Charles Wilbert White

Our Land

Our Land offers a figurative personification of the working-class labor which went into cultivating that land. Charles White channeled this concept in his 1951 solo exhibition Negro Women, which displayed a group of painted liberated visions of Black American womanhood.

In the exhibition, Our Land emanated as a central image of White's revolutionary artistic practice, which robustly explored "the vortex of black life experience." A reconfigured reference to Grant Wood's American Gothic and American Regionalism, the pitchfork in White's image is firmly grasped by the larger-than-life hands ofa Black woman as she gazes beyond the viewer upon the fruits of her labor.

Visions of Black American working-class identity powerfully champions much of White's mid-century portraiture, and Our Land builds on this experience through a masterful combination of honest social realism and muralist experimentation.