BLACK ART AUCTION February 6, 2021 Auction

BLACK ART AUCTION Saturday, February 6, 2021 • 12pm EST

ARTIST INFORMATION CATALOG THIS CATALOG APPEARS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER AND PROVIDES A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE ARTISTS INCLUDED IN OUR CURRENT AUCTION. IT DOES NOT INCLUDE ESTIMATES OR ANYTHING RELATED TO BIDDING. IT DOES NOT PICTURE EVERY LOT—ONLY EACH ARTIST. NOT EVERY ARTIST INCLUDED IS A “HOUSEHOLD” NAME, SO IF YOU SEE A WORK YOU LIKE AND WOULD LIKE TO GET MORE INFORMATION ABOUT AN ARTIST, DO NOT HESITATE TO CONTACT US. ONE OF OUR GOALS IS TO INCREASE THE AWARENESS OF WORK BY “LESSER KNOWN” ARTISTS.

Ron ADAMS (b. 1934) Adams studied at the Otis Art Institute, U.C.L.A., and the University of Mexico.

Ron Adams enthusiasm for drawing the human figure is matched only by his reverence for technical excellence in whatever medium he might be working.

Adam’s, formerly a master printer at Gemini G.E.L., opened the Hand Graphics Atelier in 1974. He collaborated on both lithographs and etchings with artists such as Charles White, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, John Biggers, Judy Chicago, Luis Jimenez and many others. He retired from printing, and sold Hand Graphics to Michael Costello in 1987, in order to focus on his own artistic career.

Solo and group exhibitions include Cline-LewAllen Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Stables Art Gallery, Taos, NM; Downey Museum of Art, Downey, CA. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Afro-American Culture, Dallas, TX; Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Hampton University Museum, Hampton VA; the Taylor Museum, Hampton, VA; The Museum of Fine Art, Albuquerque, NM; the Little Rock Fine Art Center, Little Rock, AK; and the Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY, as well as numerous private collections.

(REF: https://www.handgraphicsllc.com )

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Charles ALSTON (1907-1977) Painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist, and educator . After his father’s death, his mother remarried Henry Pierce Bearden (Romare Bearden’s uncle) and the family moved from North Carolina to Harlem.

Alston painted and sculpted at an early age and received formal instruction at Columbia University. While attending college, he taught art at the Utopia House and served as a mentor to a young Jacob Lawrence. In 1934, he co-founded the Harlem Arts Workshop, which eventually came to be known as “306.”

Alston’s style grew more abstract by the 1950’s, but he never completely abandoned figurative studies. His figures characteristically maintain a sculpture like quality influenced by African sculpture.

His subjects were derived mainly from the experiences of his life and time. Alston states, “As an artist . . . I am intensely interested in probing, exploring the problems of color, space and form, which challenge all contemporary painters.

However, as a black American . . . I cannot but be sensitive and responsive in my painting to the injustice, the indignity, and the hypocrisy suffered by black citizens.”

In 1956, Alston became the first African American instructor at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1963, he co-founded (with Romare Bearden) the group Spiral.

In 1973, he was made full professor at the City College of New York.

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Emma AMOS (b. 1934) We’re always talking about color, but colors are also skin colors, and the term colored itself—it all means something else to me. You have to choose, as a black artist, what to make your figures….I find that I almost never paint white people.

Butterscotch, brown, or really black—but rarely white. White artists never have to choose…

Amos studied at Antioch College (Ohio), London Central School of Art, and New York University. While still a graduate student, Amos became affiliated with Spiral. Amos worked in painting, printmaking and weaving.

(REF: Gumbo Ya Ya, An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, intro by Leslie King-Hammond, 1995) Amos’s artistic concerns have centered on the politics of gender, race, sexism, and ethnocentrism. Her works across the media demonstrate the activist role that imagery can play. Her longtime interest in textile manifests itself through the cloth she incorporates into many of her paintings and prints . Her boundary-breaking approach h to materials gives little regard to the arbitrary high/low art divide that separates textile arts from painting.

African American Art Since 1950, Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, p. 88.

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Benny ANDREWS (1930-2006) Born in Madison, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers, Benny Andrews studied at Fort Valley State College (1948-50).

After serving in the Korean War with the United States Air Force, he attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (1954-58), studying with Jack Levine and Boris Margo. He was generally viewed as an outsider, unyielding to the trends of abstraction at the time he was developing at the Art Institute. His work focused on figurative social commentary depicting the struggles, atrocities, and everyday occurrences in the world, especially in the African American community. In his drawings, paintings, and collages, Andrews continued to pursue representational art, which has been his focus throughout his long career. “Benny Andrews is a remarkable draftsman whose work is characterized by great economy of means,” Patricia P. Bladon wrote in Folk: The Art of Benny and George Andrews. “He infuses his drawings with the same integrity and passion which characterize his largescale paintings.”

Arts program, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-84). His work received both critical praise and commercial acceptance. Elected to the National Academy of Design in 1977, he was awarded premier fellowships and exhibited widely in this country and abroad.

Today, his work is found in the collection of many major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Detroit Institute of Art; Morris Museum of Art, GA; Hirshorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Most recently, his work was featured in the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

As his career flourished he continued to speak out on the inequalities facing African American artists and helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition with fellow artist Cliff Joseph. He spent 29 years teaching art at Queens College and served as the Director of the Visual

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Barbara WARD ARMSTRONG (1940-2013 ) Barbara grew up in Cambridge, MA, and as a child, would sit in front of her house and talk to the students passing by from the Harvard dorms. They came "from all over the world—Chinese, Asian, African—and I used to sit there and talk to everybody.”

Barbara’s father died when she was only seven, and she watched her mother struggle to make the children’s surroundings a pleasant place: “create beauty in my home with ugly things”. Her grandmother taught her how to sew and quilt.

The significance of the sculptures “derived from Ward’s perceptive grasp of human character and her ability to express that character through gestures, poses, attitudes, and garments,” Gaither wrote in the Callaloo essay. “So astute an observer of human spirit is she that with the mere turn of a head or the addition of a political button, her figures attain highly individual personalities. Like characters in a Brueghel painting or a Spike Lee movie, they are instantly identified.”

Armstrong told PBS in an interview she used soft sculpture imagery “to visually state our experiences, to expand the knowledge about ourselves and others from different racial backgrounds. My inspiration comes from living.” REF: Askart Other notable artists creating soft sculptures are Faith Ringgold and Marie Johnson Calloway.

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Richmond BARTHÉ (1901-1989) Barthé was born in Bay St Louis, Mississippi. He left in 1924, headed for Chicago to study at the Art Institute. It wasn’t until Richmond Barthé’s senior year there that he was introduced to sculpting--in an effort to improve his skill at fleshing out three dimensional forms on canvas. A bust completed in his introductory class was included in the Art Institute’s juried exhibition, The Negro in Art, in 1927. This led to commissions for busts of Henry O. Tanner and Toussaint L’Ouverture. He had been awarded two Rosenwald Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, and so after graduation, he moved to New York, focused on establishing himself as a sculptor, set up a studio in Harlem, and continued studying at the Art Student’s League.

Both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased sculptures for their permanent collections. Throughout his career he created intimate portrait busts, large scale public commissions, and studies of the human figure. His work may be found in the public collections of Fisk University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In a review of his first solo exhibition, Edward Alden Jewell, art critic for the New York Times commented,

Richmond Barthé penetrates far beneath the surface, honestly seeking essentials, and never after finding these essentials, stooping to polish off an interpretation with superficial allure. There is no cleverness, no slickness in this sculpture.

Some of the readings deserve, indeed, to be called profound.

The Inimitable Josephine Baker Monograph with essay by Dr. Margaret Rose Vendryes.

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Romare BEARDEN (1911-1988) Bearden spent summers as a teenager in Pittsburgh, staying with his grandmother in the city’s East End. He stayed in Pittsburgh for his final year in high school, graduating from Peabody High School in 1929. He learned to draw from a friend named Eugene while there. Eugene had made drawings of the brothel where he lived with his mother. When Romare’s grandmother learned of his friend’s circumstances, she brought the boy to live with them at the boarding house.

Sadly, Eugene died a year later, but the experience was significant to Bearden and he revisited his time in Pittsburgh as subject matter even much later in his career. He executed a ceramic tile mural for the transit system there in 1984, titled Pittsburgh Recollections and a collage titled Pittsburgh Memories the same year.

This collage is likely a scene from his grandparent’s boarding house, with the city and its steel mills visible outside the window.

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John BIGGERS (1924-2001) Biggers painted the Song of the Drinking Gourds outdoor mural on the exterior of the Senior Citizen Craft House in Tom Bass Regional Park outside of Houston.

The building was designed by James Marshall, and set on a grassy knoll so the mural could be seen from many points in the park. Tom Bass was a Harris County commissioner who brought a sense of humanism to politics in the county. Bass had suggested Biggers for another mural (Adair). “The setting and the building and the wall filled me with thoughts of Mexico and the murals of Rivera.” (p.87) Texture and pattern predominate in Song of the Drinking Gourds. It almost appears that Biggers painted directly onto the concrete block surface—so successfully did he incorporate the building texture into the smooth prepared plaster wall.

Creating an underlying quilt-like pattern, Biggers divided the entire wall into tiny triangular shapes, just as a quilt maker might when working with scraps of fabric,

making every piece count. Bold shapes emerge from this painted quilt. At the center is a large blackbird hovering over a balaphon with gourds fastened below for resonance and tone. These are the only shapes not fragmented by the quilt pattern, and thus they form the natural focal point of the mural.

To the left and the right, balanced symmetrically, are window-like forms that evolve first into quilt patterns and finally into a figure composed of an anvil and a wash pot. To the far left and far right are figures of a king atop a lion and a queen atop an elephant. There are connecting threads between the king and queen, and veiled forms within the window frames. (p.88) It may be then, that Song of the Drinking Gourds reflects John Biggers’s belief in the universality of the human spirit and the unique qualities of the individual soul. (p.90)

Biggers at work on platform.

(Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers, Ollie Jensen Theisen, University of North Texas Press, 2010: 88.)

Detail, ascending blackbird with gourds. (Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers, Ollie Jensen Theisen, University of North Texas Press, 2010: 89.)

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McArthur BINION (b. 1946) Binion was born in Macon, Mississippi, and studied at Wayne State University and Cranbrook in Detroit (he was the first African American to achieve a M.F.A. from Cranbrook).

Active since the 1970s, Binion’s work is abstract minimalism. He identifies as a “Rural modernist” and has said that his work “begins at a crossroads—at the intersection of Bebop improvisation and Abstract Expressionism”.

Binion pulls stylistic tropes common to folk artists as well, borrowing quilting patterns, layering photographic imagery and motifs and grids. He does all this while using one implement: his characteristic “crayon,” or paint stick, which allowed him to move past oil paint.

“In 1972 when I started to use them, they were basically industrial marking sticks,” he recalls. Binion effectively converts an elementary tool into a refined hand-held instrument. He thrives in the effort of that conversion, having developed an ornate and labored approach that demands strenuous hours, and—as Binion has noted—resonates with the cotton-picking of his childhood. He had to train himself to be ambidextrous to negotiate hand fatigue, and works an entire surface of a painting in one sitting, before returning to rework that surface the next day or week or month. Some works take years to complete. This approach carries over to his print-making as well, exemplified by the image here.

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Tarleton BLACKWELL (b. 1956) Tarleton Blackwell’s calm and wry manner merely hints at the controlled chaos of his (works) - animated with lively scenes of pigs, wolves, foxes, dogs, roosters, and more - layered with portraits, figures, and familiar icons from both high and popular culture. Sources of Blackwell’s art include his intermixing of rural southern imagery, the Baroque art of the Spanish master Diego Velazquez, and symbols of American power, justice, and money.

Blackwell began the Hog Series in 1983 while a graduate art student. He was inspired by memories and visions of growing up in the rural midlands of South Carolina, where his father, a Baptist minister, owned a pig farm, and pork production was a major business that he knew well. REF: Charleston Renaissance Gallery.

He earned his MFA from the University of South Carolina. He is also a licensed funeral director and embalmer.

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Sylvester BRITTON (1926-2009)

Sylvester Britton was born in 1926 on the South Side of Chicago. He attended the Abraham Lincoln Center, a cultural center in Chicago, and received formal art training in Mexico City at the School of Painting and Sculpture. When Britton returned to Chicago, he studied at the School of the Art Institute. He later traveled to Europe, living and exhibiting work both in Paris and Sweden before earning enough money to move back to Chicago by making Christmas cards. When he returned to the United States, he was instrumental in the revival of the South Side Community Art Center and became its gallery director. He was also a regular exhibitor at the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago.

Britton exhibited works at Oak Park Library, Chicago, IL; Atlanta University; Art Institute of Chicago; and the South Side Community Art Center. He was awarded the Eisendrath Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956. Most recently, in 2018, the Smart Museum, Chicago, IL, included his work in the exhibition, The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side 1960-1980.

Illustrations of his work appear in the catalog on pages 72 and 139. His work is also illustrated in The Black Chicago Renaissance by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr., University of Illinois Press, 2012, cat #10:28 and 10:29.

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Wendell George BROWN (Contemporary) Brown is a fiber artist who explores “the synergy between quilts and Negro Spirituals” and how the two mediums “served as a source of protection for generations of enslaved and freed African Americans.” He was first inspired by the paintings of William H. Johnson while working at an exhibit at the Florence Museum of Art, in South Carolina.

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Selma BURKE (1900-1995) Although Selma Burke displayed an early aptitude for sculpting, it wasn’t until the early stages of midlife that she actively pursued art as a career. She was initially employed as the private nurse of a wealthy heiress, who later became a supportive patron. Burke received her M.F.A. from Columbia University at the age of 41 and became involved with the Harlem Artists Guild and the WPA. During the 1930s, she traveled across Europe studying and honing her skills as a painter under Aristide Maillol of Paris and ceramics under Wiener Werkstatte master, Michael Powolny in Vienna.

The refinement of her craft as a sculptor throughout her career led to important commissions for relief portraits of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Duke Ellington among others. The portrait she created of FDR served as the model for his image on the US dime used today.

Burke was also a dedicated educator, opening the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in New York City in 1940 and the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh, PA in 1968. A nine-foot statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. she completed while in her eighties is on display in Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. Burke was recognized by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 for her contribution to African American art history.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Spelman College, GA; Atlanta University, GA; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY.

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Calvin BURNETT (1921-2007) Calvin Burnett was a Boston-based painter and printmaker. He earned degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and at Boston University (he also eventually taught at the former for 30 years). His early career centered on printmaking and commercial art, but he experimented with nearly all possible mediums, subjects, and styles over the course of his career. Burnett worked on paintings for a considerable time, often on several at once. In 1997 he was forced to quit painting after developing glaucoma.

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Margaret BURROUGHS (1917-2010) In her dedication to educating others and advocating for African American art, Margaret Burroughs became a cultural leader and role model. Born in St. Rose, Louisiana in 1917, Burroughs and her family followed the Great Migration north to Chicago in 1922. She made the most of many valuable opportunities throughout her lifetime, beginning at Englewood High School, where she first became interested in art, and became the youngest member of George Neal’s Art Crafts Guild. She later studied at the Chicago Normal School.

At age 22, she founded the South Side Community Art Center, a community organization that continues to serve as a gallery and workshop studio for artists and students. In the early 1950’s, Burroughs started the Lake Meadows Art Fair where African Americans could showcase and sell their art. Burroughs lived in Mexico for a time, where she studied print making and mural painting with the Taller Editorial de Grafica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop) under Leopoldo Mendez, a prominent printmaker of the Diego Rivera circle. When she returned to the States, she and her husband Charles founded the DuSable Museum of African American History in their living room. It remained there for nearly a decade until it moved to its own building in Chicago’s Washington Park.

Women by the Chicago Defender. February 1, 1986 was proclaimed “Dr. Margaret Burroughs Day” in Chicago by late Mayor Harold Washington. Burroughs passed away on November 21, 2010.

In 2018, the exhibitions The Art and Influence of Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs and The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, were presented concurrently; the former at her beloved museum, and the latter at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. The book South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs by Mary Ann Cain was also published. Together they provide a closer look at the life and legacy of this remarkable woman who continues to inspire generations.

