1. My thanks to Archie Motley, the artist's son and Head of the Archives and Manuscripts Collection at the Chicago Historical Society, for his assistance, and to Diane Dillon for bibliographic tips. My thanks as well to my research assistant Krissy Kim, who aided me throughout the project, and to Jim Herbert, who read the article with care and offered many insightful comments.

Motley, Archibald J. Jr., “Statement,” in Art of Today: Chicago, 1933, ed. Jacobson, J. Z. (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1932), 93Google Scholar.

2. The issue of race does arise in another article signed by Motley: he published a column in 1918 criticizing the sculptor Stanislaus Sukalski for calling upon Negro artists to paint only Negro types. Yet, shortly thereafter, Motley began to focus on African Americans in his own paintings (Motley, , “The Negro in Art,” Chicago Defender, 07 6, 1918Google Scholar).

3. Jontyle Theresa Robinson and Wendy Greenhouse identify the patrons of this nightspot as expatriate Africans and West Indians in their catalog, The Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1991), 89Google Scholar.

4. On Franz Boas's impact on the theories of “scientific” racism, see Pascoe, Peggy, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83 (06 1996): 44–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Guillaumin, Colette, “Race and Nature: The System of Marks, the Idea of a Natural Group and Social Relationships,” Feminist Issues 8–9 (1988–1989): 32Google Scholar. Robyn Wiegman dates this phenomenon to the late 17th century when “natural history … turn[ed] to the identification of skin as the primary characteristic for classifying human beings” (Wiegman, , American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995], 27Google Scholar).

6. Nott, J. C. and Gliddon, George R., Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lip-pincott, Grambo, 1854)Google Scholar. As Brian Wallis points out, Nott and Gliddon's book is the culminating tome in a string of publications for the American School of Ethnology, following on highly influential studies of skulls put forth by DrMorton, Samuel in Crania Americana (1839)Google Scholar and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844)Google Scholar (Wallis, , “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9 [Summer 1995]: 39–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

7. On the emphasis on physical inheritance over variation and evolution in the field of biology, see Cravens, Hamilton, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. On Boas's definition of culture, see Cravens, , Triumph of Evolution, 106Google Scholar. See also Stocking, George W. Jr, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology New York: Free Press, 1968Google Scholar.

9. Two good examples of this type of article are Locke, Alain, “The Problem of Race Classification,” Opportunity 1 (1923): 261–64Google Scholar; and Herskovits, Melville J., “Preliminary Observations in a Study of Negro-White Crossing,” Opportunity 3 (03 1925): 69–74Google Scholar.

10. For a historical overview of such stereotypical images, see McElroy, Guy C., ed., Facing History San Francisco: Bedford Arts; and Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990Google Scholar.

11. For discussions of the mammy type in visual culture, see Bogel, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films New York: Viking, 1973Google Scholar; and Morgan, Jo-Ann, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9 (Spring 1995): 87–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 131Google Scholar; see also Gates, , “The Face and Voice of Blackness,” in Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940, ed. McElroy, GuySan Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1990, xxiv–xlivGoogle Scholar.

13. Du Bois, W. E. B., “Negro Art,” Crisis 22 (06 1921): 55Google Scholar. As Darwin T. Turner points out, Du Bois did change his mind on this point owing to his concern that writers were placing too much emphasis on the lurid aspects of African-American life (Turner, , “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic,” in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, ed. Kramer, Victor A. [New York: AMS, 1987], 9–29Google Scholar).

14. Locke, Alain, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, ed. Locke, Alain (1925; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1969), 11Google Scholar.

15. Gates traces this ideal of the New Negro to 1895, in “Trope of a New Negro,” 136.

16. Schuyler, George S., “The Negro-Art Hokum,” Nation 122 (06 16, 1926): 662–63Google Scholar; Hughes, Langston, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation 122 (06 23, 1926): 692–94Google Scholar; Schuyler, George S., “Negroes and Artists,” Nation 123 (07 14, 1926): 36Google Scholar; Hughes, Langston, “American Art or Negro Art?” Nation 123 (08 18, 1926): 189Google Scholar; and “Editorial,” Opportunity 4 (08 1926): 238–39Google Scholar.

17. Thurman, Wallace, “Negro Artists and the Negro,” New Republic 52 (08 31, 1927): 38Google Scholar.

18. For discussions about efforts by the African-American elite in Chicago to dictate proper codes of dress and behavior, see Frazier, E. Franklin, “Chicago: A Cross-Section of Negro Life,” Opportunity 7 (03 1929): 70–73Google Scholar; Greenhouse, Wendy, “Motley's Chicago Context, 1890–1940,” in Robinson, and Greenhouse, , Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr., 42–46Google Scholar; Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 129–31, 140–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spear, Allan H., Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 168Google Scholar.

