Aesthetic Renaissance: The Rebirth of Culture

Kandice Fowlkes

I decided to take a commoner’s commute to revisit one of my favorite paintings by Hale Aspacio Woodruff. Two dollars and fifty cents is how much it costs those who want to get lost, and those who want to get found, and those who want to get everywhere and nowhere in the melting pot of Atlanta.  I reach my destination—Ashby train station, located two blocks away from the historic West End and one street down from the Atlanta Student Movement. I feel like a tourist in my own city, passing by new Black-Owned Businesses, hopeful messages, and the unchanged parts of history that lie in the area—destitution. When I was an undergrad at Clark Atlanta University, it wasn’t uncommon to walk the same streets as crackheads, squatters loitering abandoned buildings, and dope dealers to get to the only Walmart located near campus. 

Now, the Walmart is burned down. Wooden boards block the windows of Wally World, and cardboard fences surround the perimeter. Once abandoned buildings have become legally occupied by striking renovations as opposed to the neighboring houses untouched by time. The renovated houses stand two to three stories high, making the houses I remember occupied by squatters, college students, and crackheads look like antiquated Georgia shacks.

My feet soon stood before the Lyke House church. A barrier of a thin string separated me and the property lot. It was the church that provided broke college students, such as myundergraduate self, financial reimbursements for over-priced once-used textbooks. Now, my memory of this holy land is stained with the blood of Jatonne Sterling, the baseball player shot to death in this very parking lot in March 2023. I used to cross this very lot after my commute on my way to class, just as I am walking now.

My eyes were blanched in the blood of history. Although the veil of my sunglasses protected me from the college students peering in, it didn’t stop me from looking out through wide-open eyes. I climbed the stairs of what once was Trevor Arnette Library to the museum that holds the art of Hale Aspacio Woodruff: The “Art of the Negro.” Six murals by Woodruff paneled against the wood of the historic building. Muses was the last of the six panels, and it was the one I came to see. 

I hadn’t seen the mural since my early college days, but my impression of the painting’s message is still impeccable. I sat with the mural since I hadn’t seen it in years. I wanted to see how much of my own interpretation of its meaning had changed or remained. After all, it was my favorite painting in the mural collection. 

Two deities rest nobly atop a sea of historic Black men. An African deity and a Grecian deity, and the African diaspora below to represent the cultural amalgamation of the two, which contributed to the prestigious range of arts within Black life. As inferred by the museum text, the painting represents the involuntary marriage of cultures. But, upon seeing the painting itself, I think Woodruff was intentional in painting two prominent cultural influences atop the Black men. 

Below the deities range seventeen prolific artists of the African diaspora. Some of Spanish, American, and Brazilian descent who contributed to the Black intelligence through art—all interwoven like macrame for their contribution to Black canonical study. Smack dab in the middle is Nada Kane, dressed in African horticultural garments with a belt of paint-filled eggshells tied to his waist. The mystery of antiquity resolved.

It’s no thunderous blow to history tracing back the blends of cultures that shaped a group of people over time. If anything, I think it makes the essence of culture more beautiful, capturing the impact of cultural hybridity in a painting and highlighting the beauty of our culture as a product of the detriment.

The museum curator, Sol, noticed my writing and decided to give me a textbook regarding the murals of Woodruff. He advised me to read Jerry Collum’s essay, “The Art of the Negro.” Collum covers Woodruff’s work behind the murals and the history of craftsmanship that went into the historical murals. Between 1941 and 1942, Woodruff proposed the mural collection to the dean of Atlanta University (AU) to be placed in Trevor Arnette Library, but he was told they didn’t have the money to fund the collection. Woodruff requested funding several more times before he was able to attempt negotiating a $ 2,000 salary increase, but Spelman College and Atlanta University offered only $200 (121).

Woodruff began drafting the six panels. During that time, he received a teaching position at New York University (NYU), and he resigned from teaching at Atlanta University and Spelman College to relocate. While working at NYU, he was commissioned to create a mural collection for Talladega College. The mural collection for Talladega College depicts slavery, the raping of culture, and the many horrors of Black life. The debut of the Talladega College murals was grand and well-received. In 1950, Woodruff had finally finished his six panels for Atlanta University while still residing in New York. He shipped them down South, but the pictures ran contrary to the expectations of AU’s dean. He wanted something closer in subject matter to the murals done for Talladega College. Instead, these murals reflected the evolution of Woodruff’s perspective through his art, possibly due to the influential conversations he shared with other prolific artists at NYU regarding “personal invention with cross-cultural investigation of African Art” (125). Atlanta University held a modest ceremony for the mural collection’s debut, but it was evident the collection was not that well received. Woodruff said the murals were the “most important work along this line” and that they had been “almost ignored and treated with indifference,” possibly because they “don’t deal with slavery in this country; they deal with a very remote past” (Cullum 123).

In Collum’s essay, Muses is said to be the last mural done, and by the painting's context, it is easy to see that. Woodruff’s thought process had changed; therefore, the paintings had too. They didn’t know how many drafts Woodruff had done before settling on the murals he did for AU, but the evolution of his artistic perspective within the decade is clear in the paintings. Collum’s article addresses the meaning of the mural collection within the artist’s legacy:

[Woodruff] asserts the right of the artist of African descent to pursue whatever aspects of the vast range of history, form, and culture seem most promising and appealing as a subject of the artist. And in The Art of the Negro murals, Woodruff does exactly this, establishing a globalized and contemporary context in which to reconsider and reconfigure the continually evolving heritage of Africa and the African Diaspora (129).

As creators and change-makers through art, we reserve the right to articulate the world from our eyes how we see fit. The best motives of the artist are raw, authentic, and render an evolved thinking regardless of what is most appealing to an audience. Sometimes, what is least appealing is what is most needed. Ironically, Woodruff succeeded in doing something appealing and needed.

When I think of this world we live in, I can’t help but think of Muses. Woodruff wasn’t painting a cloud of darkness around the cultural hybridity of African and Western civilization. That was a topic covered many times before in slave narratives, fiction, and even his own art. Instead, he was introducing, at the time, a new ideology to the influences of African Diaspora art. Woodruff acknowledges both the past and the future in Muses. History doesn’t have to stain the future. We can let character arcs develop with positive turns in the road. Muses is an image of the African Diaspora thriving throughout the world, and it rectifies the people who were once labeled sable as art cultivators rooted in rich culture. 

I returned the textbook to the museum curator and ventured back toward Ashby train station. On the promenade, I saw the staged strolls of Greek organizations. Students gathered around to watch the AKA’s stroll, and a mild cacophony of hound barks trailed behind, or after. An overjoyed crowd of students buzzed as 808 stereo beats rang through. Memory flushed, I almost forgot what time I was in.

Hale Aspacio Woodruff knew that with understanding comes change. He invented, embraced, and created change in his thoughts, and thus his paintings. As Sankofa implies, we must fetch from our past to know where we’re going. Acknowledge the past to let the present work together in harmony for the future. Going forward in time as the chapters of a book. I hope the day never comes when hope, love, and unity will be as intangible as distant fog. As I cross Atlanta back to Decatur, the thought of Zeus traveling to Aethiopia crosses my mind. Homer does not acknowledge the Aethiopian’s ethnicity but instead revels in their close partnership with the gods and how they feast in “holiday-leaves.” Food and culture blending together like salt and pepper for a savory dish. Creating something soothing for the soul. We can blend our cultures within the diaspora. We can extend out to blend our cultures in the world.