Black Biography as Cultural Preservation
- Valerie Harris
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
History is more than a collection of dates and events—it is the lived experiences of individuals whose actions shaped the world we live in today. During Black History and Women’s History months 2025, I’ve focused on reading biographies and, being a creative person myself, I gravitate toward exploring the lives of those who have made their mark in the arts. Biography as a literary genre is a particularly insightful way of engaging with and—as a writer, preserving—our cultural history.
Recovering Forgotten Voices
The stories of Black writers, musicians, and artists help us recover forgotten voices, challenge historical erasure, and provide valuable lessons of determination, innovation, and survival in one’s chosen field. In Search of Lorraine, a bio of the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry; Survival is a Promise, on the life of poet, Audre Lorde; Becoming Ella Fitzgerald, the life of the famed jazz singer; The Swans of Harlem, about five black women who made dance history as prima ballerinas in the 1960s-70s; and We Flew Over the Bridge, the memoirs of the artist, Faith Ringgold are just a few of several recent biographies that illuminate the lives of Black creatives. These cultural icons played crucial roles in shaping American and global artistic movements.
Representing Blackness
Laura Wheeler Waring was a pioneer in the field
of black portraiture and figurative art.
For decades, African Americans endured the demeaning caricatures and racist stereotypes propagated in mainstream literature, periodicals, and advertising. For Black writers and visual artists, one of the most important themes of the early twentieth century was the question of how to represent the race.
“Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?”
W.E.B. DuBois, Criteria for Negro Art, 1926
Waring responded to this ongoing issue by painting African Americans of her own status and association, presenting elegant, empowered individuals of accomplishment and refined tastes as representative of the race.
More than seventy-five years after Laura Wheeler Waring’s death, there is a renaissance in figurative painting among black artists. The current movement has been described in The New York Times as “The New Face of Portrait Painting” and has resulted in a number of major exhibitions, including “The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure,” a recent standout show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that originated in London.
Like Waring in the first half of the twentieth century, contemporary black visual artists from the U.S., Britain, and throughout the diaspora still grapple with questions of how to represent the black physical presence, bringing to figurative painting and portraiture individualized perspectives and distinctive stylistic motifs.
Whether positioning black men within flowery, baroque-styled backgrounds or creating mystique-laden visual narratives or experimenting with grey, jet black, or even green skin tones, contemporary black artists conceptualize the black presence in unique ways that set them apart from the artists who came before them and from each other. Their paintings, sculpture, and installations command sums that were unimaginable in Waring’s time.
Yet, as her life story reveals, Waring was a forerunner among African American painters—and women in general—in creating a sustainable professional career as an artist.
Despite being consigned by racial prejudice to the peripheral of the mainstream art world, and not escaping gender bias within her own race, Waring—with talent, an ingrained understanding of professional protocol, and possessing a strong personal network—navigated the limited space allotted her by the mainstream art world to national acclaim and a legacy that resonates today.
Writing, reading, and collecting biographies of Black writers, musicians, and artists is more than an academic exercise—it is an act of cultural preservation and empowerment. By documenting and sharing their lives we reveal the historical continuity of cultural expression and ensure that the rich and diverse history of African American creatives remains an integral part of our collective memory.
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A powerful and beautifully written piece!