhile, he was excluded from other shows on the basis of his race. Motley was appointed a visiting instructor at Howard University in 1934, and he received commissions for murals under the sponsorship of the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Later, however, the artist was forced to take on commercial work, including painting decorative shower curtains in the 1950s. In that decade, he made two painting trips to Mexico. Motley's production fell off dramatically in the final decades of his life, just as increasing attention to African American artists brought him the beginning of renewed appreciation. Since the artist's death, scholars have been drawn to the issues of African American cultural identity addressed both in Motley's art and in his biography.