Dox Thrash

Dox Thrash (1893–1965) was an African-American artist who was famed as a skilled draftsman, master printmaker, and painter and as the co-inventor of the Carborundum printmaking process. The subject of his artwork was African American life. He served as a printmaker with the W.P.A. at the Fine Print Workshop of Philadelphia. The artist spent much of his career living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the second of four children in his family. Thrash left home at the age of fifteen in search of work up north. He was part of the Great Migration (African American) looking for industrial work in the North.

The first job that Thrash got was working with a circus and a Vaudeville act. In 1911, at the age of 18, he moved to Chicago, Illinois. He got a job as an elevator operator during the day, and used this source of income to attend school. Through the WPA, Thrash began working at the Fine Print Workshop of Philadelphia. At the Fine Print Workshop of Philadelphia, Thrash, along with Michael J. Gallagher and Hugh Mesibov, began experimenting and co-inventing the process of carborundum mezzotint, a printmaking technique.

In 1960, Thrash participated in a show at the Pyramid Club, a social organization of Black professional men that held an annual art exhibit starting in 1941. Others on hand were Howard N. Watson, Benjamin Britt, Robert Jefferson and Samuel J. Brown Jr.

Thrash spent the later years of his life mentoring young African American artists. He died on April 19, 1965, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Thrash's work was included in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.

In late-2020, after years of activism by preservationists, it was announced that Thrash's North Philadelphia house would be converted from a vacant property into a community resource.

Relation to Alain Locke and the New Negro Movement

Alain LeRoy Locke (1885–1954) was an intellectual, professor and author who espoused that African Americans, specifically artists, to capture the personality, lives, and essence of their people in The New Negro. He explained “The Negro physiognomy must be freshly and objectively conceived on its own patterns if it is ever to be seriously and importantly interpreted. Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid.” What Locke is expressing here is not only the call for black artists to overcome racial prejudices via positive artistic representations of blacks, but that the actual African American individual like Thrash portrayed the lives of fellow blacks, and had the power to propagate this idea of the New Negro, as Locke explains, “There is the possibility that the sensitive artistic mind of the American Negro, stimulated by a cultural pride and interest, will receive…a profound and galvanizing influence.”

In his carborundum mezzotint Cabin Days, Thrash depicts a southern black family on the porch of their shack-like home in a rural landscape. The man, woman, and child, clutched tenderly to the female figure's breast, create an intimate scene highlighted by the bright cleanliness of the laundry hanging behind them. Placed in front of the drying laundry, they are framed by one aspect of the hard work accomplished during the day. Close to one another, staring collectively outward at the Southern landscape, they, and their laudable priorities of cleanliness and family, are made the bright focal point in the poor, unstable atmosphere. Such inner warmth is seemingly incompatible with the family's crooked and disheveled surroundings, and their fuzzy appearance with a lack of facial detail makes the scene into a general archetype for rural southern blacks living conditions and qualities. Thrash was referencing an experience common to thousands of black families in rural occupations at the turn of the 20th century, often forced into slavery-like tenant farming as their only means of livelihood in the racist South. The “uneven clapboards, leaning porch, broken shutter, and uprooted fence” are rife with instability, much like the post-slavery economic and social systems of the South, making it clear that for African Americans, “the house is not the home; rather, the figures on the porch represent family unity and continuity”. Dubois called upon African-Americans to be proud of their heritage instead of being ashamed of their dark skin. This racial image issue was another characteristic of the African-American experience at this time. Thrash addressed the issue by creating portraits of African-American subjects and ideal heads using his carborundum mezzotint method that defined typically black facial features in a more realistic manner. At a time when white artists illustrated blacks barbarically in cartoons and newspapers, tasteful portrayals of black subjects were highly influential.

In Thrash's illustration of an African-American woman in his print Marylou, the chiaroscuro effect is extreme. Unlike some of his prints, there is minimal, visible white space in this print, except for around the subject's head. Resembling a halo, the light space bordering the woman's head gives the viewer a sense that there is something pure and righteous about her. She is not tainted or inferior as white society might try to imply. This could be Thrash's attempt to see the beauty in black as W. E. B. Du Bois called upon African-Americans to do in his editorial. Although this painting focuses on an individual, the way that the woman's eyes are illustrated makes her seem as though she is not a specific individual. Her extremely darkened eyes prevent the reader from identifying a precise woman, which enables the viewer to accept her as a symbol of the beauty of all African-American women.