Aaron Douglas

1899 - 1979

Aaron Douglas was a painter, illustrator and educator. He studied at the University of Nebraska and taught drawing at Lincoln High School in Kansas City before coming to New York. In New York he studied with Fritz Witold Reiss and then spent a year in Paris studying at L'Academie Scandinave. He was a mural painter and his work can be found in Fisk University Library, the Sherman Hotel, Chicago, New York Public Library and the 135th Street Branch YMCA, New York. He also did illustration work for Viking Press, Vanity Fair, Opportunity and Theater Arts Monthly. Douglas was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance and was involved in the Harlem Artists Guild. He worked with W.E.B. DuBoise and illustrated several covers for The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP. He founded the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville and taught there until he retired in 1966.