The crisis of crossing: Race and identity in the work of Archibald J. Motley, Jr

This dissertation focuses on the issue of racial identity in the works of Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891--1981), an African American painter working in Chicago. Motley's images and writing present the opportunity to examine the complexities and contradictions inherent to the shifting definition of race as a biological factor to the understanding of race as an ideological construction dependent upon specific social circumstances. After his academic training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Motley chose the artistic tradition of portrait painting to explore racial identity. Charged with the responsibility of revealing exterior likeness as well as interior character, Motley painted family members and anonymous African American women, creating a series of portraits that are at once passionate and complicated, masterful and controversial. The artist stated that he intended his works to refute the racist stereotypes about African Americans that perpetuated popular consciousness. By questioning the process of connecting image with category and sign with symbol, Motley positioned viewers to become aware of their own participation in the formation of class, gender, and race identity. Such an awareness corresponds with the battle against white superiority and the struggle for social equality that marked the work of artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Motley's own sensibility, however, was informed by the postivist science and class hierarchies that misconstrued physical difference to support prejudice. His deliberate evocation of stereotypes simultaneously confirmed and contradicted contemporary viewers' expectations of black identity. Through his portraits, Motley constructed a very personal definition of blackness, revealing the seminal role that visual imagery played in the formation and dissemination of racial identity.