Painter. Archibald John Motley received much acclaim as an African-American painter of the early 20th century in an era called the "Harlem Renaissance." He was known for his vivid hues of paints depicting vivacious action of the African-American urban life. He is credited with having the first African-American solo exhibition in New York City, selling twenty-two of the twenty-six paintings in the exhibition. Solely based on the worthiness of his work, he was given the opportunity of the exhibition without anyone knowing his race. Although born in New Orleans, he had his childhood in Chicago, where his family lived a comfortable life of the middle-class in a predominantly white neighborhood with his father being a pullman porter for Michigan Central Railroad and his mother a school teacher until she married. His father's parents were born slaves whereas his mother's ancestry was mixed French Creole and Native-American, thus as seen in his portrait, he had a light complexion. His family were practicing Roman Catholics with him being educated in Catholic schools. He refused a full-scholarship to study architecture. With his tuition paid by a family friend, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1910s, being one of the first Black students in the Institute. He credits Karl Buehr with "being one of his finest teachers and one who encouraged his style." He held a deep understanding of art history, graduating in 1918, as well as a deep understanding of racial tension after witnessing the 1919 race riots of Chicago. From the Chicago Art Institute, he received in 1925 the Logan Medal of the Arts and the Joseph N. Eisendrath Award. His art training was classical but he developed a modernist-realist and later, he was known for its modern jazz-influence. He was a prolific painter of mainly oil-on-canvas. Receiving much notoriety, his painting, "Mending Socks," was on exhibit at the New Jersey Newark Museum in 1927. Although painted in bright colors with items of his culture being unapologetically displayed, his grandmother's portrait, "Mending Socks," with the subject in a simple chair with a left-profile pose of the face, bears a resemblance to James McNeill Whistler's famous 1871 painting of "Whistler's Mother." He painted several scenes from the African-American Chicago's South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville, which was known for music and nightlife, showing couples, of various skin tones, dancing tightly together, while members of the orchestra played brass horns. As for his work being called "Harlem Renaissance," he said that renaissance means "rebirth" and there was no rebirth. He never lived in Harlem but some of his pieces had an air about this location as well as a touch of Picasso. In 1928 he was honored with the William E. Harmon Foundation Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes and a $400 monetary prize. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to spend a formative year studying and exhibiting in Paris from 1929 to 1930, yet refusing an extra six-month stay. Always in the most positive manner, he painted elegant portraits of African-Americans. Receiving recognition, he painted a 1931 nude, "Brown Girl After Bath." In 1933 he was appointed a visiting instructor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and the same year, his son was born. During the Great Depression of the 1930s for the Federal program of the Public Works Administration, he painted murals in public buildings, such as the 1937 "Stagecoach and Mail" in a post office. His 1941 painting "Sunday in the Park" has a background in shades of teal-colored paints with no details. His wife was his high school sweetheart. His wife's parents, who were German immigrants, disowned her as they did not approve of their white daughter marrying an African-American. In 1948 his wife died, marking a decline in his work with no paintings for eight years, and from 1942 until 1968, he had no real exhibitions. In 1955 he was given a six-month jail sentence for assaulting his step-father with a deadly weapon. In the 1950s, his career rallied after several trips to Mexico, documenting the Mexican daily life-style and landscapes in his paintings. In 1971 the Chicago television station produced a PBS documentary, "The Last Leaf: A Profile of Archibald Motley." Taking a decade to finish in 1972, his last painting, "The First One Hundred Years: He Amongst You Who is Without Sin Shall Cast the First Stone: Forgive Them Father for They Know Not What They Do," addresses racial relationships in the United States. In shades of dark blue, the painting shows on the left a Black man after being lynched from a tree; on the right is a house with a Confederate flag on the porch; in the middle are protesters carrying signs; in the mid-foreground, a man wearing a white sheet over his head is looking directly at the audience, and on the left, a church stained-glass window, while on the right a red devil. At the top of the painting are the death masks of United States Presidents John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln along with Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom were assassinated as they fought for the advancement of African-Americans. This is the only painting of his that reflects the suffering of African-Americans. In 1978, his pieces were part of a touring exhibition "Two Centuries of Black American Art." In 1980 shortly before his death, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the Chicago Art Institute and along with nine other Africa-American artists, he was President Jimmy Carter's guest at the White House. Posthumously, in 2014 he was the subject of a large-scale traveling retrospective, "Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist," and in the fall of 2015, he had a one-man exhibition at Nasher Museum at Duke University in North Carolina. His 1948 painting, "Gettin' Religion" was purchased in 2016 by the Whitney Museum in New York City for an undisclosed price. His nephew was author Willard Motley, who wrote "Knock on Any Door in 1947 and "Let No Man Write My Epitaph" in 1957, which were both adapted to films.