Burroughs was also an accomplished poet and author of children’s books. In 1975 she received the President’s Humanitarian Award, and in 1977 was distinguished as one of Chicago’s Most Influential

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Marie Johnson Calloway (1920-2018) Educator and artist, Marie Johnson Calloway, depicts the “rough-hewn beauty”of ordinary individuals in realistic, representational terms using a variety of media such as weathered wood, worn clothing, and found objects. “As a black woman artist,” she writes, “I wished to look beneath the misconceptions with which history had covered my people and me. The one connecting thread through all of my work is my perception of my own world (which, too, has been an odd mix), and my continuous effort to interpret it in a personal way.”

Born in Maryland, Marie Johnson Calloway received degrees from Coppin Teachers College, Baltimore; Morgan State University, Baltimore; and San Jose State University, California, before settling down to teach. She was the first AfricanAmerican public school teacher in San Jose. In 1969, she became an assistant professor at both the California College of Arts & Crafts and San Jose State University.

and the African American Cultural Center in San Francisco. Numerous group exhibits include the San Francisco Museum of Art (Marie Johnson and Betye Saar), Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and Bennett College, North Carolina.

She participated in the landmark exhibit, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, (Hammer Museum, MoMA PS1, Williams College Museum of Art, 2012-2013) which chronicled the vital legacy of the city’s African American artists.

Solo exhibits include: Oakland Museum, California College of Arts & Crafts, Howard University, San Francisco City College, Triton Museum in Santa Clara,

School Crossing Guard, c. 1970; mixed media/board, 65” x 55”; collection of the artist; featured in the exhibition, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980

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William Sylvester CARTER (1909-1996) William Sylvester Carter was born in St. Louis, MO and moved to Chicago in 1930 to study art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois. In order to earn room and board, Carter worked as a janitor at the Palette and Chisel Club (an all-white club, to which he became an honorary member in 1986).

He was among the artists represented in the American Negro Exposition assembled by Alonzo Aden, with the Harmon Foundation and the WPA in Chicago, 1940. Carter was awarded first prize for a work in watercolor. The same year, he exhibited at Howard University Gallery of Art. Carter also worked for the WPA in Illinois in 1943, and taught art at the historic South Side Community Art Center.

Carter worked in many styles and addressed virtually any subject matter from the traditional portrait to completely non-objective compositions. Although Carter humorously and vehemently vowed until the day he died (at 87) he was too young to have a painting style, this colorful, cubist-influenced work is a fine example of a style in which he worked regularly.

Carter’s work, The Card Game, 1950, was included in the exhibition, They Seek A City, Chicago and the Art of Migration (p.87) which was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

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Elizabeth CATLETT (1915-2012) Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington D.C. She attended Howard University where she studied design, printmaking and drawing. She continued her graduate work at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and in 1940 became the first African American student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture from the school. Grant Wood instilled in her the idea of working with subjects that she, the artist, knew best. She was inspired to create Mother and Child in 1939 for her thesis. This limestone sculpture won first prize in its category at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1940.

Eager to continue her education, she studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago (1941), lithography at the Art Students League of New York (194243), and independently with sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York (1943). In 1946, Catlett received a Rosenwald Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico City with her husband, Charles White, where she studied wood carving with Jose L. Ruiz and ceramic sculpture with Francisco Zuniga. There, she worked with the Taller de Grafica Popular, (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop), a group of printmakers dedicated to using their art to promote social change.

The TGP inspired her to reach out to

the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration. After settling in Mexico and later becoming a Mexican citizen, she taught sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City until retiring in 1975.

Catlett’s work has exhibited widely (most recently The Art of Elizabeth Catlett: From the Collection of Samella Lewis was presented at the University of Delaware, Sep 3-Dec 6, 2019) and her work is found in many important collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY.

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Houston CHANDLER (1914-2015) Resistance of the material is not itself a hindrance…it creates fertile energy in one’s mind.

Houston Chandler, or “Keg” to his friends and acquaintances, attended Vashon High School and Lincoln University in St Louis. Chandler was a talented athlete as well as artist, and he competed in the 1934 St Louis relays. He was also a first-rate football player. He continued his education at the University of Iowa, earning both an MA and an MFA. He was the second African-American to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa, the first being his friend and fellow sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett. He studied with Humbert Albrizio, Lester Longman and James LeChay. During the summer of 1946 he resided at 713 S. Capitol St. in Iowa City and the 1946-47 directory listed his address as 29 W. College St.

His work, he writes, “is primitive in the sense that he seeks the simplicity that brings out the most powerful line of expression.”

Chandler experimented as an abstract painter, but his most important artistic endeavors were executed as sculpture or prints (aquatints). He was versatile and proficient in numerous mediums: wood, stone, beaten lead (masks) and ceramic.

He found the physicality of print-making similar to making sculpture, and being the athlete that he was, this appealed to him. He was awarded many prizes at exhibitions for both mediums.

His work can be found in the collections of Atlanta University, the University of Iowa, National Gallery of Art, and the St. Louis Art Museum.

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Alfred CONTEH (b. 1975) Conteh was born in Fort Valley, Georgia; his mother is African American and his father is from Sierra Leone. He explores images of contemporary members of the African diaspora in mundane environments, portraying them in a “wise, gentle, heroic spiritual presence.”

REF: Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago: Our Reality, 2020 (solo) Conteh works in the Atlanta area, and his subjects frequently reside in the city’s West End.

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Eldzier CORTOR (1916-2015) Eldzier Cortor was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916. His family moved to Chicago in 1917 where Cortor was to play a large role in the Chicago Black Renaissance of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

In 1936, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project in the 1930’s and in 1941, co-founded the South Side Community Art Center on South Michigan Avenue.

After winning two successive Rosenwald Grants, he traveled to the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas.

It was here that he began to paint the women of the Gullah community as the archetype of African American culture, with their long, elegant necks and colorful head scarves. He focused on “classical composition”, making his figures resemble African sculpture. In 1946, LIFE magazine published one of these seminude female figures.

In 1949, Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to the West Indies to paint in Jamaica and Cuba before settling in Haiti for two years.

There he taught classes at the Centre d’Art in Port au Prince. Cortor worked up

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until his death in 2015 at the age of 99.

Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at the South Side Community Art Center in 2014; Eldzier Cortor Coming Home, an exhibition of prints, was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a joint exhibition of the works of Cortor and John Wilson in 2017. His work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Howard University.

Photo: The artist, 1949, taken by Gordon Parks.

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Ernest CRICHLOW (1914-2005) Social realist painter, illustrator, and educator, Ernest Crichlow was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, NY. He began studying commercial art at the School of Commercial Illustrating and Advertising Art, NY, and fine art with the Art Student’s League.

In 1930, Crichlow found a mentor in Augusta Savage when he joined the Harlem Artist’s Guild, alongside other such notables as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis.

Here he found his niche creating social realist works that packed a powerful message. During the Depression, he found work with the WPA, teaching art and working on mural projects. He used this platform to create works that captured “the indomitable inner strength, intrinsic beauty, dignity, and essential humanity of the African American community.”

He continued to support his community by establishing Brooklyn’s Fulton Art Fair in 1958. In 1969, along with Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis he co-founded the Cinque Art Gallery, dedicated to supporting and exhibiting the works of emerging black artists. He created a 25 panel mural in 1976 for the Boys and Girls High School of Brooklyn depicting people at work in various trades and careers as an inspiration for those students to achieve excellence. Crichlow was also known for his illustrations and children’s books.

Throughout his career, he participated in notable exhibitions at the American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940; the New York World’s Fair; the Harlem Community Center; the Downtown Gallery; ACA Gallery; and Atlanta University. He was honored as one of ten black artists from the National Conference of Artists by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970’s.

Crichlow’s, Reflections of Another Time, was included in Southern

Journeys, African American Artists of the South, a traveling museum

exhibition, originating out of the Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, FL in 2011. In 2018, his work was included in Truth

and Beauty: Charles White and His Circle held at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery,

NY.

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Emilio CRUZ (1938-2004) Emilio Antonio Cruz was an African American of Cuban descent born in the Bronx. He studied at the Art Students League and The New School in New York, and finally at the Seong Moy School of Painting and Graphic Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

As a young artist in the 1960s, Cruz was connected with other artists who were applying abstract expressionism concepts to figurative art such as Lester Johnson, Bob Thompson and Jan Muller. He combined human and animal figures with imagery from archaeology and natural history to create disturbing, dreamlike paintings. Harry Rand, Curator of 20th Century Painting and Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, described Emilio Cruz as one of the important pioneers of American Modernism of the 1960s for his fusion of Abstract Expressionism with figuration.

Cruz received a John Jay Whitney Fellowship as well as awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cruz moved to Chicago and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1970’s where he exhibited widely and was represented by the Walter Kelly Gallery.

He wrote two plays, Homeostasis: Once More the Scorpion and The Absence Held Fast to Its Presence. These were

first performed at the Open Eye Theater in New York in 1981, and later were included in the World Theater Festival in Nancy and Paris, France, and in Italy. In 1982 he returned to New York where he began to exhibit again. In the late 1980s he resumed teaching at the Pratt Institute and at New York University.

Cruz’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Zabriskie Gallery, New York; Anita Shapolsky Gallery, NY; Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago; Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1994, Cruz’s work was shown as part of the American contingent at the IV Biennial Internacional de Pintura en Cuenca, Ecuador. His last show, I Am Food I Eat the Eater of Food , was held at the Alitash Kebede Gallery in Los Angeles in 2004.

His work is held in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Albright– Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.

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Mary Reed DANIEL (b. 1946) Tonie, 1985 watercolor on paper 21-1/2 x 17-1/2 inches signed and dated Mary Reed Daniel was born in East St Louis, Illinois, a predominately African American community directly across the Mississippi River from St Louis, Missouri.

Daniel studied at the Southern Illinois University, and also with Allen Lunak in Chicago. The majority of her work is done in watercolor and dye on paper, and focuses on the female figure. Her work was included in Choosing: An

Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticisms by Black Americans 1925-1985 in 1986,

presented by Phillip-Morris Companies, Inc., and in the catalog accompanying the exhibition, Daniel said “There is a reservoir of information that can be taken from the African-American lifestyle, and I am presently concerned with capturing this in my work.” (Dr. Jacqueline FonvielleBontemps, Hampton University, p. 79; Daniel’s work is illustrated on this page).

Daniel exhibited at Lincoln University, Atlanta University, South Side Community Art Center, Chicago,IL, DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, Il, and the University of Wisconsin.

St in Chicago. In 1974, she showed with Sylvester Britton at the South Side Community Art Center.

REF:

Black Dimensions in Contemporary American Art, J. Edward Atkinson, 1971, p. 47.

Gumbo Ya Ya Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, Leslie King-Hammond,

1995, pp. 62-63.

Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 19651975, Rebecca Zorach, 2019, p. 46, 54.

She, along with Bill Daniel, Howard Mallory and José Williams started a gallery called 353 East on East 31st

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Miles DAVIS (1926-1991) When I first met Miles Davis, I was terrified. He was my idol and still is. Miles played the way he was as a human being and he painted and drew the same way.

Miles was authentic, nothing slick. He didn’t want to think like everyone. He knew jazz had an attitude just like his art did. When he drew faces and shapes, he drew heads in all different directions. It was always an experiment, a chance to break boundaries.

Quincy Jones Miles Davis grew up in East St Louis, Illinois, just across the river from St Louis. His family was educated and fairly well-off; his father had earned a B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and had graduated from Northwestern’s College of Denistry. Miles was given a trumpet for his thirteenth birthday along with lessons from Elwood Buchanan at Lincoln High School. He was inspired by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to be a musician. He performed in clubs around the St Louis area at a young age.

In 1944, he enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music to study classical music during the day, while playing in jazz clubs in Harlem at night. A year later, he left Juilliard to play jazz full-time. He played with Charlie Parker as early as 1945, and made a recording with Parker in 1947.

He became interested in visual arts in the 1980s, alternating between playing music and painting; he said, “I really started painting a lot in the beginning of the eighties, and now Im spending quite a bit of time doing that. If I don’t play the trumpet, I’ll do that. It’s always one of the two. I can’t do them together.” In 1988, Davis became inspired by the Milan design movement, Memphis, and began

painting abstract works using hot colors and conflicting shapes. He incorporated “totem faces” and tribal masks from African art.

On Miles Davis’ painting, Roots, 1991, Jae Sinett writes, “Miles was wellgrounded in the aesthetics of African American music. Everything he did portrayed that. Even during the cool period with Gil Evans, you can hear the blues in those orchestrated pieces. This painting seems to be a reaffirmation of the blues. Some of the figures are trying to break that spirit apart—are trying to suck the life from him. But there are figures who can’t be disrupted: a suggestion that some one is watching over the ones who are struggling.”

One of Miles’ most active influences was Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although they never met they had a mutual admiration for each other: Jean-Michel would listen to Miles’ music when he worked (and made references to Miles in his work) and Miles connected with Jean-Michel’s paintings and collected them.

Scott Gutterman describes his failed attempt at trying to define and categorize Miles’ body of work: I once asked Miles to help me with writing captions for his work. The plan was that I would hold up an image of one of his paintings, and whatever he said would become the caption. He looked at the first one, a typically free-flowing abstraction with hints of a dancer’s body at its core, and said, “I don’t know what the fuck this thing is.”

REF: Miles Davis The Collected Artwork, Insight Editions, 2013.

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Beauford DELANEY (1901-1979) Beauford Delaney’s talent was discovered by local and influential painter, Lloyd Branson whose support took him to Boston to study at the Massachusetts Normal School, the Copley Society, and the South Boston School of Art. In 1929, he moved to New York, where he became an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance, painting urban landscapes populated with the disenfranchised people he lived among, as well as portraits, sometimes of his famous friends.

Although he was a well respected artist with influential friends like James Baldwin, Henry Miller, and Georgia O’Keefe, he couldn’t escape the sense of marginalization he felt as an individual who constantly had to overcome the inequalities of being not only African American, but homosexual as well. He moved to Paris in 1950, a place where he felt a new sense of freedom. His style shifted from the figurative compositions of New York City life, to abstract expressionist studies of color and light, notably a vibrant, Van Gogh inspired yellow. In 1956, he met Darthea Speyer, an American cultural attaché living in Paris. She organized a group exhibition of works which included Delaney at the American Cultural Center in 1966, as well as two solo exhibitions of his work at her gallery which was established in 1968. Delaney lived his remaining years in Paris, eventually being hospitalized for mental illness and dying in 1979.

His work may be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; the Smithsonian Institution, and Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA.

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Louis DELSARTE (1944-2020) Delsarte grew up in Brooklyn and attended the Pratt Institute (BFA) and also the University of Arizona in Tucson (MFA). He also taught art throughout his career, including at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Delsarte was influenced by jazz music and has attempted to represent its spontaneity and rhythm in his work. He was also commissioned to execute several important mural projects in cities throughout the country. His technique is instantly recognizable. His colorful compositions are intentionally flattened and his brushwork causes a “surface tension” that is reminiscent of a reflection of the scene being viewed in choppy water. The figures and even the inanimate objects are buzzing with energy.

His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. In 2001, his work was chosen as part of the exhibition, When

the Spirit Moves: African American Dance in History and Art. Unity is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This article appeared in the NY Times announcing his passing earlier this year: Louis Delsarte

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Richard DEMPSEY (1909-1987) Richard Dempsey was born in Ogden, Utah, and spent his youth in Oakland, California where he attended Sacramento Junior College (1929-31) as an art major. He furthered his education at the California College of Arts and Crafts (1932-34) in Oakland, California, the Student Arts Center, and with Sargent Johnson. He later became an instructor himself at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington DC).

In 1941, he moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an engineering draftsman with the Federal Power Commission, and remained to become an important part of the Washington DC art scene.

In 1946, along with Elizabeth Catlett, he was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for a series of paintings of outstanding American Negroes. In 1951, he was awarded a Purchase Award in the Corcoran Gallery’s Tenth Annual Exhibition.

Dempsey was a prolific painter and worked on as many as six canvasses at one time, switching as his moods changed.

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James DENMARK (b. 1936)

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Thornton DIAL (1928-2016) Dial was a well-known “outsider” artist from Alabama. He held many jobs throughout his life, including carpenter, house painter, cement mixer and iron worker. Later in life he raised turkeys and made wrought-iron furniture. Dial met dealer Bill Arnett from Atlanta in 1987.

Arnett helped organize an exhibit of Dial’s work at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (1989). In 2005, the Houston Fine Arts Museum hosted an exhibit of Dial’s work, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century. Dial worked in many mediums and scale, from large assemblages to small watercolors.

