Racial and Ethnic Identity

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Race and ethnicity have shaped who gets pictured, how and by whom. Diego Velázquez's Juan de Pareja (1650) portrays his enslaved assistant, soon to be freed, with the bearing of any gentleman sitter, but European art more often cast people of colour as servants or decorative attendants. Modern artists pictured their own communities. Aaron Douglas's murals Aspects of Negro Life (1934) traced Black history from Africa to the Harlem of his day, and Gordon Parks's American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942) posed the government cleaner Ella Watson with mop and broom before the flag.

Later artists took on stereotype directly. Fritz Scholder, of Luiseño descent, painted Native Americans holding beer cans and wearing sunglasses from the late 1960s. Kerry James Marshall paints figures in a deep, emphatic black to claim their place in grand-manner painting, and Glenn Ligon stencils texts by Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin until the words blur.