19. Powell, Richard J., “Re/birth of a Nation,” in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 21Google Scholar. Writing in 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton espied “a brown-skinned policeman saunter[ing] along swinging his club” when describing Bronzeville, the black section of Chicago where Motley frequently worked (Drake, and Cayton, , The Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, 2 vols. [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 2: 379Google Scholar).

20. For a history of visual images of mulattoes, see Wilson, Judith, “Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth — and Twentieth-Century American Art,” American Art 5 (Summer 1991): 89–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Archibald J. Motley Jr., excerpt from “How I Solve My Painting Problems,” written for the Harmon Foundation, July 1, 1947 (see the Archibald J. Motley Jr. Papers, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, Chicago Historical Society).

22. The mulatto has historically served multiple roles in literature, science, and the arts. For overviews of the mulatto character in literature, see Berzon, Judith R., Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction New York: NYU Press, 1978Google Scholar; and Dearborn, Mary V., Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture New York: Oxford University Press, 1986Google Scholar.

23. Larsen, Nella, Passing New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929, 18–19Google Scholar. The more recent Penguin paperback edition of 1997 actually reproduces Motley's The Octoroon Girl on its cover. Wiegman's American Anatomies, which opens with the passage in which Irene notes Clare observing her, first drew my attention to Larsen's book (Wiegman, , American Anatomies, 21Google Scholar). In the 1920s Alain Locke questioned racial categories based on binary oppositions by using the example of mixed-race ancestry. For instance, to criticize a text by Roland Dixon entitled The Racial History of Man, which posited abstract race types based on anatomy, Locke referred to the argument posited by Boas that types do not account for the range of possibilities introduced by racial crossbreeding (Locke, , “The Problem of Race Classification,” in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Harris, Leonard [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989], 165–73Google Scholar). On Locke's ideas about race, see Helbling, Mark, “Feeling Universality and Thinking Particularistically: Alain Locke, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, and the Harlem Renaissance,” Prospects 19 (1994): 289–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. On the tragic mulatto, see Berzon, , Neither White nor Black, esp. ch. 4Google Scholar.

25. “Do You Know a Beauty?” Half-Century Magazine 11 (11 1921): 8Google Scholar.

26. “What Color Shall I Wear?” Half-Century Magazine 16 (05–06 1924): 19Google Scholar.

27. The symbolic roles of fashion and cosmetics intended for African-American women of this period are discussed in Peiss, Kathy, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture New York: Metropolitan, 1998, esp. ch. 7Google Scholar; and White, Shane and White, Graham, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. chs. 7 and 8Google Scholar. My thanks to Marie Clifford for drawing my attention to White and White's book.

28. Greenhouse first pointed out that Motley paid attention to the role of skin color in stratifying the African-American community in Chicago (Greenhouse, “Motley's Chicago Context,” 43).

29. My information on Cortor is based on Jennings, Corrine L., “Eldzier Cor-tor: The Long Consistent Road,” in Three Masters: Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee-Smith, Archibald John Motley, Jr. New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1988, 12–16Google Scholar; and Warren, Lynne, ed., Art in Chicago 1945–1995 New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, 248Google Scholar.

30. Jennings, “Eldzier Cortor,” 14. Copies of Cortor's fellowship applications are contained in the Eldzier Cortor Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

31. Between 1936 and 1938 when Cortor studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his teacher Kathleen Blackshear took him to the Field Museum to sketch African sculpture (see Jennings, “Eldzier Cortor,” 13; and Warren, , Art in Chicago, 248Google Scholar).

32. “Chicago Active in Effort to Establish Community Art Center,” Chicago Defender, 05 20, 1939, p. 24Google Scholar.

33. The brochure for the dedication program held on May 7, 1941, can be seen in the Peter Pollack Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

34. Locke, Alain, “Chicago's New Southside Art Center,” Magazine of Art 34 (08 1941): 370Google Scholar.

35. See, for instance, the photographs that illustrate David, Robert's “A Community Adventure,” Chicago Defender, 03 1, 1941, p. 13Google Scholar.

36. See “Chicago Active in Effort.”

37. Greenhouse offers a thorough discussion of the Motley family within the context of the changing demographics of Bronzeville (Greenhouse, “Motley's Chicago Context,” 39–48).

38. Drake, and Cayton, , Black Metropolis, 2: 379Google Scholar.

39. “DNA Results Confirmed Old News About Jefferson, Blacks Say,” New York Times, 11 10, 1998, sec. A, p. 6Google Scholar.

40. Chabrier, Comte, “A. J. Motley,” Revue du Vrai et du Beau, no. 53 (02 10, 1925): 17–19Google Scholar; and Chabrier, , “Archibald John Motley, Jr.,” Revue du Vrai et du Beau, no. 63 (07 10, 1925): 28–29Google Scholar.

