A Dialog Between FriendsTable of Contents 
The Black Chicago Renaissance (1930s–1950s) was a chorus of voices—painters, printmakers, writers, poets, and playwrights—each weaving stories of Black life with brushstrokes and verse. Eldzier Cortor stood among them, his art in conversation with the imagery of Margaret Burroughs, Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White, as well as the prose of Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. Together, with many others, like Gordon Parks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright, they shaped a movement that was both a reckoning and a rebirth, where Black creativity refused confinement. Through delicate yet powerful depictions of Black life, Cortor’s work became both an elegy and an anthem, etching resilience, beauty, and history onto the canvas of American art.
Eldzier Cortor’s life began in Richmond, Virginia, but took shape on Chicago’s South Side, where his family relocated in search of greater opportunity beyond the Jim Crow South. Raised in Bronzeville during the cultural zenith of Black Chicago, Cortor came of age immersed in a vibrant community. At Englewood High School, he studied alongside fellow luminaries Margaret Burroughs and Charles White. He later refined his skills at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where his education was shaped by Helen Gardner and Kathleen Blackshear, as well as early exposure to the Field Museum’s collection and the Art Institute itself.
Throughout the course of his career, Cortor traveled to the South Carolina Sea Islands, Haiti, Cuba, and Europe advancing his creative skills and expanding his life experiences. For over 75 years, he painted significant narratives of resilience, beauty, and history in conversation with his creative contemporaries. Together, they wove a tapestry of struggle and triumph, producing a striking visual language inspired by African art imbued with Socialist ideals. Cortor’s fusion of surrealism and African aesthetics reimagined Black life with dignity. Connecting African heritage to modern American identity, Cortor and his friends told stories rooted in history, unbound by expectation, and alive with possibility.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Chicago’s South Side was a vibrant nucleus of Black working-class life, where neighborhoods pulsed with the labor, resilience, and creativity of a people navigating the pressures of migration, racial segregation, and economic hardship. The city’s Bronzeville neighborhood, alive with industrial workers, crowded kitchenettes, and community institutions, formed the beating heart of the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC). A sanctuary established by Cortor and his friends Margaret Burroughs, Archibald Motley, Bernard Goss, Joseph Kersey, and Charles White, the SSCAC was a vivacious formative space where Black creatives lived and found inspiration.
Yet, the Black working class was not simply a backdrop for Cortor and his colleagues; it was their subject, their community, and their muse. Through figuration and stylistic influences drawn from African art, they honored everyday Black life with dignity and depth. Their early work resonated with the spirit of their literary peer Margaret Walker’s 1937 poem For My People, a powerful blend of celebration, critique, and pride at a time when Black voices were often suppressed. Their friendship, nurtured through the South Side Community Art Center and Chicago’s creative networks, embodied the deeply connected artistic legacies that still shape the city’s cultural landscape today.
Eldzier Cortor, Margaret Burroughs, and Charles White each received foundational artistic training in Chicago, where the city’s dynamic cultural scene left a lasting imprint on their work. All three graduated from Englewood High School and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where they were exposed to both classical European techniques and the powerful aesthetics of African art—elements that would become central to their visual languages. Burroughs also studied at Chicago Teachers College, where she developed a strong commitment to education, history, and community engagement. Together, they used their art to affirm Black life with dignity, historical depth, and creative prowess.
Although Cortor’s training at the SAIC grounded him in Western art history, his life on Chicago’s southside and initial study with George E. Neal gave him a tactile, place-based understanding of culture. This was further enriched by formative trips to the Field Museum, where encounters with African sculpture expanded his sense of what art could be. Building on these early experiences, he wove African formal qualities and spiritual sensibilities into portrayals of everyday Black life, honoring both ancestral lineage and contemporary experience. Set on a typical summer day in Bronzeville, Tête-à-Tête offers an intimate glimpse into Black working-class domesticity.