His subjects addressed a variety of issues, but nearly always spoke toward relationships between people—between men and women and between people of different races. REF: www.askart.com

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Frank DILLON (1866-1954) Frank J. Dillon was born in Mt. Holly, New Jersey in 1866. He studied at St. Augustine College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and continued his studies at Oberlin College until 1889.

Dillon was a draftsman and designer for the Hirst Smyrna Rug Company in New Jersey and later worked as a stained glass designer for Oesterle Glassworks and Marcus Glassworks in Philadelphia.

He was 63 years old when he exhibited at the Harmon Foundation in 1929, receiving an honorable mention, and in 1933, he returned with two still lifes.

Dillon continued to show his work at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,1933; Texas Centennial, 1936; Dillard University, New Orleans, 1938; and the Library of Congress, 1940-41, among others. Most recently, the Indianapolis Museum of Art included one of Dillon’s paintings in an exhibit addressing artists who were painting during the Harlem Renaissance (2006).

Several of his works are reproduced in Against the Odds: African-Artists and the Harmon Foundation, Gary Reynolds and Beryl Wright; The Newark Museum, 1989.

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Jeff DONALDSON (b. 1924) Young Girl, 1964 watercolor and ink on paper 19-3/4 x 11-1/4 inches signed and dated Donaldson was a principal figure in the Black Arts Movement. He was a co-founder of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC, pronounced, OBA-see), he was a contributor to the Wall of Respect in Chicago (1968), and co-founded AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists).

He studied at University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (BA) and the Institute of Design (Illinois Institute of Technology, also known as the New Bauhaus, in Chicago; MFA, 1963), and Northwestern University (Ph.D, 1974).

These early watercolors serve as a preview to his later concerns with figurative subjects and flattened and fragmented color-block images associated with his work in AFRICOBRA. His work was recently featured in the exhibit, Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power.

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David DRISKELL (1931-2020) Artist, curator, scholar and distinguished professor emeritus David Driskell was born in Eatonton, GA in 1931. He completed the art program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 1953. He went on to attend Howard University and received his MFA from the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. Prof. Driskell explored post-graduate study in art history at the Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in The Hague.

He began his career as an educator at Talledega College in 1955. In 1977, he joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he remained for the rest of his career. Upon his retirement, the David C. Driskell Center was established to honor his legacy and dedication to preserving the rich heritage of African American visual art and culture. In 1976, Prof. Driskell curated the important exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Art: 17501950, which was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has authored multiple exhibition catalogs throughout his career.

As an artist, he works in collage and mixed media -oil paint, acrylic, egg tempera, gouache, ink, marker, and collage on paper and on canvas (stretched and unstretched). Prof.

Driskell has worked with the Experimental Printmaking Institute of Lafayette college and Raven Editions. The exhibition, Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking

by David C. Driskell, held in 2009 at the High Museum of Art, GA was the first

exhibition to highlight his printwork.

Prof. Driskell’s work has recently been included in David Driskell: Artist & Scholar of the African American Experience, Oct. 2019 - Jan. 2020, Morris Museum of Art, GA; David Driskell: Resonance, Paintings 1965-2002, 2019, DC Moore Gallery, NY. His work has also been featured in the following group exhibitions: Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, Feb. 29 - May 24, 2020, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; Tell Me Your Story, Feb. 8 - May 17, 2020, Kunsthal Kade, Amsterdam; The Seasons, Nov. 16, 2019 March 1, 2020, Nassau County Museum of Art, NY; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and African Diaspora is dedicating this academic year to commemorating its namesake’s life and work—combining teaching, art history scholarship and writing, and curation and the practice of art.

Photo: David Hills, Down East magazine, March 2017

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Mel EDWARDS (b. 1937) Mel Edwards was born and raised in Houston, but was given a football scholarship to play at the University of Southern California. Upon arriving at the school, he abandoned sports and began studying art. Edwards’ work was born of conflict: the prevailing modern art movement was toward abstraction and the non-objective while he was a student, but he believed art had been made throughout history for a reason and to tell a story. He also faced pressure as an African American artist to present a narrative of racial status. His welded steel Lynch Fragments consolidated those disparate mindsets. His compositions were balanced and pure, yet presented a narrative that was at once current and historical. Edwards found he could present similarly strong images in twodimensional printmaking as well.

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Tom FEELINGS (1933-2003) Tom Feelings, a native of Brooklyn, New York, attended the school of Visual Arts for two years and then joined the Air Force in 1953, working in London as a staff artist for the Graphics Division of the Third Air Force. In 1958, he created a weekly comic strip, Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History, which ran in The New York Age, a Harlem-based newspaper.

Feelings traveled to Ghana and Guyana early in his career, and spent his time in both countries illustrating, teaching, and consulting. When he returned from his first trip to Africa, he began illustrating books with African and African-American themes. To Be a Slave, a non-fiction children’s book written by Julius Lester and illustrated by Feelings, was chosen as the 1969 Newberry Honor Book. It was the first book of its kind to receive such an award. He illustrated twenty books in his career.

The School of Visual Arts recognized Feelings with its Outstanding Achievement Award in 1974. He has received eight Certificates of Merit from The Society of Illustrators, along with a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1982.

Feelings produced primarily drawings or understated watercolors of figurative subjects. While in Africa, he worked for Africa Review, established in 1971 as a journal discussing African politics, development and international affairs.

When in the United States, Feelings exhibited at the Brooklyn Fulton Art Fair; Atlanta University; Morgan State College; Park Village Gallery, (solo); and the Market Place Gallery, NYC.

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Zwelidumile Geelboi Mgxaji Mslaba "Dumile" FENI (1942 – 1991) Feni’s drawings, paintings and sculpture often depict the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He was born in Worcester, Cape Province, South Africa.

He lived in self-imposed exile from 19681991, based between London, New York City and Los Angeles. He moved to the United States permanently in 1978, and worked as an artist-in-residence at the Institute of African Humanities at UCLA. He exhibited extensively in South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States.

See also: https://www.grosvenorgallery. com/artists/67-dumile-feni/overview/

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Frank FRAZIER (b. 1943 ) I’m concerned about the future of the Black artist; the lasting effect of our work on our own children. It’s important that we, as artists, make some statements to affect change.

Originally from Harlem, Frazier studied at the Art Students League and Hofstra University. In 1980, he moved to Dallas and began working in silkscreen medium.

He had hoped to make his art more affordable to people and make it easier to share his narrative. He uses swatches of vibrantly colored Kente cloth and figurines from Ghana and Upper Volta, as well as the Ashanti tribe. He has exhibited at Howard University; Martin Luther King, Jr Library, Dallas; and the Brooklyn Museum. (REF: Hearne Fine Art, Arkansas)

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Meta Warrick FULLER (1877-1968) Born in Philadelphia, and educated in public schools, she and and May Howard Jackson (born the same year, also in Philly) were selected to attend the J. Liberty Tadd Art School in the early 1890s. Both women went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (May Howard a few years earlier). In 1899, Meta was given the opportunity to study abroad; she encouraged May to join her, but May declined. Warrick left to study drawing at the Ecoles des Beaux-Arts and sculpture at the Colarossi Academy. In 1901, she was granted an interview with the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin. He was unable to take on additional students, but he felt she had great promise, and continued to work with her informally.

Meta returned to Philadelphia and married Solomon Fuller in 1909. Fuller was the first African American woman to receive a U.S. Government commission in 1907. Her work addressed portraiture, religion, allegory, and African American themes. She exhibited at the PAFA, Boston Library, Dunbar High School (Washington, DC) and Howard University.

REF: 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, essay, Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, AfroAmerican Historial and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia, PA; 1996.

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Ibibio FUNDI (b.1929 )

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Herbert GENTRY (1919-2003)

Let experience be a part of you as a human being…Even though we’re black and we’ve been hurt by many people, we still have to give of ourselves. We sort of have to be universal. Nor do we lose blackness by being universal.

Gentry was born in Pittsburgh, but was raised in Harlem before WWII, where he had some exposure to art under the programs of the WPA. He served in the war, first in North Africa and then in Germany. He returned to Europe in the latter 1940s and attended the Ecoles des Beaux Arts and the Academie de la Grande in Paris. Gentry loved Paris and believed there were many similarities between Harlem and Paris—they were both “world cities”, with many languages and cultures—and all embraced enthusiastically.

Gentry was more drawn to the European Cobra Group of painters, who practiced a bold, gestural, figurative form of expressionism, over the abstract expressionists who were gathering great popularity in the United States in the mid-20th century. Eventually, he took up residence in Sweden, and divided his time between there and the U.S.

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Sam GILLIAM (b. 1933) Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. Shortly after his birth, the family (Gilliam was one of eight children) moved to Louisville, KY where he was raised.

Gilliam attended college at the University of Louisville, receiving a BFA in 1955. That same year his first solo exhibition was held at the university. He went on to serve in the Army and upon his return, began working towards his MFA. After graduation, he taught for a year in the Louisville public schools until he moved to Washington D.C., where he continues to live today. Gilliam continued to teach in the Washington public schools as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art, University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh throughout his career.

By the time Gilliam arrived in Washington D.C. in 1962, the Washington Color School had been established and included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing. Gilliam met and became friends with Downing. Soon, his works became large, hard-edged abstractions. His works evolved as he continued to experiment with innovative methods - taping and pouring colors, folding and staining canvases. He created Beveled-edge paintings in which he stretched the canvas on a beveled frame, so that the painting appeared to emerge from the wall on which it was hung. In 1965, he abandoned the frame and stretcher altogether and began draping and suspending his paint stained canvases much like hanging laundry on the clothesline. Each work could be improvised and rearranged at will. The first of these was displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969. Gilliam received numerous public and private commissions for his draped canvases. One of the largest of these was Seahorses in 1975. This six part work involved several hundred feet of paint stained canvas installed along the exterior walls of two adjacent wings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1972 he

represented the US in the Venice Biennale.

By 1975, Gilliam began to create dynamic geometric collages influenced

by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In 1977, he produced similar collages in monochromatic black hues. Re-invention has been a consistent component in Gilliam’s work throughout his career - he has constantly innovated, disrupted, and improvised and he is still doing all of it at age 86. He is now being represented

by Pace Gallery in New York and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Gilliam’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Tate Modern, London; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.

Recent exhibitions include: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, now showing at the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA; Black: Color, Material, Concept, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2015; Surface Matters, Edward H. Linde Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015; Affecting Presence and the Pursuit of Delicious Experiences, The Menil Collection, Houston, 2015.

A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings is currently on view at Dia:Beacon, NY.

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Nefertiti GOODMAN (1917-2010) Born Cynthia Freeman, and also known as Nefertiti Goodman, Nefertiti has become best-known for her large, exquisitely produced relief prints. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (MFA, 1977) and the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA, 1974).

After graduating, she taught at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Art in Roxbury (founded in 1950), but after receiving a fellowship in printmaking from the New Jersey Council on the Arts , she left Boston for Nutley, New Jersey. She begins her print-making process in black and white, and then embellishes the image with gouache and watercolor in jewel-like tones. She incorporates contrasting patterns in most of her works, sometimes within the subject and other times as a border to contain the image.

at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston the previous year. She also exhibited in Jubilee: Afro-American Artists on Afro-America, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1975 (four works; Dream II was illustrated, along with a work by William H. Johnson, on p. 16 of the catalog).

Her work was also included in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black Americans, 1925-1985 , sponsored by the Phillip Morris Companies (Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps, curator, 1986; work, p. 106 of accompanying catalog).

Her first major exhibition came in 1975 at the National Center of Afro-American Artists, National Arts Club, NY, although she was included in a group exhibition

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Jonathan GREEN (b. 1951) Jonathan Green was born in Gardens Corner, South Carolina, and raised in the home of his maternal grandmother, Eloise Stewart Johnson, where he learned the Gullah dialect and the culture of the Southeast. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force, Green studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1982). His work has been heavily influenced by his Gullah heritage.

The scenes he depicts in his work focus on themes of work, love, belonging, and spiritually in the African American experience.

The Kinsey Collection; Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, Where Art and History Intersect, p. 144-145.

Gullah Images, The Art of Jonathan Green, was written by Pat Conroy in

1996.

For a video interview with Jonathan Green, please visit the following link,

Seeking Jonathan Green .

Green’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Morris Museum; The Afro-American Museum of Philadelphia; The Naples Museum of Art; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, and the IFCC Cultural Center, Portland, OR.

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Inge HARDISON (1904-2016) Dr. Charles Drew (1904-1950) was an American surgeon and medical researcher. He developed improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing largescale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of lives of the Allied forces. As the most prominent African American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950 Lewis Latimer (1848-1928) was an American inventor and patent draftsman for the patents of the incandescent light bulb, among other inventions

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Portrait of Dr. Charles Drew

Portrait Bust of Lewis Latimer

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Barkley HENDRICKS (1945-2017 ) Painter and photographer best known for his portraits of young, urban men and women rendered in a realist or postmodern style. Barkley L. Hendricks was born in 1945 in north Philadelphia. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts between 1963 and 1967 and graduated with a BFA and MFA from Yale University School of Art, where he studied photography with Walker Evans.

Hendricks was primarily a painter, his work incorporating photography more and more as his style evolved - rendering his subjects with exquisite detail to their clothing, shoes, jewelry, and other accoutrements. In 2008, his work was featured in the major exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool, organized

by Trevor Schoonmaker, contemporary curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC. Of Hendricks work, Schoonmaker said, “His bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks’ artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today’s younger generation of artists.”

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Leon HICKS (b. 1933) An acclaimed engraver and draughtsman, Leon Hicks is known for his portraits and exploration of everyday life. Since the sixties, Mr. Hicks has distinguished himself as an artist and educator. He emerged during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, producing powerful images rooted in self-discovery and social consciousness. By the late 1970s, he was preoccupied with autonomous form and giving his full attention to investigating the language of engraving.

Throughout his career, Mr. Hicks has remained a committed student of art history, learning and mastering engraving techniques pioneered by giants like Albrecht DĂźrer (1471-1528), Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijin (1606-1669), and Mauricio Lasansky (b.1914), with whom he studied at the State University of Iowa.

His prints have been included in many exhibitions, including, Impressional Expressions: Black American Graphics at the Smithsonian Institution and The Studio Museum in Harlem. An edition of the work, Black Boy, was featured in the exhibition titled, Leon Hicks: The Ingenious Line, organized by Fisk University in 2012.

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Curlee Raven HOLTON (b. 1951) A highly regarded professor, painter and master printmaker, Curlee Raven Holton has exhibited his work throughout the world. His paintings, drawings, and prints are held by major museums and collections in the U.S. and abroad. His most recent solo exhibition, Journey: The Artistry of Curlee Raven Holton, was held at the University of Maryland University College.

Holton earned his MFA from Kent State University with a concentration in printmaking and his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Fine Arts in drawing and painting. He served as the David M. and Linda Roth Professor of Art at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. where he taught printmaking and African American art history. Holton founded the Experimental Printmaking Institute with a vision to provide artists with the time, space, materials, and professional support to create new work. This vision was realized with more than 200 works

produced. In 2014 he was appointed executive director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at University of Maryland, College Park.

Holton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Art and Philosophy from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) at the 2018 commencement in New York City. In 2015 he received the Anyone Can Fly Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Raven Editions is collaborating with the Pauly Friedman Art Gallery at Misericordia University for an exhibition titled, The Fine Print: African American Printmakers. This exhibition will open on Friday, January 15th and run through March 14th.

(REF: www.ravenfinearteditions.com)

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Varnette HONEYWOOD (1950-2010) Varnette Honeywood is an artist who celebrates black lifestyles in America with images rich in African references...

Honeywood’s primary concern is to illustrate the strong, reassuring, and free expressions of proud Black people.

For Honeywood, this goes far beyond depicting the icons of African American history to her own community. She is documenting a secular historical record of everyday African American life.

“Who else”, says Honeywood, “is going to interpret or document these feelings..and who else is going to deal with our triumphs and our sufferings if it is not us?”

-Curtis James, Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, 1995, p. 110.

Varnette Honeywood was born in Los Angeles. Her mother, Lovie, moved from Mississippi to L.A. in 1945 and married Stepny Honeywood. Both her parents were elementary school teachers.

Varnette studied at Spelman College and

USC. She visited Africa in 1977, when her work was exhibited at FESTAC. She met Bill and Camille Cosby in the 1980s, and a reproduction of one of her works was chosen to hang in the living room set on the Cosby Show. Honeywood was a prolific printmaker as well as painter.

