Listen to co-curator Erica Ciallela talk about Archibald Motley Jr.’s painting The Octoroon Girl and read Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem “The Octoroon” (1922).
THE OCTOROON GIRL
The portrait and genre-scene painter Archibald Motley Jr. made a series of three works that portray African American women based on their Creole racial classifications, including The Octoroon Girl, the most famous, as well as A Mulatress (1924) and The Quadroon (1927). The sitter in The Octoroon Girl, as in the sister paintings, remains nameless. She is only identified by her race, which is one-eighth Black. Born into a mixed-race family, Motley was raised in New Orleans and Chicago and experienced firsthand how these complex classifications determined social status and privilege.
Archibald Motley Jr. (1891–1981)
The Octoroon Girl, 1925
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.
© Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr. All reserved rights 2024 / Bridgeman Images
ERICA: The painter Archibald Motley Jr., like so many artists during the Harlem Renaissance, wanted to create images that highlighted the fullness of the Black experience while drawing attention to issues facing the community. He accomplished this aim beautifully through this elegant portrait that brings race, gender, and class into conversation, while reflecting his own background within the nuanced system of racial identity practiced in New Orleans. Three years before this painting was made, the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote a poem titled “The Octoroon.” If Motley Jr.’s work appears to recognize and celebrate the sitter’s mixed-race identity, Johnson’s poem reminds us that, in the 1920s United States, the one-drop rule was starting to replace gradations of racial identity with the inflexible binary of “Black” and “White.”
“The Octoroon” (1922) by Georgia Douglas Johnson
One drop of midnight in the dawn of life’s pulsating stream
Marks her an alien from her kind, a shade amid its gleam;
Forevermore her step she bends insular, strange, apart—
And none can read the riddle of her wildly warring heart.
The stormy current of her blood beats like a mighty sea
Against the man-wrought iron bars of her captivity.
For refuge, succor, peace and rest, she seeks that humble fold
Whose every breath is kindliness, whose hearts are purest gold.