Unfixing the Folk: Palmer Hayden and 20th-Century African American Art Pedagogy

The central question that animates this presentation is how the work of the 20th-century painter Palmer Hayden facilitates critical re-examinations of the linkage between the arts and American citizenship in courses on African American history and visual culture. Scholarship on Hayden prompts questions about his legibility in the canon of African American art history. Although he is primarily known for the controversy surrounding his problematic early works, his later images of the 1940s and 50s evidence a shift toward more nuanced explorations of African American life. Drawing upon the work of Robin D. G. Kelley, we examine how his later folkloric images functioned as visual records of the “hidden transcripts” of Black protest: everydayresistance practices and encoded survival strategies. Through the study of Hayden and African American life during World War II, students learn how the artist responded to institutional narratives that framed African American citizenship as contingent.

As a class we work together to understand how Hayden’s career points to the permeability of art-historical categories. His work transgresses the boundaries between fine and folk art, academic training and self-study, and the domains of “high” and “low” culture. We discuss who set these terms, who could lay claim to them, and how they structure Hayden’s place within African American Art History as a discourse. Over the course of the class, students learn to critique the ways in which art-historical categories render some artists legible while pushing others to the margins.