In the short span of its existence, between 1928 and 1948, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship Program became one of the most important sources of funding for African American artists in the United States—supporting some of the twentieth century’s most significant works of Black art, and furthering the careers of a generation of Black artists. This dissertation narrates the history of this idiosyncratic program—examining its singular impact on the field of Black art, as well as its role in forging notions of artistic expertise, discipline, and research that would circulate widely across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the same time, it examines the work of specific Rosenwald artist-fellows, and the creative, sometimes unexpected ways they used its support—making visible new definitions of artistic “research” in the process.
Engaging critically with the Rosenwald’s institutional archive, I examine the social mission and meritocratic ideals that governed its Fellowship Program, along with the bureaucratic procedures of evaluation it implemented to determine what art received funding—helping to explain broader processes at work in U.S. arts patronage, especially as non-profit funding rose to greater prominence across the twentieth century. Ultimately, I argue that the Rosenwald Fund acted as a disciplinary body, working in powerful ways to anticipate, shape, and direct artist-fellows’ decisions. I closely detail the system of value that it created, which rewarded artistic projects that were methodical, oriented to a discrete social question, and deeply researched––often involving a component of directed travel and on-site investigation akin to social scientific fieldwork.
Moving from the institutional to the individual, the dissertation’s chapters follow three artist-fellows—Jacob Lawrence, Eldzier Cortor, and Rose Piper—on their fellowship journeys, tracking both their physical movement and their evolving relationship with the Rosenwald. Examining these artists’ initial attempts to shape themselves and their art into “fellowship material,” each chapter attends to the ways these artist-fellows engaged with notions of research forwarded by their patron, especially with social scientific thought and methodology. I consider how the mandate of research set these artists’ movement apart from that of other travelers, like tourists or migrants, examining how the specificities of research travel inflected their aesthetic choices––from the size and kind of materials available while on the road, to the ways their artworks negotiated the barriers erected between a researcher and her subjects. At the same time, the chapters consider how the contingencies of travel could delay or reroute these artists’ carefully-planned research itineraries, attending especially to the risks that even the prestige of a Rosenwald Fellowship could not alleviate for Black travelers in the twentieth century—especially within the American South, where Lawrence, Cortor, and Piper each traveled on their fellowships, following a pattern that obtained among all Rosenwald fellows. Examining the encounters that these artists had in the South—with the hostilities of Jim Crow, but also with the strategies of survival and creativity that Black Southerners had devised in response—I track not only the subsequent deviations in their original research itineraries, but also the ways their understanding of research itself, its aims and purpose, shifted and transformed as a result.