REF: Forever Free: Art by AfricanAmerican Women 1862-1980, Center for the Visual Arts Gallery, Illinois State University, 1981; St James Guide to Black Artists , editor Thomas Riggs, 1997, pp.

251-252.

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Mildred HOWARD (b. 1945) For Mildred Howard, old family photographs and seemingly trivial objects identified with a historical African American culture take on the mnemonic power of Marcel Proust’s madeleine…

Howard creates moving reminders of her own and other family’s pasts, bringing their lessons of courage and endurance into the present, preserving them for the future.

Cecile N. McCann, Gumbo Ya-Ya, Anthology of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Women Artists, p. 112 Howard was born in West Texas, but her family moved to the San Francisco area when she was young. She studied Fashion at the College of Alameda California and Fireworks at John F. Kennedy University (Orinda, CA). She was influenced by Betye Saar, and became interested in installation art.

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Earlie HUDNALL Jr. (b. 1946) I chose to use the camera as a tool to document different aspects of life—who we are, what we do, how we live, what our communities look like. These various patterns are all interwoven like a quilt into important patterns of history.

Earlie Hudnall was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. His sense of community within his family and that of the African-American culture is what helped shape his work as an artist.

Hudnall began photography while serving as a Marine in the Vietnam War in the 1960’s. In 1968, he relocated to Houston to attend Texas Southern University and received his BA in Art Education. There he found the encouragement to continue photographing his subject matter of the everyday for African-Americans in the South. Hudnall made Houston his permanent home and has been working as the university photographer at Texas Southern University since 1990.

Hudnall is a board member for the Houston Center for Photography and an Executive Board member in the Texas Photographic Society. His work has been influential in the portrayal of the African-American community and culture. The director of Academy Award winner for Best Picture in 2017, Moonlight, mentioned Hudnall as visual inspiration on how the film should depict African-Americans both aesthetically and symbolically.

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Manuel HUGHES (b. 1939) Hughes, known to his friends as “Manny”, was born in St Louis, Missouri, and at the young age of 8, enrolled himself in the People’s Art Center. He eventually studied at the University of Missouri (BFA, MFA), and was initially an abstract artist, but turned to realism. He is best known for realist still life paintings of objects he found and bought at flea markets in New York and Paris.

A.M. Weaver writes in St James Guide to Black Artists : “Light through the use of color is a vehicle to heighten the dramatic effect of the appearance of objects that comprise his cluttered compositions. The theatrical quality of his paintings re-enhanced at intervals through the use of stark..backgrounds”. (p. 258) Hughes has exhibited in numerous important venues over the decades of his career, including Contemporary Black Artists in America, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Kenkeleba Gallery, NYC; Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art, Las Vegas; Pratt Institute; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; O.K. Harris, NYC; and Liz Harris Gallery, Boston.

REF: Black Artists on Art, vol. 1., Lewis/ Waddy.

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Margo HUMPHREY (b. 1942) Humphrey addresses issues of feminism, race, and personal subject matter subtly. Humphey works in sculpture and installation, but by far her medium of choice is print-making. She studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (BFA) and Stanford University (MFA). She uses narrative symbolism in her work, grounded in African American cultural traditions.

She has worked with significant printmaking ateliers, including the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hampton University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

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Wilmer JENNINGS (1910-1990) Jennings studied at Morehouse College with Hale Woodruff, and then went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. He also worked for the WPA as a muralist. Jennings was possibly bestknown for his wood engravings, so he was accustomed working in exclusively black and white. He subjects were varied, from portraiture to abstraction. He exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum; Worlds Fair, 1939, New York; Harmon Foundation; American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940; and the Texas Centennial, 1936, Dallas.

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Rashid JOHNSON (b. 1977 ) Rashid Johnson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College, Chicago.

He first received critical attention when his work was included in the exhibition, “Freestyle” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Thelma Golden in 2001. The same year, two photographs were accepted into the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Exhibitions that followed were, Chickenbones and Watermelon Seeds: The African American Experience as Abstract Art, in which the artist used stereotypical African American food culture items, placing them on photographic paper and exposing them to light through an iron reactive process; Manumission Papers (2002), so-named for the papers freed slaves were required to carry to prove their status. Johnson showed photographic abstracts of feet, hands and elbows. This was considered a study in racial identity because the parts were not identifiable; and Seeing in the Dark, Winston-Salem State University (Diggs Gallery); In this exhibit, Johnson focused on images of homeless men. In conjunction with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, he exhibited The Evolution of the Negro Political Costume in 2004, presenting outfits worn

by African American politicians.

The exhibition, The Production of Escapism: A Solo Project by Rashid Johnson was held at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005, and curated by Christopher West. This work addressed distraction and relief from reality through art and fantasy, using photos, video and site-specific installation to study escapist tendencies, often with a sense of humor that bordered on absurd.

More recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 2012, held Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, which was both a retrospective and Johnson’s first major museum solo exhibition. This exhibit recently traveled to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (at Washington University in St Louis).

Johnson uses nearly every medium in his work, and in that way, cleverly avoids limitation. That being said, the majority of his body of work is based in sculpture or photography. Introductory Image to a Twenty Image Suicide Documentary is equally literature, sculpture, photography and installation. It is an appropriation of an Elliot Erwitt photograph for Magnum, taken in 1950, which Julie Rodrigues Widholm, curator for the show at the MCA, suggests in the catalog for the exhibit, “(is) perhaps an oblique reference to the suicide at the end of Beatty’s novel.” She is referencing author Paul Beatty, an African American writer whose first novel, White Boy Shuffle , was a seminal text for Rashid Johnson, and which ends with a suicide. Another work

by Johnson, Fatherhood as Described

by Paul Beatty (2011) is one of his “shelf” works, and has various objects arranged on a literal shelf. The Erwitt photo appears in this work as well, directly below three copies of Bill Cosby’s book Fatherhood. The appropriation has a double meaning, as do most of Johnson’s symbolic references: the ultimate act of escape and also the concern for what hope exists for future generations.

Johnson’s artistic endeavors, like Beatty’s literature, always address identity, both as an individual and as a race--and how those definitions coincide and conflict for each.

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Sargent JOHNSON (1888-1967) Purportedly one of only two bronzes executed by Sargent Johnson, the other example of which is in the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art. Sargent Johnson was best known as a modernist sculptor, influenced by the cultures of Mexico, Latin America, and West Africa. Born in 1887, to a father of Swedish descent and a mother of Cherokee and African American heritage, Johnson and his siblings could have passed for white, but he remained firmly aligned with his African American heritage. In fact, the aim of his art was, according to him, to show African Americans how beautiful they were to themselves. Johnson was orphaned at an early age and sent to live with an uncle, whose wife, May Howard Jackson, happened to be a well-known sculptor of African American portrait busts.

He received his first formal art training at the Worcester Art School in Boston, later relocating to the West Coast in 1915, where he studied at the A.W. Best School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He studied with Ralph Stackpole, as well as Benjamin Bufano, whose work influenced his artistic output greatly in the 1920’s. At this time, Johnson’s work consisted of small scale ceramic heads, primarily of children. He became a regular exhibitor in the Harmon Foundation exhibitions between 1926 to 1935.

Johnson’s creative output increased dramatically in the 1930’s. He experimented with a variety of material including terra cotta, wood, beaten copper, marble, terrazzo, and porcelain.

He also produced prints and gouache drawings. He was employed by the California WPA, eventually becoming a supervisor, where his work took on a

monumental scale. He created public sculptures such as a carved redwood organ screen for the California School of the Blind, and exterior low relief friezes and mosaic decorations for the San Francisco Maritime Museum. Johnson also created sculptures for the Golden Gate International Exposition held in 1939 on Treasure Island.

In 1944 and 1949 he traveled to Mexico using funds from the Abraham Rosenberg Scholarship, where he studied the culture, ceramics, and sculpture of the region. While still incorporating the geometric shapes and motifs of indigenous peoples, his work became increasingly more abstract until his death in 1967.

In 1970, the Oakland Museum organized the first retrospective of his work, and in 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition entitled, Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist. His work may be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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Frederick D. JONES, Jr. (1914-2005) Painter and printmaker, Frederick D. Jones, Jr. studied at Clark University in Atlanta and later at the Art Institute of Chicago with George Neal, the first African-American to teach at the institute, and Eldzier Cortor. He is best known for his numerous paintings of jazz figures, including Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and Pee Wee Russell. He exhibited at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, and widely in the South throughout the 1940’s. In 1943, he won the purchase award in 1943 at Atlanta University. Jones worked for a time with Hale Woodruff while in Georgia.

He exhibited at Atlanta University, 1942 and 1943; Xavier University, 1963; and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1946-49 and 1951. His work can be found in the collections of Atlanta University and the Evans-Tibbs Collection in Washington D.C. REF: Tradition Redefined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art.

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Lawrence A. JONES (1910-1996) Jones was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, the oldest of 12 siblings. He left Virginia and registered at the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 19341936. In Chicago, Jones befriended accomplished artists Charles White, Eldzier Cortor and Frank Neal.

He also worked in the art studios at Hull House.

Jones did not finish his degree there, but moved to New Orleans and simultaneously studied and taught art at Dillard University (1936-1940). While there, he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship to travel to Mexico and study at the Taller de Grafica Popular.

In 1941, Jones went to teach at Fort Valley State College in Georgia. One of his students was Benny Andrews. A year after arriving in Georgia, he was drafted into the army. He painted a mural while serving at Fort McClellan titled, Negro Work and Life in Georgia. After the war, Jones created a new art department at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and remained there teaching until the 1970s. Jones earned a Master’s degree in art education from the University of Mississippi (1971). He visited Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and the Republic of Benin (1974).

Jones exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum; Atlanta Annuals, 1957, Many Years of Growth, honorable mention; American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940, New Orleans YMCA; Centennial Show of Black Progress, Chicago, 1964, Past, Present, Future, second place; and Augusta Savage Studios, NY, 1939.

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, St Louis Art Museum, Jackson State University, MS.

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Lois Mailou JONES (1905-1998) Lois Mailou Jones’ career spanned seven decades, and her paintings represented a variety of artistic techniques and themes as her style evolved. Her work remained consistent in her thoughtful use of color and strong sense of design, both of which were instilled in her through her extensive education at institutions such as the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Boston Normal Art School, and the Designer’s Art School of Boston.

At the beginning of her career, Jones submitted textile designs through a white classmate that were used by major textile firms. She went to work at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, helping to establish an art department. Professor James Herring was so impressed with her work, that he asked her to join the faculty at Howard University.

Jones held a position here for the next 47 years. A number of her students went on to have extremely successful careers in art, including Elizabeth Catlett and David Driskell.

In 1937, Jones went to Paris for a years sabbatical. She attended the Academie Julian and began painting plein air. She would continue to return to Paris throughout her life; like other African American artists of the time, she felt a freedom there that was profound.

Jones found another spiritual home in Haiti. In 1954, she was invited to visit and paint the country’s landscape and the people. The works she produced in this period are her most widely known works. Jones was equally at home painting French landscapes and figure studies. Her work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum, NY; and the National Palace, Haiti.

The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, organized the exhibition Lois Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color in 2011. In 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a show of 30 paintings and drawings showing her versatility and mastery of techinique. Her work was also included in the exhibition, I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, held at the Columbus Museum of Art, OH, in 2018.

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Robert Edmund Lee JONES (b. 1913) Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, Robert Edmond Jones was an African-American painter and sculptor active in Chicago where he studied at Hull House and the Art Institute. He was a founding member of the National Conference of Artists along with Chicago-based artists Bernard Goss, Marion Perkins,and the distinguished artist and educator, Dr. Margaret Burroughs. Inaugurated as the National Conference of Negro Artists, the group later became the National Conference of Artists. It is likely that Jones knew Burroughs in Chicago.

Stylistically, Jones worked in a style not unlike muralist Bill Walker and the artists of Africobra. His intentionally straightforward composition incorporating text as a decorative element was found to be effective in conveying the message in public art.

Jones’s work is found in the collections of the Negro History Hall of Fame and the Chicago Coliseum.

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Napoleon JONES-HENDERSON (b. 1943 ) Jones-Henderson was born in Chicago, and studied at the Sorbonne Student Continuum-Student and Artists Center in Paris (1963). When he returned to the U.S., he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1971). He also became involved in Africobra as one of the earliest members (1969). Jones-Henderson explored various mediums in his artwork.

His work is included in the collections of the DuSable Museum of African American History, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, South Side Community Art Center, Hampton University Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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Gwendolyn KNIGHT (b. 1946) Knight was born in Barbados, West Indies. Her mother entrusted her to friends at the age of 7, and as a part of that family, she moved to St Louis, Missouri. Six years later, they moved to Harlem. She graduated high school in 1930 and attended Howard University for two years, but was forced to drop out due to financial hardship. She continued to work at the Harlem Community Art Center and was mentored by Augusta Savage. She also assisted Charles Alston in mural painting. She joined a WPA mural project in 1934 where she met her future husband, Jacob Lawrence.

Josef Albers invited the couple to teach at Black Mountain College. Eventually they moved to Seattle, WA. Knight’s subjects are figurative, exploring the life, culture, and history of African Americans.

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Artis LANE (b. 1927) Whether she is creating purely figurative work that represents the universality of man, or portraits of such luminaries as Jacqueline Kennedy and Nelson Mandela, painter, sculptor, and educator Artis Lane has always been concerned with portraying enduring spiritual truths.

Most recently she completed a bust of Sojourner Truth which has been installed in Emancipation Hall and is part of the collection of the U.S. Capitol. Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, remarked that she was a perfect choice to sculpt Truth because, “her family- her personal story-is so compelling, and in some ways she embodies the history of black Americans.”

Lane was born Artis Shreve in 1927 in North Buxton, an all black village in Ontario, Canada. She is a direct descendant of abolitionist Mary Ann Shad Cary, who founded a school and the newspaper, The Provincial Freedom.

One of her earliest memories is of recreating dolls out of clay she found in a stream on her grandmother’s property.

She was painting portraits by age 6, and at 16, she received the Canadian Portraiture Award as well as the Edith Chapman Scholarship to the Ontario College of Art. Lane moved on to the Cranbrook Art Academy, and while in Detroit, had the opportunity to paint many of the important business and political leaders at the time, including Governor George Romney, Mayor Colman Young and several Ford family members.

Lane worked and lived in New York City, Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico City before settling down more permanently in Los Angeles. Throughout her career she created portraits, explored social injustice, and the metaphysical - examining both the individual and mankind as a whole. She writes, “In my work, I strive to heal, uplift, and inspire viewers and collectors to find perfection in their own being.” She has created portraits of such luminaries as Nelson Mandela, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey. Her bronze portrait of Rosa Parks was the first work of an African American woman to be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. In 1999, she designed the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded to Ms. Parks. Lane was inspired by this to further her artistic vision into the realm of the metaphysical with a series of works that explored mankind’s spiritual evolution, the culmination of which has been the creation of a 12 foot bronze sculpture called, Emerging Man. Her work has been featured in major group and individual exhibitions, including Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana; Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; DuSable Museum, Chicago, Illinois; and the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, California. In 2007 a major retrospective of Lane’s work was held at the California African American Museum which spanned 60 years and included nearly 100 works of art.

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Raymond LARK (1939-2005) Raymond Lark was born in Philadelphia, and studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and Temple University. He began working in fine art and commercial illustration, and eventually moved to Los Angeles . He was one of only a few artists representing California for the exhibit, Art Event of the Year (1966; Picasso participated in this venue). As a commercial artist, his work is included in many publications and he was the president of Art-West Associated. REF: Black Artists on Art, Lewis/Waddy, 1969; two of his drawings are illustrated, pp.

83-84.

I may get turned on by an old pair of shoes, a scrub bucket and a mop, a poor old lady, fire, a child of poverty, color in a dress, or the structure of a body. I can see beauty in earthy subject matter that most people feel is very insignificant. I usually elevate to full status subject matter that nobody seems to care about.

Samella Lewis writes, “Lark’s figurative compositions are enriched with line patterns that act as nets covering the surfaces of his works.” “The surface planes are animated by the inclusion of a web of lines that at times follows the form of the figure and at other times, opposes it. The shimmering surfaces that result suggest the reflections of light on a body of water.”

REF: African American Art and Artists, Samella Lewis, p.246.

