While many scholars celebrate Aaron Douglas as the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, there remains a widespread unfamiliarity with the diversity of his artistic production and his manifold contributions to the New Negro Movement. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, the first nationally touring retrospective of his work, attends to this disparity. Organized by Susan Earle and coordinated by Stephanie Fox Nappe for the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the exhibition showcases Douglas’s output in a variety of media, displaying oil paintings, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings, book and record jackets, magazine covers, illustrations, and murals. In doing so, it invites viewers to recognize the artist’s centrality to African American cultural life during the Harlem Renaissance, to integrate his work into the narrative of American art history, and to question a common presumption in modern art criticism that aesthetics and social engagement are disparate enterprises. Born in 1899, Douglas was raised in Topeka, Kansas. After graduating from high school in 1917 and the School of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922, he accepted a position as art instructor at the segregated Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri. Although Douglas was a reader of...