Envisioning New Worlds: The "Tropical Aesthetics" in the Art of Wifredo Lam and Aaron Douglas

This essay seeks to illuminate the imaginative ways in which black artists of the Caribbean and United States sought to create art that exempliied this important aspect of the black experience in the early twentieth century. It examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African diasporic art. By examining the work of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, I will consider how their representations of tropical and subtropical landscapes relect the particular and complex relationship that black people of these respective regions had with the terrain they inhabited—land on which many of their enslaved ancestors labored.