page_title: Archibald Motley
section_title: Skin tone and identity
hierarchical_section_title: Archibald Motley / Skin tone and identity
caption_attribution_description: General notes: Painting.
context_page_description: Archibald John Motley, Jr., was an American visual artist. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America—its local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance.
  The Renaissance marked a period of a flourishing and renewed black psyche. There was a newfound appreciation of black artistic and aesthetic culture. Consequently, many black artists felt a moral obligation to create works that would perpetuate a positive representation of black people. During this time, Alain Locke coined the idea of the "New Negro", which was focused on creating progressive and uplifting images of blacks within society. The synthesis of black representation and visual culture drove the basis of Motley's work as "a means of affirming racial respect and race pride."
context_section_description: Motley's family lived in a quiet neighborhood on Chicago's south side in an environment that was racially tolerant. In his youth, Motley did not spend much time around other blacks. It was this disconnection with the African-American community around him that established Motley as an outsider. 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, Motley wrestled all his life with his own racial identity.
  Although Motley reinforces the association of higher social standing with "whiteness" or American determinates of beauty, he also exposes the diversity within the race as a whole. Motley's work made it much harder for viewers to categorize a person as strictly black or white. He showed the nuances and variability that exists within a race, making it harder to enforce a strict racial ideology.
  Motley used portraiture "as a way of getting to know his own people". He realized that in American society, different statuses were attributed to each gradation of skin tone. Motley portrayed skin color and physical features as belonging to a spectrum. He used distinctions in skin color and physical features to give meaning to each shade of African American.
  In the 1920s and 1930s, during the New Negro Renaissance, Motley dedicated a series of portraits to types of Negroes. He focused mostly on women of mixed racial ancestry, and did numerous portraits documenting women of varying African-blood quantities ("octoroon," "quadroon," "mulatto"). In titling his pieces, Motley used these antebellum creole classifications ("mulatto," "octoroon," etc.) in order to show the social implications of the "one drop rule," and the dynamics of what it means to black. He would expose these different "negro types" as a way to counter the fallacy of labeling all blacks as a generalized people. These direct visual reflections of status represented the broader social construction of blackness, and its impact on black relations. By asserting the individuality of African Americans in portraiture, Motley essentially demonstrated blackness as being "worthy of formal portrayal." These portraits celebrate skin tone as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic. They also demonstrate an understanding that these categorizations become synonymous with public identity and influence one's opportunities in life. It is often difficult if not impossible to tell what kind of racial mixture the subject has without referring to the title. These physical markers of blackness, then, are unstable and unreliable, and Motley exposed that difference.
  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. He hoped to prove to blacks through art that their own racial identity was something to be appreciated. For white audiences he hoped to bring an end to black stereotypes and racism by displaying the beauty and achievements of African Americans. By displaying the richness and cultural variety of African Americans, the appeal of Motley's work was extended to a wide audience. Many were captivated by his portraiture because it contradicted stereotyped images, and instead displayed the "contemporary black experience." This is consistent with Motley's aims of portraying an absolutely accurate and transparent representation of African Americans; his commitment to differentiating between skin types shows his meticulous efforts to specify even the slightest differences between individuals. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Motley explained his motives and the difficulty behind painting the different skin tones of African Americans:
  They're not all the same color, they're not all black, they're not all, as they used to say years ago, high yellow, they're not all brown. I try to give each one of them character as individuals. And that's hard to do when you have so many figures to do, putting them all together and still have them have their characteristics. (Motley, 197
caption: NARA black-and-white photograph of "Getting Religion" painting by Motley (original painting in color)
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