54 Facts About Archibald Motley

Archibald Motley himself had mixed race ancestry, and often felt unsettled about his own racial identity.

Archibald Motley was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Mary Huff Motley and Archibald John Motley Senior.

Archibald Motley's mother was a school teacher until she married.

Archibald Motley had been a slave after having been taken from British East Africa.

Archibald Motley shared her stories about slavery with the family, and the young Archibald listened attentively.

Archibald Motley describes his grandmother's surprisingly positive recollections of her life as a slave in his oral history on file with the Smithsonian Archive of American Art.

Archibald Motley spent the majority of his life in Chicago, where he was a contemporary of fellow Chicago artists Eldzier Cortor and Gus Nall.

Archibald Motley lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, and attended majority-white primary and secondary schools.

Archibald Motley graduated from Englewood Technical Prep Academy in Chicago.

Archibald Motley was offered a scholarship to study architecture by one of his father's friends, which he turned down in order to study art.

Archibald Motley attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received classical training, but his modernist-realist works were out of step with the school's then-conservative bent.

Archibald Motley graduated in 1918 but kept his modern, jazz-influenced paintings secret for some years thereafter.

Archibald Motley used these visual cues as a way to portray subjects more positively.

Archibald Motley studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months.

Archibald Motley found in the artwork there a formal sophistication and maturity that could give depth to his own work, particularly in the Dutch painters and the genre paintings of Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt.

Archibald Motley felt that portraits in particular exposed a certain transparency of truth of the internal self.

Archibald Motley understood the power of the individual, and the ways in which portraits could embody a sort of palpable machine that could break this homogeneity.

Archibald Motley took advantage of his westernized educational background in order to harness certain visual aesthetics that were rarely associated with blacks.

Archibald Motley understood that he had certain educational and socioeconomic privileges, and thus, he made it his goal to use these advantages to uplift the black community.

Archibald Motley experienced success early in his career; in 1927 his piece Mending Socks was voted the most popular painting at the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

Archibald Motley was awarded the Harmon Foundation award in 1928, and then became the first African American to have a one-man exhibit in New York City.

Archibald Motley sold 22 out of the 26 exhibited paintings.

Archibald Motley would go on to become the first black artist to have a portrait of a black subject displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Archibald Motley strayed from the western artistic aesthetic, and began to portray more urban black settings with a very non-traditional style.

Archibald Motley's family lived in a quiet neighborhood on Chicago's south side in an environment that was racially tolerant.

Archibald Motley himself was light skinned and of mixed racial makeup, being African, Native American and European.

Unable to fully associate with either Black nor white, Archibald Motley wrestled all his life with his own racial identity.

Archibald Motley's work made it much harder for viewers to categorize a person as strictly Black or white.

Archibald Motley showed the nuances and variability that exists within a race, making it harder to enforce a strict racial ideology.

Archibald Motley used portraiture "as a way of getting to know his own people".

Archibald Motley realized that in American society, different statuses were attributed to each gradation of skin tone.

Archibald Motley portrayed skin color and physical features as belonging to a spectrum.

Archibald Motley used distinctions in skin color and physical features to give meaning to each shade of African American.

Archibald Motley focused mostly on women of mixed racial ancestry, and did numerous portraits documenting women of varying African-blood quantities.

Archibald Motley would expose these different "negro types" as a way to counter the fallacy of labeling all Black people as a generalized people.

Archibald Motley spoke to a wide audience of both whites and Blacks in his portraits, aiming to educate them on the politics of skin tone, if in different ways.

Archibald Motley hoped to prove to Black people through art that their own racial identity was something to be appreciated.

Archibald Motley was able to expose a part of the Black community that was often not seen by whites, and thus, through aesthetics, broaden the scope of the authentic Black experience.

Archibald Motley depicted a vivid, urban black culture that bore little resemblance to the conventional and marginalizing rustic images of black Southerners so familiar in popular culture.

Archibald Motley married a white woman and lived in a white neighborhood, and was not a part of that urban experience in the same way his subjects were.

In Stomp, Archibald Motley painted a busy cabaret scene which again documents the vivid urban black culture.

For example, on the right of the painting, an African-American man wearing a black tuxedo dances with a woman whom Archibald Motley gives a much lighter tone.

Archibald Motley wears a black velvet dress with red satin trim, a dark brown hat and a small gold chain with a pendant.

Archibald Motley is portrayed as elegant, but a sharpness and tenseness are evident in her facial expression.

Archibald Motley used sharp angles and dark contrasts within the model's face to indicate that she was emotional or defiant.

Many of the opposing messages that are present in Archibald Motley's works are attributed to his relatively high social standing which would create an element of bias even though Archibald Motley was black.

Still, Archibald Motley was one of the only artists of the time willing to paint African-American models with such precision and accuracy.

Archibald Motley treated these portraits as a quasi-scientific study in the different gradients of race.

The distinction between the girl's couch and the mulatress' wooden chair reveals the class distinctions that Archibald Motley associated with each of his subjects.

Archibald Motley created a set of characters who appeared repeatedly in his paintings with distinctive postures, gestures, expressions and habits.

Archibald Motley suggests that once racism is erased, everyone can focus on his or her self and enjoy life.

Archibald Motley keeps it messy and indeterminate so that it can be both.

Archibald Motley married his high school sweetheart Edith Granzo in 1924, whose German immigrant parents were opposed to their interracial relationship and disowned her for her marriage.

Archibald Motley's nephew, Willard Motley, was an acclaimed writer known for his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door.