The French colloquialism tête-à-tête, meaning a private conversation, aptly describes the scene: two heavy-limbed figures engage in a relaxed exchange over groceries, grounding their conversation in the familiar routine of everyday Black life—a casual meeting on the commute home from work and the market. Cortor’s exaggerated proportions and curved lines show the influence of African sculpture on his work, especially in the elongated necks and the man’s stylized profile, which echo mask forms from the Fang peoples of Central Africa. Cortor’s stylistic choice is critical because it suggests that the everyday routines of working-class Blacks hold just as much creative depth as African design.
This is underscored by the warmth of the moment, as well as the man’s shovel, which represent beauty in the ordinary, reinforcing Walker’s tribute to Black people whose labor—digging, planting, and cooking—often went unrewarded. A writer and social activist, Walker was known for For My People (1947), her seminal novel Jubilee (1966), and her devotion to portraying the complexity of everyday Black life. Making her mark in Chicago’s literary circles, and as a long-time English professor at Jackson State University, Walker devoted her writing to capturing the nuance and significance of ordinary African Americans. Here, Cortor offers us a glimpse of that life, showing how work, friendliness, and perhaps even romantic interest meet for a quiet moment of rest and connection.
Correspondingly, Margaret Burroughs’s linocut Faces portrays the collective identity of Black working-class Chicagoans through bold, mask-like visages rendered in high contrast black and white. Drawing on African masks for symbolic effect and Cubism as a formal aesthetic, Burroughs conveys the intricacies and distinctness of urban Black life. Compressed forms and intersecting lines echo the South Side’s density, while the uniform gaze of the figures suggests shared struggle and solidarity—echoing Walker’s call for “a second generation full of courage [to] issue forth.” A lifelong educator and co-founder of both the SSCAC and the Du Sable Museum, Burroughs helped shape that next generation with a deep commitment to Black history, community and cultural heritage.
Lastly, Charles White’s Kitchenette Debutantes echoes both African and classical Greek sculpture. The figures stylized faces mimic the intensity of African mask forms, especially in their expressive eyes and prominent lips. Their sculptural postures signify the chiseled perfection of classics like the Capitoline Venus and Nike (Winged Victory) of Samothrace. However, the title’s irony critiques how poverty often constrains Black women, turning debutantes into survivors of crowded tenements; rather than the bearers of victory or beauty—a reality many Black women spend much of their youth striving to overcome.
White depicts the two women in a cramped window frame, one styling her hair, the other leaning contemplatively on the window sill. Thus, the window functions as both a frame and barrier, reflecting the tension between aspiration and limitation—a key theme in both White’s work and Walker’s poem, which illuminate the “dreams deferred” yet still alive within Black people and our communities.
Together, these works ground the visual archive of Black working-class life on Chicago’s South Side. Created in the aesthetics of African art and the realities of home and labor, they stand as powerful responses to Margaret Walker’s poetic invocation—testimonies of a people enduring and transforming, remembered not in silence, but in print, pigment, and pride.
For Cortor, Burroughs, and White, the background was never just filler—it pulsed with as much meaning as the figures it surrounded. In each of their works, something more stirs beyond the surface. Look closely, and you’ll find an abstract force alive in the canvas, a formal rhythm that moves within the lines and paint textures. It speaks to the spiritual energy that flows through Black communities, where motion is memory, and the unseen carries just as much weight as the seen. Their art doesn’t sit still—it dances, breathes, and testifies with us, capturing the dynamism not only present in the artists’ brushstrokes but alive in us and the spaces we occupy.
White depicts the two women in a cramped window frame, one styling her hair, the other leaning contemplatively on the window sill. Thus, the window functions as both a frame and barrier, reflecting the tension between aspiration and limitation—a key theme in both White’s work and Walker’s poem, which illuminate the “dreams deferred” yet still alive within Black people and our communities.
Together, these works ground the visual archive of Black working-class life on Chicago’s South Side. Created in the aesthetics of African art and the realities of home and labor, they stand as powerful responses to Margaret Walker’s poetic invocation—testimonies of a people enduring and transforming, remembered not in silence, but in print, pigment, and pride.
