Dancing Figures

A dancer and writer himself, Richard Bruce Nugent had a deep affinity for the expressive possibilities of the human body in motion. In this striking image, he depicted dancers and plants as flat, stylized forms rendered in black silhouettes. In the mid-1920s, several Harlem Renaissance artists embraced an Art Deco silhouette aesthetic while evoking an African mythological past. As suggested in a verse of Nugent’s poem “Shadow” (1925), the silhouette also had personal significance for the artist, who was African American and openly gay:

Silhouette
A silhouette am I
On the face of the moon
Lacking color
Or vivid brightness
But defined all the clearer
Because I am dark
Black on the face of the moon