OSCAR Student Tucker Collins Researches the Impact African American Art Impacted the White Majority's Perspective of the African American Community

I began this project last Fall in my Honors 110 class. I originally wanted to examine all of minority art’s impact on the mainstream art world. I planned on examining how Chicano art and African-American art both impacted the way the White majority saw these two groups, mainly due to the fact that these were the two largest groups within American minority art. Of course, this original topic was too broad for just a semester-long research project. My professor at the time, and now research advisor, Dr. Davis, suggested I pick just one group on which to focus. I continued to research both groups and found that there were more scholarly articles and literature on African-American art. Following this, I was able to focus my research and refined my research question to:  How did African-American art throughout the 20^th century impact the White majority’s perspective of the African-American community? I was also able to pick out specific African-American artists that I could use as case studies to further focus my research. These artists were Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I chose these artists because each respectively found success at the beginning, middle, and end of the 20^th century. They each were also some of the most noted and successful artists during the 20^th century in both the African-American art community, but also in the mainstream art world as well.  Once the Fall semester ended, Dr. Davis suggested that I could extend my research and actually conduct the qualitative analysis by applying for undergraduate research through OSCAR. Of course, I applied and was fortunate to use this Summer to complete what I began in the Fall.