In 1948, famed Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes asked a haunting question—What happens to a dream deferred? His groundbreaking suite of poems, Montage of a Dream Deferred, includes this inquiry, while capturing the struggles and aspirations of Black life in mid-20th-century America. Drawing inspiration from jazz, Hughes crafted a dynamic collage of voices and perspectives, reflecting both the vitality and frustration of a Harlem community grappling with systemic racial injustice and unfulfilled dreams.
Regrettably, that reality was not unique to Harlem. During the Great Migration (1910–1970), Cortor and his parents were among the nearly six million African Americans who fled the racially segregated South, seeking opportunity in industrial cities like New York, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Their journey was part of the vast exodus of African Americans who uprooted their lives in search of places where they could live with dignity and in peace.
Having come of age in Chicago amid the grip of northern segregation, Eldzier Cortor and Gwendolyn Brooks confronted Hughes’s question early in their careers. While Cortor’s paintings captured the decay and confinement, Brooks’s poetry illuminated the quiet resignation of daily survival. Each artist revealing how segregation deferred dreams but never fully extinguished Black hope and resilience.
In Cortor’s Americana, a Black woman stands defiantly, mirroring Michelangelo’s David—feet firmly grounded, her right hand gripping a tattered shawl that loosely drapes around her nude figure, while her left hand gently holds the other end at her side. Flanked by a patchwork of magazine and newspaper clippings, serving as crude wallpaper for her kitchenette apartment, one-foot rests in a pail of water while the other presses a makeshift paper-bathmat into the floorboards. Yet, Cortor’s scene is not without defiance—the woman’s upright stance, unyielding gaze, and the rooster, a symbol of dawn, evoke the promise of renewal.
The kitchenette became a defining fixture of Chicago’s Black Belt, where over 80,000 of these cramped, makeshift units sprang up between 1940 and 1960. Kitchenettes emerged when ruthless, white landlords, driven by profit, carved once-stately homes into tiny, single-room units that combined living, cooking, and sleeping spaces. Often windowless and poorly ventilated, these overcrowded units became the only housing option for many Black families migrating north, offering little refuge from the structural racism they sought to escape.
Published in 1945, “kitchenette building” appeared in Gwendolyn Brooks’ debut collection, A Street in Bronzeville—the powerful volume that introduced the world to her unflinching portrayal of Black urban life. Based upon her own living experiences in kitchenette apartments, Brooks poignantly captures the stifling monotony of life within Chicago’s discriminatory housing system, where hope withers amid the confines of impoverished living.
Cortor underscores this sense of confinement and monotony in Room No. V, repeating the collaged wallpaper motif which frames his mirrored figure deep in solemn contemplation. Her nakedness serves as a powerful metaphor for vulnerability—her bare body alone within the frayed realities of kitchenette living. Yet, in her undressed form, Cortor also suggests possibility: unbound by costume or pretense, she sits with the power to clothe herself in whatever she chooses—to redefine her own narrative, (which many Black women did) despite the tattered surroundings that attempt to reduce her.
Having lived in both Chicago and New York, Cortor knew intimately the suffocating reality of Black families crammed into kitchenette apartments. In Room No. VI, he captures the quiet despair and enduring beauty of lives fractured by such desolate spaces, symbolized by the father’s figure—literally cut off at the knees—his presence rendered incomplete, yet still existent.
The number five surfaces throughout Cortor’s kitchenette scenes, almost like a code legible only to those familiar with life on Chicago’s South Side. In Americana, it appears as the stylized table leg, its significance reinforced by the drape of the tablecloth mirroring the shawl around the central figure’s thigh. In Room No. V, Cortor embeds it in the title and the collaged wallpaper, mathematically hidden within the numeral “14” as (1 + 4) equals five. These subtle gestures reference the fifth room in the overcrowded units Brooks evokes in “kitchenette building.”
