“I made this Jar for Cash- / though its called lucre trash/ Dave.” In August 1857, the enslaved South Carolina artisan Dave (later recorded as David Drake) inscribed these words onto this stoneware jar. The first line is both an assertion of agency and a tacit acknowledgment of the injustices of the enslaved economy. Dave made the jar “for cash” but it is unlikely he received the money for which it was exchanged. The second line references the biblical injunction against money obtained dishonestly. In 1834, South Carolina passed an “antiliteracy law” prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read and write, yet Dave was not deterred. He inscribed his first vessel that same year and went on doing so until 1862. It was the middle of the Civil War and the tide was turning against the Confederacy: “I, made this Jar, all of cross / If, you dont repent, you will be, lost.”

In 1798, Joshua Johnson described himself as “a self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art…having experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” Johnson, the son of a white man and an enslaved Black woman, was the first free Black painter to earn a professional reputation in the US. He worked almost exclusively as a portraitist, depicting Baltimore’s merchants, officials, and military officers. He also painted residents of his neighborhood, including the Aitkin family, who were active abolitionists. In this graceful image, Johnson skillfully entwined Eliza’s arm affectionately around her mother, Elizabeth, and connected their gestures with a book. 

A free man of color, Thomas Day owned and operated one of the largest and most successful cabinetmaking shops in North Carolina before the Civil War. Active in Milton, in rural Caswell County, on the state’s northern border, Day worked in the era’s popular Greek Revival or Empire style. As the large sweeping scrolls ornamenting this secretary's glass doors suggest, Day had both an eye for visual drama and the skill and material knowledge to cut and powerfully arrange mahogany veneers. His practice thrived until the Panic of 1857, when the economy went bankrupt and Day’s white customers refused to settle their accounts.

Painter and printmaker Grafton Tyler Brown was a talented artist and a savvy marketer of his work. In 1886, he produced a catalogue of sketches depicting Yellowstone’s signature sites, capitalizing on the growing fascination with the American landscape and the democratic ideals of shared natural resources that the National Parks promised. Brown painted this view of Old Faithful, Yellowstone’s renowned geyser, from one of his 1886 sketches. As a painting, it is one of the artist’s most exceptional achievements. Its vertical composition emphasizes the awe-inspiring height of the spray, which contrasts with the dramatic storm-darkened sky.

Tanner’s permanent residency in France gave him freedom from the racial prejudice that haunted him in the US as well as respect for his preferred subject, biblical scenes. The son of an African Methodist Episcopal clergyman, Tanner responded to European religious art and imbued his work with light and power. In 1897, he traveled to Egypt and Palestine, seeking to add authenticity to his images. In Cairo, he painted this mosque interior, found within the 15th-century Mamluk complex of Qaitbey, a masterpiece of Islamic architecture.  Tanner depicted light from the stained-glass windows on the patterned floor and banded walls, carefully rendering architectural detail while evoking the serenity of observance and faith.

Around 1926, when Archibald Motley completed this painting, one of the smallest details would have been the most provocative—the cocktails on the white tablecloth. At the time, prohibition laws made it illegal to manufacture or sell alcohol in the US, a context that gives a political edge to this seemingly carefree scene. In the background, a painting of three monks suggests restraint and morality, creating a sharp contrast with the joyful women. At this moment in his career, Motley had moved away from painting portraits and began to create bustling social scenes, many set in his hometown of Chicago. Here, he skillfully unites enigmatic narratives with jazzy colors and light.

Beauford Delaney moved to New York in 1929 and settled in Soho in 1936 at 181 Greene Street. He often painted this lively area, flattening its spatial dimensions, reworking its signs and directional arrows, and integrating the rhythmic pace of the traffic lights with thick impasto and bright colors. His studio abutted Greenwich Village, a meeting place for bohemian artists at the time. This world offered Delaney sexual freedom he would not have been able to express elsewhere. For artists wanting to communicate outside of normative sexuality, codes and covert messages were necessary. A fresh look at Greene Street, with its seemingly abstract signs and symbols, could suggest multiple meanings, as Delaney quietly lets us in behind the closed doors of his artistic circle.

