Charles Alston was one of the pioneers of the visual arts during the Harlem Renaissance and became a mentor to many younger artists. He was born in North Carolina, and his family moved to New York City in 1915 along with many other African-Americans during the Great Migration. He studied art at Columbia University beginning in 1925. After graduation, he began teaching at the Harlem Arts Workshop and he was a founder of the Harlem Artists' Guild. He was the first African-American supervisor of the WPA's Federal Art Project. During the 1930s, he traveled back to the South to observe the conditions of African-Americans living there, and he made a series of paintings about that, including the painting "Tobacco Farmer." He was a cousin of another Harlem Renaissance artist, Romare Bearden, and the two remained close friends for life. His most famous works include a series of murals at the Harlem Hospital.
Jacob Lawrence was a student of Charles Alston. Born in 1917, he moved from New Jersey to New York City as a teenager. He studied with Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center, and he also worked in the WPA's Federal Art Project. His style was flat and abstract, and very modernist. He is best known for his series of paintings about the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North, but he also did a series of paintings about famous Africans, such as Toussaint l'Ouverture, the hero of the Haitian Revolution, and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
Aaron Douglas was born in Kansas in 1899, but by 1925 he was living in Harlem. He has been called "The Father of African-American Arts." His painting and illustration style, like Lawrence's, was abstract and modernist. His career focused at first on illustrating important magazines and books associated with the Harlem Renaissance, but in the late 1930s, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to found the art department at Fisk University. He did a series of seven murals at Fisk. His style was heavily influenced by Egyptian painting, African masks and European ideas about abstraction.
Photography was also important during the Harlem Renaissance. James Van Der Zee established a portrait studio in Harlem in the late 1920s and became instantly successful as middle-class African-American families flocked to his studio to have their portraits made. He is also known for more informal street photography about the newly wealthy and middle-class African-Americans in Harlem.
A younger member of the Harlem Renaissance generation was Romare Bearden. Born in North Carolina, he moved to New York City and attended New York University. He was influenced by the mural paintings of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. He also worked on the WPA's Federal Arts Project, illustrated magazines with his cartoons and was a member of the Harlem Artist Guild. Later, in the 1960s, he became famous for his innovative collage work.