Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), known for his art on racial themes, painted a series of murals in the old library building at Fisk University in 1930. Executed in modernistic style, employing opaque greens and blues highlighted by yellow · and orange, the murals borrow from mythology and the history of the African American. Douglas' studies depict the story of blacks from central Africa to America, such as ceremonies, Egyptian enslavement, and the slave ship; the slave block in America, slave religion, freedom, and education; blacks in the American industrial dynamo; phases of life, architecture, and the world's new centers; and, in a central area of the building, panels showing, in sequence, day, philosophy, drama, music, poetry, science, and night. The restoration has been captured in the film "A Thing of Beauty," which Fisk commissioned.