With piercing eyes and an expression of calm determination, this portrait bust of an unidentified young man shows Augusta Savage’s skill in capturing a person’s likeness and her ability to convey a deeper psychology. The work’s title, which alludes to the Black steel driver and folk hero who triumphed in his race against a steam powered engine, only enhances the figure’s strength and confidence. Savage possessed a similar defiant resolve: she battled her entire life for artistic opportunities and recognition for herself and for all Black artists, establishing the Savage Studio for Arts and Crafts in 1932 and becoming the first director of the Harlem Community Arts Center in 1937. She also mentored numerous young artists including Jacob Lawrence, William Artis, and Norman Lewis, all of whom have work in the MFA’s collection.

This necklace was forged by the fusion of two creative spirits: the experimental artist Joyce J. Scott and her mentor, the avant-garde jeweler Art Smith, shortly after their time at the multidisciplinary Haystack Mountain School in Maine. Art Smith considered jewelry as integral to the energetic movement of the body. Characterized by undulating wirework, many of his pieces look as if they are themselves dancing. Scott brought her now well-known free-form, off-loom bead-weaving techniques to her collaboration with Smith, foreshadowing her versatile practice that includes jewelry, sculpture, performance, and installation art. Here, the beadwork follows the dynamic, rhythmic lines and adds vibrant color to the warm brass mount.

This work combines a bold design with the portrait of a self-possessed girl from the Tai region of Côte d’Ivoire. The dramatic red cross emblazoned across the girl’s face signals the initiation into womanhood, a ritual practiced by the Sande, a women’s initiation society in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast. Following repeat visits to the African continent when Jones was in her sixties, she found her mature style by unifying intrepid patterns and joyful colors with figurative representation. She was one of the first artists to create Pan-African representations, embracing cultural legacies from across the African diaspora with dignity.

In Eldzier Cortor’s resonant, layered interior, recollections of 20th-century Black experiences in the US take physical form. Objects pile atop one another, every item a story. Most tell of accomplishments, such as a fan with the likeness of Madam C. J. Walker, who built her own business and fortune. Others are reminders of systemic racism, like a headline about the Scottsboro Boys, who were wrongly accused, unfairly tried, and convicted of sexual assault in a notorious miscarriage of justice in the 1930s. “This still life was painted at a reflective time of my life,” Cortor later told the MFA. “Hopefully people will relate to this work, add memories and reminiscences of their own.”

Born in Cuba of Nigerian descent and living in Boston since 1991, Magdalena Campos-Pons creates autobiographical artwork while also encompassing broader narratives of survival. Through photography and audiovisual material, she tells stories of cultures, religions, and people—from the oceanic voyage from Africa during the slave trade in the 18th century, to its aftermath in Cuba on the sugar plantations, to present-day racial injustice in the US. In this multipaneled photograph, the deep blue central passage, evocative of the ocean, splits the portrait of the artist. Her eyes are closed, suggesting she is looking inward to feeling, memory, and the complexities of her identity.

“Hairdressers are my heroes,” says Sonya Clark. “Rooted in a rich legacy, their hands embody an ability to map a head with a comb and manipulate the fiber we grow into a complex form.” In essence, hairdressing is the earliest form of textile art, where the hair is manipulated for aesthetic and functional purposes. Clark worked with hairstylists—Kamala Bhagat, Dionne James Eggleston, Marsha Johnson, Chaunda King, Anita Hill Moses, Nasirah Muhammad, Jameika and Jasmine Pollard, Ingrid Riley, Ife Robinson, Natasha Superville, and Jamilah Williams—to create updos on canvases threaded with fiber, blurring the boundaries between hair salons and art galleries as sites of aesthetics, craft, skill, improvisation, and commerce.

What does it mean to center Black bodies that have been almost invisible in art history’s Western canon? Kehinde Wiley subverts the stereotypes of traditional representation by depicting contemporary Black figures in positions of visibility, beauty, and power in large-scale paintings that use traditional European portraiture conventions. For this painting, Wiley’s starting point was English artist William Dobson’s portrait of the first Lord Byron of Nottinghamshire from about 1643. Wiley recast the leading figure as a confident Black man wearing a simple t-shirt and jeans. His left hand is extended, pointing upwards, almost as if he asks, What if history had been different?