Elizabeth Grant Bankson Beatty (Mrs. James Beatty) and Her Daughter Susan
Joshua Johnson
An item at Art Institute of Chicago
Joshua Johnson portrayed his fashionably dressed sitter Elizabeth Beatty wearing a circlet of glass beads that accentuates her brown hair and gray eyes. The child's clothes are equally elegant: she sports a high-waisted, white-muslin gown and holds a brightly colored straw-berry, a delicacy often featured in the artist's portraits. Johnson was the first known Black painter to gain professional recognition in the United States. Listed in the 1816 Baltimore city directory as a "free householder of Colour," he had been freed by his enslaver (and father) around 1782 after apprenticing as a blacksmith. Described as "self-taught" in a newspaper advertisement, Johnson attracted local patrons among the city's artisan and middle-class families.
Americas in the Making
An exhibit at Art Institute of Chicago
These galleries present dynamic and wide-ranging art forms made in the Americas, where artists have been at work since time immemorial. The region now known as Chicago has long been a vibrant center of Native artistic practices, including those of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations. European settler colonialism and the development of the metropolis-including our museum's founding in 1879-introduced global art forms. Together, these local histories shape the collections we steward today, which encompass diverse makers, objects, and styles spanning centuries and continents, from North to South America and the Caribbean. The works here offer layered stories of the Americas in the making. Created for a variety of purposes-from aesthetic to ceremonial to practical —they have the power to evoke a range of emotions and responses. Complex factors impacted their making, including displacement and immigration, enslavement, global trade, and indus-trialization. As a result, they offer insights across eras while inviting reinterpretation in our moment. Just as artistic traditions are continually made and remade, so, too, are our efforts to present them. Today you can find selections of the many histories of art in the Americas on this floor and the floor above, in tandem with Gallery 136, a dedicated space for celebrating Indigenous art.