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Al LAVERGNE (1943-2020) Al Lavergne grew up in rural Louisiana, the son of a sharecropper. He remembered the necessity of knowing how to use all sorts of tools and even in some cases, invent tools to get a job done. He looked forward to visiting the blacksmith with his father, and was fascinated by the work done with hot metal. These early influences stayed with him, and as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he began to favor welding, because of the durability and the freedom it allowed for innovation during the process of creation.

Lavergne earned his BA at Southern University Baton Rouge (1968) and his MFA at University of California Berkeley (1973). He exhibited extensively throughout the 1980s-2000s all across the country, and had one person shows at Governors State University, Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Louisiana State University, Kellogg Community College, Stephen F. Ausin (Nacogdoches, TX), to name a few.

He earned important public commissions, including at Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Battle Creek Art Center, Western Michigan University,s Grand Rapid Art

Center, The Old State Capitol Museum (Baton Rouge, LA), Southern University Baton Rouge, etc. He created an outdoor sculpture for Obafemi Awolowo University, Osun State, Nigeria; Martin Luther King Gateway Project, Shreveport, LA, and Musicians at the State Capitol Gardens, Shreveport, LA. Al Lavergne was a professor of art at Southern University Baton Rouge (19741990) and Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI (1990-2019). He was awarded two Fulbright Scholarships to travel to Nigeria.

Lavergne’s primary philosophical concern in his work was balance in space. His work pursues a vocabulary in rhythm and symmetry. He worked in abstract and figurative subjects, but he claimed the exact subject matter concerned him much less than the positive and negative in space. All elements to him were expressive. Lavergne counted many important artists as friends, influences, and co-conspirators, including Mel Edwards, Richard Hunt, John Scott and Ed Clark.

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Jacob LAWRENCE (1917-2000) Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917 and raised in Philadelphia and Harlem. As a teenager, Lawrence had been uprooted from a childhood spent in Philadelphia when his mother brought her children to live with her in Harlem. She enrolled him in the after-school arts program directed

by James Lesesne Wells. Lawrence’s mentor happened to be Charles Alston.

He was able to create voraciously - he created elaborate paper mâché masks and three-dimensional models of Harlem.

He read about master painters and focused his attention on patterns and colors.

Lawrence began attending high school, but quit after two years, worked odd jobs, and completed a stint with the CCC digging ditches during the Depression.

He re-discovered Alston who was now teaching in a WPA art center. Alston directed him to the Harlem Community Art Center, which was run by Augusta Savage. She was able to get him admitted as an easel painter by the time he turned 21. He eventually found studio space with fellow artists Ronald Joseph, Romare Bearden, and Claude McKay. Lawrence was a regular at Professor Charles Seifert’s discussions of

African and African American history at the 135th St. branch of the NYPL. At Seifert’s request, he attended an exhibition of West African sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. As an artist, Lawrence synthesized the events, meetings, discussions, experiences, and moments of his life onto the canvas and into his first narrative series (and the works to come). In 193638, he produced a series of works, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. For him, it was not sufficient to produce one defining work on the life of such an important historical figure, so he created 41 paintings. Lawrence also created series

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on Frederick Douglass in 1939; Harriet Tubman, 1940; John Brown; and the Migration Series.

In 1939 the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Harlem YMCA - his first publicized one man show. The Toussaint L’Ouverture series was also shown at the Manhattan headquarters of the Catholic Interracial Council. Later, an entire room was set aside at the Baltimore Museum of Art for his series. This was unprecedented. Lawrence was well on his way to becoming the best known African American artist of his time.

Lawrence won three successive Rosenwald Fellowships. With the second, he traveled through the South, experiencing both rural and urban life, the result of which was his Migration Series.

It was at this time that Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery began representing him. During WWII, he served in the Coast Guard, and was assigned to the first racially integrated ship in US history.

In 1946, he accepted an invitation from Josef Albers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He taught at many schools throughout his career, including the Art Students League, New School for Social Research, Pratt Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, where he eventually retired.

Between 1986 and 1997, Lawrence created prints from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture Series, which is now in the collection of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Lawrence translated 15 of these paintings into silk screen prints. At this later date, he was able change certain aspects of the work when adapting his original paintings to sets of silkscreen prints. The works were shown in the exhibition, To Preserve Their Freedom: Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Serigraph Series, held at the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans in 2017.

Recently, his work has been shown in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College, Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center, Asheville, NC, 2018-19 and I, Too, Sing America, Columbus Museum of Art, OH, 2018-19. The exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, was held at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2020.

His work is found in the collections of MOMA, NY; National Academy of Design, NY; National Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and many more.

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Claude LAWRENCE (b. 1944) Lawrence studied music in high school and in college at Roosevelt University in the mid-1960s. He made a living as a saxophonist after college until 1980.

He was mostly self-taught, although he studied printmaking at the Printmaker’s Workshop in New York City from 19921993. He was living in Harlem in the late 1980s, attending gallery openings and networking. He met artists Fred Brown, Lorenzo Pace, Jack Whitten and Joe Overstreet. Bob Blackburn recruited him to the Printmaker’s Workshop after meeting Lawrence at an opening. From 1990-2010, he lived in locations across the country and in Mexico City. He has lived in Chicago since 2010.

In 2013, three of his paintings were accepted into the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, NY, and in 2014, three of his paintings were accepted into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. His work is also in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem; African American Museum, Los Angeles; American Folk Art Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum; the National African American Museum of History and Culture, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Lawrence paints on canvas and on cold press watercolor paper.

In

2015, Gerald Peters Gallery in New York presented: Claude Lawrence: Beyond Improvisation. Lawrence’s work has also been featured in exhibitons at Cinque Gallery, NY; East African Cultural Center, Philadelphia, PA; Montclair University, NJ; Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, NY; Water Mill Museum, NY; Elaine Benson Gallery; East End Arts Council, Riverhead, NY; Great Neck Library, NY; Goat Alley Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY; Warren Street Gallery, Hudson, NY; Hugh Hill Gallery, Kent, CT; Works of Art Gallery, New York, NY; Museum of African-American Art, Los Angeles, CA. Photo courtesy of Madeline Rabb.

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Hughie LEE-SMITH (1915-1999) Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida in 1915, and raised in Atlanta and Cleveland, Ohio. He knew from an early age that art was his mission. His mother encouraged his growing talent by enrolling him in an art class for gifted students at the Cleveland Museum of Art. At twenty years old, he won a Scholastic magazine competition that allowed him to study at the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. He also studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938); and at Wayne State University (1952-1953), he studied art, theater, and dance. Throughout his career, he taught at several distinguished institutions including the Karamu House, Cleveland (late 1930’s), Princeton Country Day School, NJ (1963-65), Howard University, Washington D.C. (1969-1971), and the Art Student’s League, NYC (1972-1987).

Lee-Smith was employed by the Ohio Works Progress Administration in 19381939. At this time, he did a series of lithographic prints and painted murals at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois.

The Cleveland Museum recognized him for drawing in 1938 and for printmaking in 1939-1940. His early works were shown mostly in Chicago and Detroit; at the South Side Community Art Center, the Snowdon Gallery, and the Detroit Artist’s Market. He was a regular exhibitor at the National Academy of Design between the years of 1959 and 1976.

Despite many accolades and awards throughout his career, Lee-Smith did not

enjoy a major solo exhibition of his work until 50 years after he began painting.

The retrospective was held at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton (1988).

Just two years before his death, he was featured at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, and in 1994, he was commissioned to paint the official City Hall portrait of former New York City Mayor David Dinkins. He died in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1999 after a long illness.

His work is included in many major collections including the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago; Howard University; the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Wayne State University. In 2013, the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, organized a solo exhibition of his work from the 1930’s and 40’s titled, Hughie Lee-Smith: Meditations.

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Roy LEWIS (b. 1937) Martin Luther King, Jr., along with Albert Raby, formed the Chicago Freedom Movement in Chicago in 1966. Their slogan was “We’re on the move to end slums” (created by Don Rose, the press spokesman for the movement), and they developed a symbol, which combined the letters, M-O-V-E, emblazoned on signs, buttons, and armbands. King moved his family into a tenement in Chicago and began leading protests demanding open housing, good education, and access to jobs. The movement took on “discriminatory and duplicitous real estate practices, such as steering, redlining, and panic peddling, that kept blacks boxed inside big-city ghettos.”

(Chicago Magazine, Politics and City Life, The Long March, David Bernstein, 2016).

Rev. Jesse Jackson (in the photo on the left) was a young pastor, but already one of King’s top lieutenants, heading up the Chicago chapter of the SCLC “Operation Breadbasket,” PUSH’s precursor.

The movement was expectedly met with much resistance and was not deemed successful, but as Jackson pointed out much later, it set the pace for the country and did, in fact, land some success: “it helped erase neighborhood color lines; it led to greater equity in housing, including the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968; it opened up economic and political opportunities for blacks; it galvanized black youths.”

Roy Lewis grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, living on a plantation where his father worked as a sharecropper, harvesting cotton. After graduating high school, he landed a job in the subscription department at Johnson Publishing and moved to Chicago. He took up photography after he was drafted into the US Army in 1960. In 1964, Jet magazine

published his photo of Thelonius Monk.

Lewis’ photo, which appeared in Ebony in a 1967 article pictured a building at 43rd and Langley on the south side of Chicago. The article said, “another barren symbol of slum life” covered with “routine gang inscriptions.”

A group of local artists, seeing the article, resolved to paint a mural, and the Wall of Respect project was born. It is a common belief that the Wall of Respect was strictly a painted mural, but photography was also incorporated into the design. The mural included photos by Billy Abernathy, Darryl Cowherd, Robert Sengstacke, and Roy Lewis. Lewis’ photos were in the sections dedicated to theater and political activism. (REF: Walls of Prophecy & Protest, William Walker & the Roots of a Revolutionary Public Art Movement, Jeff Hubner, 2019, p. 61-66).

In 1970, he videotaped an interview with Elijah Muhammad, which was featured in the film, A Nation of Comon Sense. In 1973, Lewis moved to Washington, DC, and landed a job at the Washington Informer.

He traveled to Zaire in 1974 to film the AliForeman fight. (REF: The History Makers, The Nation’s Largest African American Video Oral History Collection, Chicago, online).

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Samella LEWIS (b. 1924) Over the course of a distinguished multi-faceted career, artist, art historian, museum curator, and activist, Samella Sanders Lewis became a peerless advocate for African American involvement in the arts. While she works in a variety of media, Lewis is best known as a printmaker. Often utilizing the human figure, her oeuvre speaks to the struggle and strength of the African American community.

Lewis began her education in her hometown of New Orleans, at Dillard University, but on the advice of her professor, Elizabeth Catlett, she transferred to Hampton University.

After graduating, she taught at several universities and in 1968, Lewis became the education coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a position she hoped to use to increase exhibition opportunities for black artists. Repeated clashes with museum administrators over the hiring of more staff of African descent led Lewis to

resign. She would go on to establish three independent art galleries and, in 1976, founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, where she served as senior curator until 1986.

Soon after she left LACMA, Lewis began teaching at Scripps College in Claremont, California (1969–1984), and, in another first, became the college’s first tenured African American professor. When she and fellow artist-scholar Ruth Waddy sought to publish their landmark twovolume guide on African American artists, Black Artists on Art (1969 and 1971), Lewis co-founded Contemporary Crafts Gallery, the first African American–owned art publishing house.

She also founded the noted academic journal, International Review of African American Art, in 1976.

REF: The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, SC.

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Glenn LIGON (b. 1960 ) Ligon is a contemporary artist currently working in New York City. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. His body of work is greatly varied in terms of medium, but the much of the content of his work relates to the issue of identity and the black experience.

Ligon credited the inspiration of his neon America (s), first seen in 2006, to the text of Charles Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“After trying to think of a piece using the Dickens text, I realized, actually, Dickens is talking about a moment that society is in where everything is happening and nothing is happening; everything is booming and everyone is poor,” Ligon says. “The dichotomies between rich and poor, progress and going backwards seemed to be where we were at in America. Those things going on at the same time seemed, to me, embodied in the word ‘America.’

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Lionel LOFTON (Contemporary) Lofton studied with John Biggers at Texas Southern University (Houston) and Clarence Talley at Prairie View A&M University (Prairie View). He has exhibited extensively from the 1980s to present, including at the Houston Art League, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Traveling Exhibition of Works by Texas Printmakers, 1995; African American Museum, Dallas, TX; Amon Carter Museum; Kinsey Collection Art Exhibition, Houston Museum of African American Culture; The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection: Works on Paper, Houston Museum of African American Culture.

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Ed LOVE (b. 1939) Love was born in Los Angeles and studied at California State University (LA), receiving a MFA. He also studied abroad at the University of Uppsla, Sweden as a post-graduate fellow. He eventually became a professor at Howard University, teaching sculpture (1969-1987) and from 1987-1990 he served as Dean of Visual Arts at the New World School of Arts, Miami. In 1990, he became a professor and director of undergraduate studies at Florida State University.

Love’s work in metal is influenced by jazz, traditional African sculpture, and ancient Egyptian mythology. His work was recently included in an exhibition at the California African American Museum titled L.A. Blacksmith which ran from September 10, 2019 through February 16, 2020. The exhibition featured "historic Los Angeles metal sculpture that signifies the durability of West African metalsmithing aesthetics to contemporary explorations of iron and steel alloys, bronze, copper, tin, aluminum and gold." https://caamuseum.org/exhibitions/2019/ la-blacksmith Ed Love exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, solo, 1976; Studio Museum in

Harlem; California State University, LA; University of Massachusetts; Washington Project for the Arts; University of Maryland, and elsewhere. His work was also included in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black Americans, 1925-1985, sponsored by the Phillip Morris Companies (Jacqueline FonvielleBontemps, curator, 1986.)

Similar examples of his work are illustrated in University of the District of Columbia Special Art Collection, 1984, p.

52-53.

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William McBRIDE (1912-2000) Born in Algiers, Louisiana, McBride’s family relocated to Chicago when he was ten. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with George Neal and privately with Ivan Albright. He exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and was active at the South Side Community Art Center (Chicago). McBride was a friend of Charles White and Eldzier Cortor.

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Geraldine McCULLOUGH (1917-2008) McCullough worked initially as an abstract painter, but in the early 1960s, she turned to sculpture. She convinced her husband, a welder, to teach her the craft, and began creating welded metal sculpture works. Her sculpture, Phoenix, won the Widener Memorial Gold Medal in 1964 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (Stuart Davis had won the award for painting).

Her work combines several metals, some cast, some welded, into twisted organic and distorted shapes, vaguely figurative in subject. She finds inspiration from African and Pre-Columbian art, and the resulting image conveys a mystical quality.

McCullough graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago (MAE, 1955) and taught high school classes before joining the faculty of Rosary College, in River Forest, IL. REF: Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, the catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia, 1996.

Her work is included in the Johnson Publishing Company collection, Chicago, Howard University, and the Oakland Museum.

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Charles McGEE (b. 1924) Self Portrait, 1968. charcoal on paper 26 x 20 inches signed and dated label verso: Arwin Galleries, 222 Grand River West, Detroit, MI McGee was born in South Carolina, but moved to Detroit when he was ten years old. He studied at the Society of Arts and Crafts (now the Center for Creative Studies) in Detroit. He also studied in Spain for a year. He was later an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University (1969-87) and had his own art school and gallery in the 1970s.

McGee painted several murals, including The Blue Nile (1987) at the Detroit People Mover Broadway station. He helped found the Urban Wall Mural Program in Detroit in 1978, a community beautification project funded by the Michigan Council of Arts. There were a total of fifteen murals executed for this project in the 1970s and 80s. McGee also painted murals at the Martin Luther King Community Center and for Northern High School.

McGee exhibited extensively and was included in the controversial Contemporary Black Artists in America held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

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Sam MIDDLETON (1927-2015) Mixed media artist, Sam Middleton was one of a group of expatriate African Americans who enjoyed success in Europe in the 1960’s. Middleton was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem near the Savoy Ballroom. This notable venue provided much inspiration for his future collages. His love of music - classical and jazz - was integral to his very life - he was known to carry an unwieldy turntable and collection of records with him wherever he traveled.

He joined the Merchant Marines in 1944.

Upon his return to New York City in the 1950s, he relocated to Greenwich Village, meeting and befriending a small group of African American artists including Walter Williams, Clifford Jackson, Harvey Cropper, and Herb Gentry - all of whom would expatriate to Europe in the next decade In the early 1950s, Middleton was part of New York’s Cedar Tavern scene, which included his friends Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Kline encouraged Middleton to apply to the John Hay Whitney Foundation and advised him to seek artistic success outside New York.