As a co-founder of the Southside Community Art Center, Cortor knew Brooks and her groundbreaking collection A Street in Bronzeville, which helped her become the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. While Brooks notes that the tenant in room “Number Five” has just stepped out of the bathroom, Cortor invites us inside her kitchenette, revealing her confined world. Using surrealist and trompe l’oeil techniques, he paints the peeling walls, crowded spaces, and the somber atmosphere of Chicago kitchenettes. Both artists illuminate these shared realities—where dreams pressed against hardship, yet dignity endured. Together, their works give voice to lives too often overlooked.
Surrealism, with its dreamlike distortions and symbolic juxtapositions, became a potent tool for Black artists seeking to visualize the fractured realities of life in urban America throughout the post-WWII era. Eldzier Cortor embraced the style to depict the psychological weight of racial oppression, often rendering elongated, ethereal Black female figures strong but adrift in deteriorating interiors and devastated outdoor environments. His surrealist scenes, rich with metaphor, expressed both the spiritual resilience and existential alienation of Black life.
Eldzier Cortor emerged as a vital figure in Chicago’s Black arts community while working for the Easel Division Program of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA). Established during the Great Depression, the WPA’s Federal Arts Project offered a lifeline to struggling artists by funding public murals and other creative works, providing steady employment amid widespread economic hardship. For Cortor, the program was more than financial relief—it became a catalyst for artistic growth.
Immersed in a creative network that included Charles White, Cortor refined his visual language, transforming scenes of hardship into poetic reflections of perseverance and grace. White, a close friend and collaborator, deeply influenced Cortor’s commitment to painting the figure as his bold compositions gave monumental dignity to everyday laborers and demonstrated how art could be used to promote and preserve Black cultural histories.
During the 1930s, socialism gained significant traction in Chicago’s Black working-class communities, where Cortor, White, Elizabeth Catlett, and Richard Wright embraced its ideals of labor solidarity and social justice. Reflecting on his involvement in Leftist politics during this era, Cortor remarked, “everybody was slightly pink in the Depression days,” a reference to the widespread embrace of socialist thought among he and his colleagues. This political consciousness profoundly shaped their practices, inspiring them to create social realist works that celebrated Black resilience, challenged systemic inequality, and recounted African American history.
Social realist painting is a style that emerged in the early 20th century, rooted in the belief that art should reflect the realities of everyday life—especially the struggles of working-class people—and serve as a tool for social change. It became the dominant aesthetic of the WPA mural projects during the 1930s and 40s, where artists were commissioned to create public works that highlighted American labor, racial injustice, and community resilience. This movement was deeply influenced by the Mexican muralists—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—whose large-scale frescoes modeled a bold, politically-engaged visual language that many American artists adopted.
For Cortor, White, and Catlett social realism wasn’t just a style—it was a framework for storytelling, resistance, and education. These artists used figuration to elevate Black life and labor, infusing their work with respect, gravity, and a profound commitment to justice. This is seen most prominently in early works like, Coming Home from Work (1938-43), Peeling Potatoes (1938-43), In other folks’ homes (1946), Sharecropper (1952), and Our Land (1951).
Whether exhausted from a hard day’s work or standing tall in defiance of land and wage theft, the figures in these works speak volumes about labor, struggle, and pride. Through expressive hands, grounded stances, and resolute gazes, Cortor, White, and Catlett insisted that Black lives, stories, and contributions were not only visible but central to the American narrative. These contributions not only shaped the visual culture of their time but also laid the groundwork for future generations of politically-conscious Black artists.
In 1943, White was commissioned by the WPA to paint The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America at Hampton University. The mural, along with Five Great American Negroes (1939) at Howard University, chronicles the essential yet often overlooked role of African Americans in shaping the nation’s democracy. Through powerful, larger-than-life depictions of Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth and a host of other celebrated Black laborers, intellectuals, and activists, White visually asserts our place in the American narrative. Thirty years later, this commitment to honoring our history is powerfully evident in Still-Life: Past Revisited (1973), where Cortor transforms an intricate domestic scene into a poignant visual archive of Black cultural memory.