41. Chabrier, “Archibald John Motley, Jr.,” 29.

42. Jewell, Edward Alden, “A Negro Artist Plumbs the Negro Soul,” New York Times Magazine, 03 25, 1928, sec. 5, p. 8Google Scholar.

43. Tuttle, Worth, “Negro Artists Are Developing True Racial Art,” New York Times, 09 9, 1928, sec. 9, p. 10Google Scholar.

44. “One-Man Show of Art by Negro, First of Kind Here, Opens Today,” New York Times, 02 25, 1928, front pageGoogle Scholar.

45. Jewell, Edward Alden, “Archibald Motley,” New York Times, 03 4, 1928, sec. 9, p. 15Google Scholar.

46. Jewell, “Negro Artist Plumbs,” 22

47. M.P., , “A New Color on the Palette,” New Yorker 4 (03 10, 1928): 79Google Scholar; and Bulliet, C. J., “Art of East Is Challenged by Mid-West,” Chicago Evening Post, 02 2, 1932Google Scholar.

48. See, for instance, “Two Prizes Were Won by Archibald Motley Jr.,” Crisis 30 (07 1925): 135Google Scholar; “Persons and Achievements to be Remembered in April,” Negro History Bulletin 2 (04 1939): 61Google Scholar; Barnett, Albert, “Both Artists Win High Praise from Chicago Visitors,” Chicago Defender, 09 2, 1933, p. 10Google Scholar; and Roberts, Lucille D., “Progress in Art,” Negro History Bulletin 9 (04 1946): 151Google Scholar.

49. Bennett, Mary, “The Harmon Awards,” Opportunity 7 (02 1929): 48Google Scholar.

50. Herring, James V., “The American Negro as Craftsman and Artist,” Crisis (04 1942): 118Google Scholar.

51. Porter, James A., Modern Negro Art New York: Dryden, 1943Google Scholar.

52. Locke, Alain, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in New Negro, 254Google Scholar; see also Locke, , “The American Negro as Artist,” American Magazine of Art 23 (09 1931): 210–20Google Scholar.

53. Locke, “American Negro as Artist,” 220.

54. Locke, “American Negro as Artist,” 218.

55. Alain Locke, perhaps in response to James A. Porter's criticisms, modified his racial theory about artistic style. In the early 1940s he reminded the reader, “We must not expect the work of the Negro artist to be too different from that of his fellow-artists. Product of the same social and cultural soil, our art has an equal right and obligation to be typically American at the same time that it strives to be typical and representative of the Negro” (Locke, , The Negro in Art [Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940], 10Google Scholar; see also Locke, , “Up Till Now,” in The Negro Artist Comes of Age: A National Survey of Contemporary American Artists [Albany, N.Y.: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1945], iii–viiGoogle Scholar).

56. Porter, James A., “The Negro Artist and Racial Bias,” Art Front 3 (06–07 1937): 8–9Google Scholar.

57. Porter, , Modern Negro Art, 115Google Scholar. An article published in Opportunity in the late 1920s also pointed out that Motley's voodoo images were based on imagination: “Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,” Opportunity (04 1928): 114Google Scholar. As Jontyle Theresa Robinson points out, “Motley undertook the African paintings at the urging of Hell-man [president of the New Gallery where Motley had his first one-person show]” (Robinson, , “The Life of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,” in Robinson, and Greenhouse, , Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr., 11Google Scholar).

58. Porter, , Modern Negro Art, 180Google Scholar.

59. Porter acknowledged that he “cannot tell whether these commentators [who consider Motley's art to be racial] mean an essentially racial psychology or the mere predominance of the Negro subject” (Porter, , Modern Negro Art, 180Google Scholar).

60. Critics had some difficulty dealing with the voodoo pictures on such clear terms. Even a mainstream critic for the New Yorker stated, “Such things, to be real primitives, could hardly be executed by the young man who painted the sophisticated octoroon and the black and Tan Cabaret” (M.P., , “Archibald Motley,” New Yorker 4 [03 10, 1928]: 79Google Scholar).

61. Motley's position as an outsider to the world he depicted is discussed by Greenhouse, who points out that he was light skinned, middle class, and Roman Catholic, grew up in a white neighborhood, and married a white woman (Greenhouse, “Motley's Chicago Context,” 34). In addition, Robinson states that “all of his schoolmates and playmates were white” (Robinson, “Life of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,” 2).

62. On his education at the Art Institute, see Greenhouse, “Motley's Chicago Context,” 48–51.

63. Philpott, Thomas Lee, The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991), 173–74Google Scholar.

64. Robinson, “Life of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,” 2.

65. Robinson, and Greenhouse, , Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr., 95Google Scholar. See also Grossman, , Land of Hope, 157–59Google Scholar; and Spear, , Black Chicago, 175–79Google Scholar.

66. Porter, , Modern Negro Art, 116Google Scholar.

67. Barnett, “Both Artists,” 10.