Middleton received a scholarship for one year of study at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, otherwise he was largely self-taught. It was there in 1957, that he began experimenting with collage.

His work was shown at Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1958 and again in 1960.

The Whitney Museum of American Art showed four of his works in Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under 36.

Between 1959 and 1961, Middleton lived in Europe, exhibiting in Spain, Sweden, and Denmark. Much of his artistic material was gleaned from ephemera he collected as he moved from city to city.

In 1962 he decided to make a home in the Netherlands. His later work brought the Dutch landscape into his collages.

Middleton remained in the Netherlands for the rest of his life. He showed extensively there and other locales throughout Europe, but was not forgotten in the States. In 1970, his work was shown in the exhibition, Afro-American Artists Abroad at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin and in 1983, the Studio Museum in Harlem held the exhibition An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad which also included Herb Gentry, Cliff Jackson, and Walter Williams.

His work is found in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Fisk University, Nashville, TN; Brooklyn Museum, NY, as well as many others.

Photo: Middleton, Cliff Jackson, and Harvey Cropper in Stocklholm, Sweden, 1960; Sam Middleton Estate. Unidentified photographer; © Sam Middleton Estate

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Earl MILLER (1930-2003) Earl Miller was born in Chicago and studied at Roosevelt College, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; Pratt Institute; Art Students League; and the Brooklyn Museum School in New York.

He also studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Germany. Miller’s early influences in Chicago, especially at the Institute of Design (a.k.a., the Chicago Bauhaus, because it was founded by Bauhaus master, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), would have been in abstraction.

Photo: The artist and Romare Bearden at a meeting of the Spiral group; courtesy of Dr. Pringl Miller, the artist’s daughter.

In New York, Miller joined the group Spiral, the year this work was executed (1963). He exhibited in an important group show which included Beauford Delaney, Herbert Gentry, Sam Middleton, Larry Potter, Norma Morgan and Walter Williams in Copenhagen in 1964: 10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe. He also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, along with an extensive list of exhibitions in Europe. He eventually began teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle (1969).

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Lev T. MILLS (b. 1940) Known primarily as a printmaker, Mills grew up in Florida, and studied at Florida A&M University. He earned his MA and MFA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At Wisconsin, he studied with Dean Meeker, an accomplished printmaker himself. Mills’ subjects approach a social narrative, but he likes to leave room for interpretation. He places precedence on artistic issues and this is evident in the high level of craftsmanship in his work. The images are bold, but subtle—not heavy-handed.

Mills studied abroad at the Slade School of Art in London on a fellowship. He participated in exhibits throughout Africa with the United States Information Agency program. Mills returned to the U.S. to Atlanta, to teach printmaking at Clark College, and later Spelman College. In the late 1960s-70s, Mills’ work consisted primarily of intaglios and silkscreen prints.

Photo: Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1980, p. 33.

I am greatly influenced by the discovery of new materials that might be used to produce a work of art. It is necessary to define these components that make art meaningful as new media are produced.

The ongoing effort of a “structuralist” is to struggle with forms—to build up, modify, tear down, and build up again before the resolution of a given work finally does take place.

-Lev T. Mills

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Dean MITCHELL (b. 1957) The Drums come in On the beat of one To lift my soul . . .

The cry of lonely in a crowded room midnight waiting for me each day at noon happiness so fickle coming late, leaving soon Mitchell writes, “Maya Angelou wrenches her poetry from her heart and sets it free to sing the pain and the joy, not of one heart, but of humanity. This is her jazz.”

Dean Mitchell was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1957 and raised in Florida. He attended Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio, working his way through by selling his watercolors. After graduation, Mitchell worked at Hallmark Cards until he decided to paint full time.

Although he initially found it difficult to find gallery representation, he has since

won numerous awards and had his work exhibited extensively. He is well known for his figurative works, landscapes, and still lifes that evoke Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.

His inclusion in the 2002 exhibition, Black Romantic, at the Studio Museum in Harlem led Michael Kimmelman, art critic of the New York Times to call his works, “subtly tuned character studies with an eye toward abstract form and charismatic light. Mr. Mitchell is a virtual modern-day Vermeer of ordinary black people given dignity through the eloquence of his concentration and touch.”

Mitchell is primarily focused on capturing his immediate surroundings and conveying a sense of intimacy between the viewer and his subject. He has felt especially drawn to the city of New Orleans, where he has painted the city streets and the musicians that populate them.

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Evangeline MONTGOMERY (b. 1933) Evangeline Juliet, “EJ” Montgomery was born in New York. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a homemaker. As a teenager, she discovered her affinity for creating art when she received a paint set as a gift.

Montgomery graduated from Seward High School in New York City. In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband and studied at the Los Angeles City College (1955-58) and Cal Sate, Los Angeles (1958-62). Montgomery lived in Nigeria from 1962-1965. Upon her return, she earned a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1969. She also studied at UC Berkeley (1968-70).

EJ worked as an artist in several mediums, including printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and jewelry design. She was also a very important administrator and advocate of African American art. She worked as a curator at the Oakland Museum from 19681974, and organized the retrospective show on the work of Sargent Johnson.

Montgomery was impressed with Johnson’s work in enamel and

successfully executed works of her own in that medium.

Montgomery moved to Washington, D.C. in 1980 to work as a community affairs director for WHMM-TV. Shortly thereafter, in 1983, she began working with the United States Department of State as a program development officer for the Arts America Program, organizing overseas exhibitions for American artists—including African American artists.

Photo: The artist, 1973; Oakland Post Photograph Collection, MS 169, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library.

Oakland, California.

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Clarence MORGAN (b. 1950) Morgan was born in Philadelphia, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Art (MFA, 1978). Morgan, while purely an abstractionist, explores the widest range of the genre, combining elements of structured minimalism and abstract expressionism in a single image.

Morgan stated that “the intelligence of painting does not manifest itself in words, but rather in material and how that material is manipulated to evoke a broad range of sensibilities and forces.” (REF: St James Guide to Black Artists, essay, A.M. Weaver, 1997)

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Otto NEALS (b. 1931) Neals' mother left her husband and three children in South Carolina in the early 1930s in search of employment in New York City. There was a much greater chance of a woman succeeding at the time because of the numerous domestic jobs available in the city. She did, in fact, become employed, and her family immediately moved to Brooklyn in 1934.

Neals attended the Brooklyn High School for Special Trades there and was already very interested in the arts (coincidentally, Ernest Crichlow attended the school at the same time, albeit they were a few years apart).

After high school, Neals got a job in a factory, but two years later, in 1952, he was drafted into the army (he did not go to Korea, but was stationed at Fort Bragg, NC). In the mid-1950s, he married Vera Anita, whose relatives were from Guyana. Otto joined a group of Harlem-based artists known as the Twentieth-Century Creators. This group eventually split and the dominant faction started Weusi (a Swahili term for “blackness”), and then five of those members founded the Nyubba Ya Sanna (House of Art), located at 132nd Street in Harlem.

Neals had also studied at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and the Brooklyn Museum’s school.

Neals began participating in the Fulton Art Fair in Bedford-Stuyvesant (1950s-60s), along with artists Ernie Crichlow and Tom Feelings. He made two trips to Guyana, the second in 1970, and when he returned, he became much more invested in sculpture. He found a studio in Brooklyn, and began working with Vivian Schuyler Key, whom after a break in her artistic career to raise a family, returned to work as a painter and sculptor. The two influenced each other’s work.

REF: Black New York Artists of the 20th Century Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, NYPL, 1998 Black Artists of the New Generation, Elton Fax, 1977. (Photo credit: Leroy Ruffin)

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William PAJAUD (1925-2015) William Pajaud was born in New Orleans and lived there until he finished the ninth grade. Even though he was young, his experiences in that city shaped his subject matter as a painter later in his life. Pajaud moved with his mother to Chattanooga for a year, and there he experienced a racially motivated beating. A year later, his mother landed a teaching job at Texas College, so they moved, once again, to Tyler, TX. Just a teenager, he was subjected to another racially motivated act of violence. Later he commented that his art was a reaction to how a person copes with these kinds of challenges experienced throughout his life.

Pajaud earned a BFA from Xavier University in New Orleans. Eventually he moved to Los Angeles in 1948, and enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute. He exhibited in the 1950s-60s, he exhibited at Heritage Gallery, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Esther Robles Gallery.

He also participated in a co-op group known as Eleven Associated. The artists, including Beulah Woodard, Alice Gafford, and Curtis Tann who rented a space on South Hill Street in an attempt to gain more visibility for their work. The group, while historically significant, did not last long.

Pajaud was appointed as an art director for Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1957, the largest African American-owned business in Los Angeles. Golden State was known for supporting African American artists, and Pajaud also convinced them to build an impressive collection of African American art.

Pajaud exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pasadena Art Museum; deYoung Art Museum, San Francisco; Atlanta University; University of Iowa.

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Howardena PINDELL (b. 1943) Pindell was involved in a serious automobile accident in 1979, and the experience influenced her to produce work that was more personal in nature as well as address the under-appreciation for works by women of color—as she experienced earlier in her career. She called the entire project Autobiography and this series encapsulates work executed between 1980-1995. This work emulates the mixed-media work of the series, using imagery from postcards and photographs she had collected for years prior to the accident in a collage structure. Pindell had traveled extensively in Japan, India, Africa, Brazil, and Europe. She also began to regularly implement silhouettes of figures in the composition, oftentimes her own face and body.

in 1967. She then worked as an exhibition assistant and associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She began teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979.

She exhibited extensively from 1970-present, and her work was recently included in these exhibitions: Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power, originating at Tate Modern, London; Howardena Pindell, What Remains to Be Seen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2018; and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, Brooklyn Museum, 2017.

Pindell earned her B.F.A. at Boston University School of Fine and Applied Art, and an M.F.A. at Yale University, graduating

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Robert PIOUS (1908-1983) Pious exhibited at the Harmon Foundation throughout the 1930s and worked as a muralist for the WPA, as well as taught at the Harlem YMCA. In 1936, his work was included in the Exhibition of Fine Art Productions by American Negroes at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. His poster design for the American Negro Exposition (1940) in Chicago won first place. This is an original poster originally taken from an unopened package of ten.

Robert Savon Pious achieved a celebrity status among African Americans for his lively illustrations which appeared in magazines and books nationwide, but he was also an accomplished painter whose portraits garnered him prestigious awards and accolades. Pious was born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1908. Like most artists of his caliber, he showed talent at an early age. He and his family moved to St. Louis in 1915 where they lived at 2246 Washington Avenue. His stepfather worked as a furnace fireman at a local manufacturing plant, while his mother worked as a laundress. After six years, they moved to Chicago. Pious attended the Art Institute of Chicago for two years, leaving to work full time as a commercial artist and painting portraits of Chicago’s elite until, in 1929, his portrait of world famous African American tenor Roland Hayes won the Harmon Foundation’s Springarn Prize. He received a 4 year scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York City where he attended from 1931 to 1935. While living in New York City, he spent time at the Harlem Artist’s Guild and became acquainted with other African American artists of the time like Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Joseph Delaney. He also met Charles Seifert, a noted African American historian and scholar, who

converted the basement of his school into an artist’s studio. Pious created paintings for Seifert to display in his school, which was converted to a library in 1939.

Pious continued to exhibit through the 1930’s with the Harmon Foundation and worked as a muralist for the WPA, as well as teaching at the Harlem YMCA during the depression. In 1936, his work was included in the Exhibition of Fine Art Productions by American Negroes at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. His poster design for the American Negro Exposition (1940) took first prize and remains a notable example of his work.

During the war, Pious worked as an illustrator for the Office of War Information, and continued his freelance illustrative work throughout the rest of his life with work appearing in literary editions, comic books, newspapers, and pulp magazines like Sports Fiction, Super Sports and Sports Winners.

Pious exhibited with the Urban League, 1932; Atlanta University, 1942; Harlem Art Community, 1935; Augusta Savage Studios, 1939, and the City College of NY,1967. His portrait of Harriet Tubman is found in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

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Prentice POLK (1898-1984) Prentice Polk was born in Bessemer, Alabama. He studied photography at the Tuskegee Institute (1916-1920) with C.M. Battey and apprenticed with Fred Jensen in Chicago, Illinois (1922-1926).

Jensen charged Polk $2.50 an hour and Polk was making $5.00 a day. Polk went door to door soliciting commissions for pictures of the neighborhood kids. That was a rough job during the Chicago winters, so he returned to Tuskegee in 1927 and opened his first studio. A year later he was hired to the faculty at Tuskegee Institute, and from 19331938 was the Head of the Photography Department.

His work was exhibited at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Atlanta University, Birmingham Museum of Art, California Museum of African American Art, Emory University, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Tuskegee Institute, and the New York Museum of National History. Polk worked at Tuskegee from the late 1920s through the 1960s, capturing the significant cast of visitors to the school over the years on film. He also created more than 500 negatives of Dr. George Washington Carver at Tuskegee.

REF: P.H. Polk, Pearl Cleage Lomax (essay), 1980.

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Carl POPE (b. 1961) Carl Pope’s artistic practice is committed to the idea of art as a catalyst for individual and collective transformation. His photographic and multi media investigations of the socioeconomic landscape of Indianapolis earned critical acclaim at prestigious venues like the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. The installation The Black Community: An Ailing Body received support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993.

Pope frequently works in large-scale public art and collaborates with communities and cities to stimulate public dialogue and revitalization. He expanded his public art practice with projects in Hartford, Ct, Atlanta and New York for Black Male at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1996, Pope produced Palimpsest, a video/writing project. Palimpsest, commissioned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum with grants from the Warhol and Lannan foundations, was included in the Whitney Biennial 2000 exhibition.

Pope’s most recent installation of letterpress posters called The Bad Air Smelled of Roses explores the concept of Phenomenology as seen in the writings of Martin Heidigger, a German philosopher of the early 20th century. Pope uses the medium of letterpress posters because they represent a presumptuous idea-they seem official. People look at the printed posters as a source of information and even direction. What Pope offers,

however, is misdirection, so the viewer is required to reconsider. Another artist who explores phenomenology in a similar fashion is Shepard Fairey, with his OBEY THE GIANT propaganda campaign. Fairey created a fictional, but official-looking image, presented via stickers and graffiti pasters, in an attempt to unbalance the viewer and provoke reflection. Most of Pope’s subject matter, or what he might be inclined to call, “anti-subject matter” is concerned with his identity as an African American. Borrowing from the writings of Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925) and Hubert Harrison (The Voice) and his “New Negro Movement”, Pope questions the role and identity of the African American today. He accomplishes this, not by offering solutions or pre-supposed identities, but by questioning everything and being provocative---and then as Heidigger explained the usefulness of Phenomenology, “letting things manifest themselves”. Some people might find several of the messages offensive, but Pope challenges them to question the very perspective from which that reaction emanates.

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Mavis PUSEY (1928-2019) Pusey’s work is the subject of a future retrospective exhibit at the Birmingham Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. This image is in the collection of the Birmingham Museum’s collection.

Mavis Pusey was best known for her hard-edge, non-representational images.

This was very much her singular focus throughout her entire career.

Pusey was born in Jamaica in 1928. Her parents died when she was young. An aunt taught her to sew, and her first job was cutting fabric in a garment factory in Kingston, Jamaica. When she was 18, Pusey went to NY to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion. Due to financial constraints she began attending classes at the Art Students League instead, where she studied painting and printmaking over the next four years.

One of her teachers was Will Barnet.

When her student visa expired, Pusey went to London, and then Paris, where her first solo exhibition was held at Galerie Louis Soulanges in 1968. When she returned to NY, her work Dejyqea (oil/ canvas, 72 x 60 in.) was included in the important exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, held in 1971 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. She worked with Robert Blackburn at his workshop for three years and was struck by the energy and constant movement of the city. Many of her prints from this period reflect a focused interest on the

city’s construction. Pusey also taught at various institutions throughout her career including Rutgers University and the New School for Social Research. She moved to Virginia later in her career.

In 2017, her work was included in the exhibition, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today. It was the first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color. Her work will also be the subject of a major exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL. Pusey’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL.

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I am inspired by the energy and the beat of the construction and demolition of these buildings. The tempo and movement mold into a synthesis and, for me, become another aesthetic of abstraction. I use color and texture to convey the tension that is the heartbeat of the city… I see the new construction as a rebirth, a catalyst for a new environment, and since the past must be a link to the future, in each of my works…. there is a circle to depict the never-ending continuation of natural order and all matter.