Eldzier Cortor’s Still-Life: Past Revisited (1973) transcends the still-life genre, functioning as a visual archive of Black cultural history. Like entering a musty attic or secondhand store the scene is densely packed with objects evoking nostalgia, resistance, and memory. At the center, sunflowers burst from a bouquet wrapped in vintage newspapers, signifying Black triumphs and strength. The sunflowers, often associated with happiness, symbolize the enduring legacy of Black joy through our cultural production, while the dried cattails evoke our Southern roots, migration, and lasting presence. The potbelly stove and crowded shelf create a domestic setting reminiscent of early 20th-century Black households and Cortor’s own oeuvre of interior scenes. Despite the signs of wear, the furniture and accumulated objects, reflect the achievement in Black people’s creativity and ability to forge success from adversity.
Cortor’s striking arrangement of stacked, mismatched chairs and tables—teetering in a precarious, surreal configuration—embodies Black ingenuity as it demonstrates the dual influences of Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism on his work. Although he was not a steadfast abstractionist, Cortor resonated with the movement’s celebration of spontaneity, gesture, and the expressive potential of form. The stacked furniture in Still Life: Past Revisited formally echoes the dynamism of Charles White’s mural, where bold, sweeping configurations depict African Americans in collective action and upward motion. Like White’s murals, Cortor’s precariously balanced objects symbolize the progressive upward movement of Black life, emphasizing how form itself becomes a metaphor for the resilience, complexity, and enduring vitality of the Black experience.
Painted from memory, Still-Life: Past Revisited reflects Cortor’s lived experiences while honoring Black history and referencing the socio-political landscape of the 1970s. The Black Arts Movement was in full swing, with Black nationalist and revolutionary ideology shaping cultural consciousness across the globe. Cortor illustrates this era’s celebration of Black pride and self-determination by skillfully weaving symbolic references to Black cultural icons into a mural-like visual narrative.
Public murals in Black communities throughout the U.S. have a long and celebrated history. During the 1930s, the WPA championed murals as tools of public education, commissioning White’s mural at Hampton and hundreds more like it, including Aaron Douglas’s Aspects of Negro Life series at the Schomburg Center in New York and Hale Woodruff’s Amistad Murals at Talladega College in Alabama. These commissions not only elevated Black history and culture but also contributed to the foundation of well-established art and art history departments at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
Institutions like Fisk University, Howard University, Hampton University, and Clark Atlanta University became critical hubs for Black artistic and intellectual development. During the 1940s, Hampton and Howard, in particular, were vibrant cultural centers where Harlem Renaissance artists exchanged ideas and mentored the next generation.
Before moving to Chicago, Elizabeth Catlett completed her undergraduate studies at Howard and her graduate studies at the University of Iowa, where she became close friends with Margaret Walker. She also taught alongside White, her first husband, at Hampton University. Aaron Douglas, a key Harlem Renaissance artist, was a longtime faculty member at Fisk, while Hale Woodruff founded the art departments at both Clark Atlanta University and Talladega College. Cortor, who often hung out with many of his colleagues at Hampton and Howard Universities, honors this legacy in Still Life: Past Revisited with a Hampton pennant, paying homage to White’s mural and celebrating the enduring power of Black art, education, and community at HBCU’s.
Through Cortor and his friends, we are reminded that the Black Chicago Renaissance was not just a moment in time—it was a movement born of community, purpose, and a deep belief in the power of art to tell the truth. Their works gave form to the dreams and struggles of a people, offering images that continue to speak across generations. In the faces, gestures, and rhythms of their work, we find stories of survival and celebration, of everyday life elevated to the extraordinary. Their legacy is not only preserved in museums or books but lives on wherever Black artists dare to imagine new worlds—and invite us to see ourselves within them.
This online resource was developed in collaboration with Michael Cortor, the son of Eldzier Cortor.
Eldzier Cortor: A Dialogue Between Friends is organized by the Black Artists Archive and generously supported by The Terra Foundation for American Art, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and Alma | Lewis.