-Mavis Pusey

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Madeline Murphy RABB (b. 1945) Similarly to Emma Amos, with whom she exhibited in 1983 at Jazzonia Gallery (owned by George N’Namdi) in Detroit, Rabb was attuned to both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, but unlike the artists of Africobra, she was not radical. Her subjects appear personal, and they are, but they are also universal statements of racial and gender identity. The scene addresses the subject’s contemplation of identity, specifically, how a woman of color fits into society, but it is also a statement of protest—an affirmation of racial and gender equality. Amos once said, “For me, a black woman artist, to walk into the studio, is a political act”.

The lines and contours of the female figure blend seamlessly with the natural elements surrounding her: the sand of the beach, the water and sky—symbolic of the natural order of inclusion; and yet the physicality of the body also breaks the line of the horizon, interrupting the casual sweeping scan of the viewer, demanding attention.

Madeline Murphy Rabb was born in Wilmington, DE and earned her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (1966); she earned her MS in 1975 at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago).

Continually working and exhibiting her own art, she also was dedicated to promoting art civically. She was became the Executive Director of Fine Arts for the City of Chicago in 1983. She also worked in a curatorial capacity for several corporate collections and is on the board of various museums.

Rabb exhibited at the Artist Guild of Chicago, 1974; North Shore Art League; The League of Black Women, Southside Community Art Center; Black Women Artists, 1974; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 1976-1976; Black Printmakers in Chicago, 1980; and The Arts Club of Chicago, 2012.

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John RIDDLE (1934-2002) Los Angeles native John Riddle became known initially for his politically charged works that combined welded steel and debris left from the WATTS riots in 1965 the purpose for which was to expose the harsh conditions that African Americans lived and labored in South Central L.A. Later in his career, after moving to Atlanta, Georgia, he began to work on low relief assemblages, prints and paintings, which, with their solid color, angular shapes recalled the work of Jacob Lawrence and allowed viewers a glimpse of African American culture.

Riddle earned his Associate’s degree from Los Angeles City College, and then served in the US Air Force from 19531957. After leaving the military, he was able to earn his BA from California State University, Los Angeles on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1966. He continued there to earn his MFA in 1973.

Like his mentor Noah Purifoy... Riddle was deeply affected by the physical aftermath of the [Watts] riots and created assemblage works from the torched metal junk that was piled everywhere.

sculpture possesses a lyricism of form that clearly draws from early twentieth-century abstraction in its emphasis on line and geometry.

- Andrea Gyorody, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, p. 212.

Catalog accompanying the exhibition at The Getty, 2011 Riddle’s work, Gradual Troop Withdrawal (1970)l, was included in Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power (the leg of the exhibit at The Broad).

His work may be found in the collections of the Oakland Museum, High Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum.

His sculpture Ghetto Merchant (1966) was pieced together from a destroyed cash register that Riddle found in the wreckage, picked apart down to its barest skeleton, and then mounted on metal legs that he had scavenged from a junkyard. Although its parts betray a pained history, the

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Faith RINGGOLD (b. 1930) This image relates to Ringgold’s children’s book written in 1991, Tar Beach . The setting is 1939, and the central character is a young girl named Cassie. “Tar Beach” is the roof of the building of her Harlem apartment. Cassie dreams she would like to someday go wherever she wanted, and the story tells how the stars help Cassie to fly across the city.

Ringgold was born in Harlem and lived an entire life before beginning her life as an artist: she grew up and married a jazz musician, raised two children, divorced, and then finished her education at the City College of New York (BS, 1955 and MFA, 1959). She was the youngest daughter of Andrew and Willi Posey Jones, and they lived on West 140th Street. Faith was an excellent student and was also a very talented artist, albeit that was never explored formally. In fact, she had little encouragement from her school teachers. She had hoped to attend the High School of Music and Art in NYC, but she was never told about the process for applying. She ended up at George Washington High School, which did have high academic standards, but practiced institutional racism. Black students were never given the same opportunities as whites, even though sometimes the administration claimed it was strategic because the black kids would fail setting their sights too high.

When she graduated she knew she wanted to study art, and hoped to go to Pratt, but because her older sister was already attending NYU, finances were strained. She settled on CCNY. In 1961, she traveled to Europe for a summer with her daughters and her mother. She re-married (Burdette Ringgold) who was very encouraging regarding her art. In the 1960s, her work was politically charged. In the 1970s,

she shifted in subject and medium choices. Her subject matter became contemporary black culture in America and the common person. She began using craft-type materials as a statement of feminism because many women were at home making crafts with their families. She began making masks and dolls. Her mother was the well known fashion designer, Willi Posey. The art of quilting and dressmaking was passed down through Ringgold’s family. She also began experimenting with performance art.

In 1980, Ringgold collaborated with her mother to make her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem. She chose quilt-making because that practice was allowed to slaves, with their owners unaware that the practice developed and preserved African culture. Ringgold has used the flag symbolism throughout her career, sometimes making a very harsh statement. Perhaps taking all the images into consideration along with this image, we can assume the flag for Ringgold has always symbolized an idealized freedom—but whether people live up to it or not is another matter. Perhaps the taking of the knee during the sporting events is not about disrespecting the flag but about being disappointed in people not living up to what it symbolizes.

Freedom for ALL.

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John ROZELLE (b. 194) A native of St. Louis, Missouri, John Rozelle is a prolific painter and collagist.

Rozelle attended Washington University, St. Louis, where he received a BFA and Fontbonne College, where he received a MFA. He served as an associate professor in the Drawing and Painting Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1990-2009.

Prior to joining the Art Institute faculty he taught drawing, design, painting, and sculpture at Fontbonne College. In 1989, Rozelle was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

His work has been featured in exhibitions including I Remember...Thirty Years After the March on Washington: Images of the Civil Rights Movement 1963-1993, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1993; The Chemistry of Color: African American Artists in Philadelphia, 1970-1990, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, 2005; Layers of Meaning: Collage and Abstraction in the Late 20th Century, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, 2003; The Studio Museum in Harlem: 25 Years of African-American Art, NY, 1994; African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections, MO, 2008.

In 1998, Rozelle was commissioned to install the Middle Passage Project at the Dred Scott Courthouse in St. Louis, MO. Museum collections include the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Margaret Harwell Museum, Spertus Museum of Jewish Studies, Chicago,

IL; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles; and The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles. ... As an artist, Rozelle seems to have zeroed in on this uncompromising balance, one which allows him to cite influences of all kinds without having to suppress personal and cultural history.

His intricate collages, products of a fertile imagination and a skilled hand appeal to us not because they are from the mind of a black artist; they appeal to us solely on the grounds that they come from a gifted artist.

-Jeff Daniel, critic for the St Louis PostDispatch Photo: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 12, 1996, p. 22

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Betye SAAR (b. 1926) Saar was born in Los Angeles, and moved with her family to Pasadena in the early 1930s. She first studied design at Pasadena City College and interior design at UCLA. This strong design-centered background would prove to be highly influential in her mature work in fine art. She was close friends with two other L.A. artists, Curtis Tann and William Pajaud. Saar and Tann actually started an enamel design business which was featured in Ebony in 1951.

After graduating, from the late 50s through the mid-1960s, Saar was primarily interested in print-making, producing color etchings and intaglio prints. During the turmoil of the 1960s, the Watts riots, and the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Saar’s work began to shift to collage and assemblage, reclaiming and repurposing personal objects she inherited as well as negatively-charged objects she found at LA flea markets. She believed that a universality of international culture could be connected by reclaiming objects and artifacts from other cultures to be used in her own constructs of perspective. She was inspired further by a visit to a retrospective exhibition of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. Saar comments: There has been an apparent thread in my art that weaves from my early prints of the 1960s through later collages and assemblages and ties into the current installations.

I am intrigued with combining the remnants of memories, fragments of relics, and ordinary objects with the component of technology.

It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge.

Saar exhibited extensively throughout the 1970s and on, including: Whitney Museum of American Art, NY;Wadsworth Athenaeum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; MOCA, Los Angeles; University of Connecticut, Hartford; Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the National Gallery, Washington D.C. Her work is in numerous important public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, NY; MOMA, NY; The Oakland Museum, CA; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA.

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Walter SANFORD (1912-1987) Born in Detroit in 1912, Walter Sanford moved to Chicago to pursue formal art training at the Art Institute of Chicago under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He also spent a year at Detroit’s School of Arts and Crafts under John Carroll. Throughout his career he drew much inspiration from Chicago’s South Side, where he resided for many years. Sanford can be counted among the second wave of artists emerging from the Chicago Renaissance between 1941 and 1960.

While he embraced a wide range of styles from naturalism to abstraction, he considered himself an abstract expressionist. By the 1950’s, his work was clearly influenced by Picasso. His tenure in Chicago was punctuated by travels to Las Vegas, Mexico, and France.

In 1952, he received the Prix de Paris.

Later in his career, he established a studio in Chicago where he began working on a series of portraits of real and imaginary figures inspired by the work of Mexican painters David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Sanford has exhibited in more than 20 major shows and had more than two dozen solo exhibitions.

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Augusta SAVAGE (1892-1962) Augusta Savage was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida. She had a knack for sculpting even as a small child, making mud ducks and selling them at the local fair. She married at the age of 15, but her husband died the following year, after having a child together. In 1915, her family moved to West Palm Beach, where she met a potter and acquired 25 pounds of clay. Her sculpture received much local attention, and through a series of events and support of teachers, Savage traveled to New York City in her quest to become a professional sculptor. She was admitted to the Cooper Union School, which was tuition-free, and finished her 4 year program in 3 years. She traveled abroad to France on scholarship and joined a group of black artists and intellectuals, including Hale Woodruff, Henry Tanner, and Countee Cullen.

By the early 1930s, Savage was living in Harlem and had created a school, Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. In 1933, she founded The Vanguard, a group of Harlem intellectuals who met in her studio to discuss politics, art, and the condition of the African American. In

1938, Savage was commissioned to do a sculpture for the New York World’s Fair, occurring the following year. Inspired by a song written by Rosamund and James Weldon Johnson, she produced the 16 foot painted plaster Lift Every Voice and Sing near the Contemporary Art Museum.

Funds to have the work cast in bronze never materialized, and the sculpture was bulldozed at the closing of the fair. Only the small metal maquettes remain.

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John T. SCOTT (1940-2007) In Search of the Unicorn, color lithograpn on wove paper 10 x 15-1/2 inches (image) 13-1/2 x 19-1/2 inches signed, titled, and numbered 8/16 Scott was born in New Orleans, LA, and studied at Xavier University (N.O., BFA, 1962) and then Michigan State University (MFA, 1965). He became a professor of art at his alma mater, Xavier, after completing graduate school.

Though best known for his large-scale sculptures, the breadth of Scott’s oeuvre includes drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, and his subject matter ranges from self-portraiture to more broad political and social issues. Scott was heavily influenced by New Orleans’ eclectic blend of African, Caribbean, and Creole cultures, as well as the playfully structured dynamics of jazz. (African American Art Since 1950, Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, p. 88) Scott’s work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Fisk University, Florida A&M University, Michigan State University, National Museum of American Art, Loyola University, New Orleans Museum of Art, Tulane University Law School, among others.

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Charles SEARLES (1937-2004) Born in Philadelphia in 1937, artist and educator Charles Searles held a careerlong interest in African tribal arts--he first incorporated mask forms and colors from Africa in these late 1960s and early ‘70s figurative paintings. By 1971, Searles had risen to prominence with the inclusion of his 1970 painting, News, in the exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Searles studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating with honors, and later taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for 19 years.

His works are found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair, NJ; Dallas Museum of Art; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia; and Howard University.

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Charles SEBREE (1914-1985) Charles Sebree was born and raised in Kentucky until the age of ten, when he and his mother moved north to Chicago.

By the age of 14 he was carving out his own rough existence in the midst of the Great Depression. At this time, the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago featured his drawing, Seated Boy on the cover of their magazine. He went on to train formally at the Chicago School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago and used his interests in European modernism and African sculpture to forge his own individual style; one which evoked a mystical quality similar to old world Byzantine enamels and Russian icon paintings. He was the only African American artist represented

by Katherine Kuh among a group which consisted of a majority of leading European modernists.

Between 1936 and 1938 Sebree worked for the WPA easel division, participated in the South Side Community Arts Center, and was involved with the Cube Theater. He maintained a strong interest in the theater due to his friendship with Katherine Dunham. Guided by her influence, he explored set and costume design, theatrical production, writing, and dance, while continuing to paint. Sebree was also close with a group of bohemian artists from Chicago and Wisconsin, which included Magic Realist painters Gertrude Abercrombie, John Pratt, John

Wilde, Karl Priebe, and others. Sebree began writing plays in earnest in 1949his most well received work was Mrs. Patterson, which opened on Broadway in 1954 starring none other than Eartha Kitt.

In addition to all of his creative endeavors, Sebree also collaborated with Harlem Renaissance author Countee Cullen by illustrating his narrative poem, The Lost Zoo (A Rhyme for the Young But Not Too Young).

Sebree’s work has been featured in multiple exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and was also featured at Katharine Kuh Galleries, Chicago Artists Group Galleries, American Negro Exposition, South Side Community Art Center, Howard University, Chicago Public Library, Kenkeleba House, and the Woodmere Art Museum. His work is found in many prominent collections including Howard University, Smithsonian American Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and University of Chicago.

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Gary SIMMONS (b. 1964) Simmons uses icons and stereotypes of American pop culture to address personal narratives and issues of race and class. Many of his images are constructed and then defaced or partially erased by the artist, creating ghostly imagery or subjects portrayed in a state of destruction. Simmons studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York and the California Institute of the Arts . He works in a variety of mediums and consistently explores the complexity of urban life in the U.S.

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Lorna SIMPSON (b. 1960 ) Best known for her conceptual photography and photo-text installations.

Simpson’s work raises questions about issues such as identity, race, gender, and history. She was born in Brooklyn and studied at the University of California-San Diego and the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Her work became popular in the 1980s, and she was the first African American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, as well as the first African American woman to have a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (Projects 23).

Her work was included in the popular exhibition, 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection, 2008-2009 and may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art, among others.

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Frank SMITH (b. 1935) Frank Smith grew up in Chicago and studied at the University of Illinois (BFA, 1958) and at Howard University (MFA, 1972). Smith is part of a family of musicians, his brother being part of Max Roach’s all-percussion ensemble, M’Boom.

As a visual artist, music highly influenced his work, and he was enamored with the work of Wassily Kandinsky, whose art was also deeply influenced by music. Smith moved to New York in 1967, and exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1969.

In 1970, he met the members of Africobra during their exhibition at the Studio Museum. Jeff Donaldson had become the head of the art department at Howard University, and when Smith completed his MFA he joined the faculty there. He joined Africobra in 1973.

Frank Smith takes a different approach to the music theme. Instead of painting pictures of musicians performing, Smith interprets the music as he hears it using a panoply of sound wave lines and colors...Smith says he has gone through three phases of visual expression. First, he made visual statements with the human figure; next he combined the figurative with the non-figurative into semi-abstracts…In the third and current state he had cast off all reliance on figurative forms and evolved a totally interpretative style.

Smith retired from Howard in 2001 after having taught there for 31 years. His mixed media fabric collage, Banner for a New Black Nation (1978) was recently included in the Brooklyn Museum’s leg of Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power. The work is in the permanent collection of the museum. https://www.brooklynmuseum. org/opencollection/objects/210709 Smith’s work, Black and Tan Fantasy is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Africobra The First Twenty Years, Nubia Kai, 1990, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, p. 11

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Smith’s works on canvas and paper gives way to the formation of two-dimensional soft sculptural images derived through an extemporaneous process of draping. By working on several pieces simultaneously, Smith combines disjointed rhythms and syncopated patterns of paint and mixed media by sewing the canvas or paper together. Bright zigzag stitching joins colorful patches of painted patterns and found objects.

-Tim Davis, International Visions Gallery

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Carroll SOCKWELL (1943-1992 ) Carroll Sockwell grew up in Washington DC, and studied at the Corcoran School of Art. He was tied to the Washington Color School, but gravitated to a later offshoot of the group that was more concerned with abstraction and direct painting. He frequently executed works on paper. Sockwell’s work was included in group shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1974. Sockwell also worked as a curator for the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the nation’s first museum of African American art.

Sockwell committed suicide in 1992 by jumping from the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge in Foggy Bottom . He lived in humiliating poverty the last year of his life, sleeping on a mattress in a friend’s framing business. It is believed that severe alcoholism contributed to his suicide.

The work of Carroll Sockwell, a former student of Lois Mailou Jones and of the Corcoran School of Art was more congenial to the then dominant school

of color field painting. He had briefly become curator of the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1965-66. By the late sixties, Sockwell was showing prominently in the city. He organized shows with Walter Hopps and Gregory Battcock and was later included by Hopps in major traveling shows of “Art in Washington”. (REF: Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940-1970, Keith Morrison, Washington Project for the Arts, 1985, p.

60; catalog accompanying the exhibition).

Sockwell was included in many important exhibitions, including Washington: 20 Years, held at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1970, along with contemporaries Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, and Kenneth Young; Salute to the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Morgan State College, Baltimore, 1968; The Washington Show, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1985; and Washington 1968: New Painting: Structure, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1968.

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John SPAULDING (1942-2004) Spaulding was born in a housing project in Indianapolis, and went through public schools. He taught himself welding and landed a job in California in the aerospace industry when he was in his twenties (1960s). He worked on his art part-time, but then moved to New York in 1978 to devote full time to his art. Much of his subject matter involved jazz themes, but he explored abstract subjects as well. There are various public commissions in and around Indianapolis, including two works on the campus of IUPUI. REF: African American Visual Arts Database.

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Nelson STEVENS (b. 1938) Nelson Steven’s career has spanned over 5 decades and a multitude of media and style, yet has remained consistently grounded in the black experience and his exuberant celebration of color. He began his career painting murals on the walls of jazz clubs in the 1950’s. Stevens received his B.F.A. from Ohio University in 1962, then moved to Cleveland in 1963, where he taught in the public school system and at the Karamu House.

By 1969, he had completed his M.F.A. at Kent State University. Stevens recalled during this period he had to convince his teachers and fellow classmates that Black art, as defined by friend and Black Arts scholar and playwright Larry Neal, existed as its own entity - an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America - an aesthetic equivalent to the Black Power movement. Prior to the movement, there was no literature to back up Black art as an absolute genre. Murals like the Wall of Respect, painted in 1967 by William “Bill” Walker and other members of the Organization of Black American Culture helped change that. Stevens, now a professor at Northern Illinois University, joined the newly formed art collective AFRICOBRA in 1969, along with Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Jeff Donaldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams and exhibited widely with them.

In addition to his work in the visual arts, Stevens produced the Black culture magazine, Drum at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was a professor for over 30 years.

Stevens’ work may be found in many private and public collections, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY; and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is now being shown in the exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which originated at Tate Modern in London, UK. He currently lives and works in Maryland. In 2019, Stevens work was featured in the solo exhibition, Work from the 60’s to the Present held at Kravets Wehby Gallery, NY.

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Renee STOUT (b. 1958) The Trickster on His Throne With Henchmen, 1996 stone lithograph, 27 x 20 inches (image) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 9/70 From the Resounding Heart Colophon, a set of eight lithographs published by Hand Graphics, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Stout grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984 and after a brief stint in Boston, moved to Washington, D.C. In D.C., she began a series of fetishes, objects in which mysterious powers are thought to reside. She used found objects and created an art of relics to create sophisticated assemblages (and prints following a similar theme). Sylvia Moore writes in the book, Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Women Artists, (MidMarch Press, NY, 1995): Spiritual influences and inspirations for Stout’s art are diverse. “I am attracted to spiritual societies”, says Stout, “I am obsessed about knowing about my own past—which is a mystery to me.” She reaches out to Candombie devotional objects of Brazil, to Haitian Vodun and its American Voodoo adaptations, to Native American spiritualism and folk medicine, and especially, to Central African arts and cultures.

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Ann TANKSLEY (b. 1934) Born Ann Graves in the Homewood community of Pittsburgh, Ann became interested in art at an early age. She graduated from South Hills High School in 1952 and went on to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and earn a BFA. She married fellow Homewood native, John Tanksley and they moved to Brooklyn, NY. Tanksley began raising her family before returning to study at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research (Greenwich Village), and also at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

Tanksley was an early member of Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc., a women’s art collective based in New York. She exhibited at the 1972 show, Cookin’ and Smokin’, at the WeusiNyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery in Harlem.

“She uses a glazing technique incorporated with charcoal lines, which enhances a sense of spontaneity and humor.” (Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, KingHammond, 1995) Her work is included in the collections of the Johnson Publishing Company (dispersed), Studio Museum in Harlem, National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Hewitt Collection, among others.

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Evelyn Patricia TERRY (b. 1946) Terry’s work is seldom pre-mediated; her influences are children’s art and folk art, so there is a crucial element of spontaneity, which captures not just the literal rendering, but the emotional quality of the image. She was born in Milwaukee, and earned her B.F.A. and M.S. from University of Wisconsin. Terry exhibited an etching titled Black Flag in the controversial show, Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

See also: Gumbo Ya-Ya, Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, p. 287-288)

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Dox THRASH (1893-1965) Dox Thrash was a master of technical innovation who was equally adept at capturing African American life with a social realist lens. He was born in a former slave cabin in Griffin, Georgia in 1893 and studied art through correspondence school until 1909 when he moved to Chicago and began taking part time classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1917, he served in the army as a member of the 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers in France. He was wounded and in lieu of being sent to the front, he toured in a vaudeville act that performed at military hospitals. Thrash was able to resume his studies in 1919 at the AIC and also received tutoring from established African American artist, William Edouard Scott.

He lived an itinerant lifestyle in Boston, Connecticut, and New York, working odd jobs and painting, until eventually, in 1926, he settled in Philadelphia where he studied at the Philadelphia Sketch Club with Earl Hortor. He took a job with the Federal Art Project’s Fine Print Workshop in 1937 and began experimenting with the aquatint process. Thrash is credited with later inventing the process of carborundum printing, also known as carbograph, with fellow artists Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher. He made his debut as an artist in 1931 at the Catherine Street YWCA in Philadelphia, which featured an exhibition of his oil and watercolor paintings. In 1933, his first exhibition of prints was held at the same location.

Thrash’s work has been exhibited widely including: The Negro Artist Comes of Age, Albany Institute of History and Art, 1945; Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976; Black Artists/South, Huntsville Museum of Art, 1979; Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015; and In Search of Missing Masters: The Lewis Tanner Moore Collection of African American Art. Woodmere Art Museum, PA, 2009.

Recent exhibitions include, Dox Thrash: The Hopeful Gaze, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 2019 and Dox Thrash, Black Life, and the Carborundum Mezzotint.

Photo credit: Digital collections, Free Library of Philadelphia.

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William TOLLIVER (1951-2000) Tolliver was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was one of 14 children.

His father was a carpenter and his mother worked all day in the cotton fields.

Tolliver was interested in art as a young boy, but there was no curriculum in the public schools he attended to support this interest, He bought inexpensive watercolor sets at the dime store . When he was 13, he discovered the work of another self-taught painter, Vincent Van Gogh.

“Van Gogh painted purely for the love of it,” Tolliver explained in The International Review of African American Art (vol. 7, No. 3, article by John Hart, p. 17-23).

Tolliver dropped out of school at the age of 14 and left Mississippi for Los Angeles, and joined the Job Corps program there, learning carpentry and reading skills.

He also received limited instruction in painting. He then moved to Milwaukee for awhile, working as an assistant to a local sculptor, before returning to Vicksburg to take a job in construction.

He was married in 1977, and did his best to paint in the evenings.

In 1981, Tolliver moved to Lafayette, Louisiana to work in construction, but always painting at night. His wife, Debrah, encouraged him to show his work to a gallery, but William felt it wasn’t good enough and refused. Debrah decided to do it herself, showing the work to Bob Crutchfield, a local gallerist.

Crutchfield sold 9 paintings in 10 days and requested more.

Tolliver frequently painted blues and jazz musicians. Crutchfield moved to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1989, opening the Galerie Royale, and representing Tolliver’s work. His clients include Sheri Belafonte, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Richard Pryor, Cecily Tyson, David Winfield and Ellis Marsalis.

REF: biography from Galerie Royale and Celebration of Life , Zigler Art Museum, Jennings, LA (1987)

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James VanDerZee (1886-1983) James Van Derzee was a Harlem photographer whose studio approach contrasted the photojournalistic style of Gordon Parks and the social realism of Aaron Siskind. His success was largely based on his portraits of middle-class black families in Harlem, which sought to convey a sense of dignity and self assurance in the sitter. It has been said that the successful recipe for a Van Derzee image was equal part authentic pride of the sitter and equal part carefully constructed artifice—courtesy of the photographer.

In 1924, Van Derzee was commissioned as the official photographer of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It was Van Derzee’s responsibility to not simply document the activities of Garvey and the movement, but portray them in a strictly positive light. Van Derzee executed thousands of photographs of meetings and parades, some of which were made into a calendar.

His work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Williams College Museum of Art, MA; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others.

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Kara WALKER (b. 1969 ) Walker was born in California, but raised in Atlanta from the age of 13. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Art (MFA, 1994). Her work primarily addresses race, gender, and sexuality in graphic terms. She is well-known for her silhouette cut-outs, paintings, prints, installations, in black and white contrast.

Photo: Ari Marcopoulos/www.theguardian.com

In 2007, the Walker Art Center presented the first full-scale museum survey of her work, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love. Her work is included in numerous museum permanent collections.

Works from this series may also be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (Camptown, 1997) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (Drumstick).

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Larry WALKER (b. 1935) A major aspect of my creative pursuits seems to be my concern for the relationship of shapes to their existing environment. Often these shapes appear as human images, sometimes as enigmatic forces that suggest natural phenomena.

Larry Walker was born in Franklin, Georgia, but at the age of five, his family moved to New York City. He graduated from the High School of Music and Art in 1953, and went on to earn his M.A. at Wayne State University. He taught in the Detroit Public School System before becoming a professor and Chairperson at the College of the Pacific (Art Dept, Stockton, CA)

Solo Exhibitions: Larry Walker: Four Decades, City Gallery East, Bureau of Cultural Affairs, City of Atlanta and Georgia State University School of Art and Design (ATL), 2001; Larry Walker: Saguaro Spirits , Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA (1999).

His work was included in Black Romantic at the Studio Museum in Harlem, April 25-June 23, 2002.

See also: Traditon Redifined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, 2009, p. 92.

REF: Black Art, an International Quarterly, Summer 1977, Vol. 1, Number 4, p. 4.

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Cheryl WARRICK (b. 1956) Warrick is a Boston-based abstract painter. She was born in St Albans, NY and studied at the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA). She has exhibited extensively in Boston area galleries and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Her work is included in many public and corporate collections including: the Boston Public Library; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Rhode Island School of Design; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, Harpo Productions; Museum of Art, Providence; and Lucent Technologies, NY.

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Keith Morris WASHINGTON (1925-2015) Washington earned his BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and his MFA at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work was the focus of solo exhibitions at Thelma Harris Art Gallery, Oakland; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; Edward Mitchell Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College (Providence, RI); and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (Roxbury, MA). Washington has sometimes used surprising influences in addressing his subjects; for example he was inspired by late 19th century Hudson River School works to create a series addressing former lynch scenes.

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Carrie Mae WEEMS (b. 1953 ) Weems was born in Portland, Oregon and studied at the California Institute of the Arts, UC-San Diego, and UC Berkeley. She studied Folklore and Photography—both fields becoming essential to her mature work. Weems’ images simultaneously document the past (or the perceived notion of it) and offer a prospect of improvement for the future. In that, the artist fully embraces documentary photojournalism, but only as a half-truth; the “negative space” or deception opens up to exploration, and Weems frequently approaches that with her accompanying text. This narrative parallels the concept of “double consciousness” addressed by W. E. B. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folks . Weems uses the literal, static foundation of photography but demands the viewer look at it from more than one angle—and then challenges them to make changes.

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James Lesesne WELLS (1905-1998) Wells was greatly influenced by African sculptural forms and the work of the German Expressionists, in particular Albrect Durer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Mueller, and Emile Nolde; Cubists, and the Fauves. He worked in a variety of media at this time, although printmaking was a favorite. He created block prints for the publications Survey Graphic, Opportunity, and Plays and Pageants of Negro Life. HIs work was included in an exhibition of International Modernists in April 1929 at the New Art Circle Gallery owned by J.B. Neumann. Wells was the recipient of a Harmon Foundation Gold Medal in 1931 for his painting, Flight Into Egypt, and in 1933 won a first prize at the Harmon Foundation for a woodcut titled Escape of the Spies from Canaan.

He received a position at Howard University in the crafts department - teaching clay modeling, ceramics, sculpture, metal , and block printing.

Wells spent two years making a case to move his position and linoleum printing to the College of Fine Arts. The print as an art form, did not yet garner much respect. It was considered a lesser art form to painting and sculpting, but Wells appreciated it for its accessibility.

During the Depression, Wells served as the director of what was to become the Harlem Community Art Center, teaching classes for children and adults. Palmer Hayden and Georgette

Seabrooke were his assistants. At this time, he dedicated himself entirely to printmaking. Wells continued to hone his technical ability by working with Frank Nankivell and spent a year working in Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17, then the most innovative center of etching and printmaking in the nation.

Wells continued to paint and create prints throughout the rest of his career. In 1961, the Smithsonian Institution held a solo exhibition of his prints, and another solo exhibition was held at Fisk University in 1973. The Washington Project for the Arts presented an exhibition of his oils and prints in 1986. The show was also presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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Charles WHITE (1918-1979) Born in 1918 in Chicago, Charles White was initially an introverted child, preferring to retreat into a world of reading and drawing. As he grew older, he became more outspoken, influenced by Alain Locke’s The New Negro. As a student at Englewood High School, alongside other future notables such as Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, and Charles Sebree, he often clashed with his teachers over their whitewashing of historical subjects. He joined George Neal’s Art Crafts Guild and gathered at the studio of Morris Topchevsky, where he was able to further explore his views of art, politics, and the role of the African American in society.

White graduated high school in 1937 and went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was subsequently hired by the Illinois Art Project in the easel division, but transferred to the mural division, where he worked with Edward Millman and Mitchell Siporin. His first major mural, Five Great American Negroes, was completed in 1940. His work was also exhibited at the American Negro Exposition, winning several awards.

White married Elizabeth Catlett in 1941 after meeting her at the South Side Community Art Center, and the pair moved to New Orleans where they both taught at Dillard University. Two consecutive Rosenwald scholarships allowed him to study lithography at the Art Student’s League of New York with Harry Sternberg, as well as travel the Southern United States. He used this opportunity to observe and paint black farmers and laborers for his mural, The Contribution of the Negro to the Democracy of America.

Catlett and White relocated to Mexico where they both became involved with the Taller Grafica de Popular. After their divorce, White returned to New York City. His work

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retained a figurative style which stood in stark contrast to the burgeoning abstract movement occurring at the time. He used drawings, linocuts, and woodcuts to celebrate the historical figures who resisted slavery, as well as ordinary African Americans struggling amid great social injustice in a post-slavery America. Despite their small size, these works conveyed the power of a mural.

In New York in the 1940s and early 1950s, White showed his work at the progressive ACA Gallery and was a prominent member of African American and leftist artist communities. White moved to Southern California in 1956, and his career flourished as he embraced drawing and printmaking more fully, pushing at the boundaries of his media while continuing to engage with civil rights and equality. Despite his rejection of the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism and ongoing use of an expressive figuration, he found critical acclaim in the United States and abroad.

White was the second African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Art and Design in 1975. Charles White: A Retrospective was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. This exhibition traveled to the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019.

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Stanley WHITNEY (b. 1946 ) Whitney grew up in Bryn Mawr, PA. Both his parents were college-educated: his father went to Howard and his mother, Temple. His father was in real estate, but also ran a series of small businesses trying to make ends meet. Stanley had been interested in art since as long as he can remember, although he initially thought he would be a commercial artist, because that was more realistic, but when the time came to actually make a painting, he would consistently use every color on the palette with reckless abandon. He wanted to get out of Philadelphia, so after high school he discovered a college in Columbus, Ohio that offered a fairly open-ended art program affiliated with the Columbus Museum of Art (1964). In 1966, recruiters from the Kansas City Art Institute visited his school, so he transferred. He was inspired when he saw the work of Morris Louis, believing that his art had been all about the past previously, but Louis’ work was about the future, and that clicked with the young Whitney.

He bounced around between Kansas City, the Studio School in New York, and eventually Yale University, where he completed his MFA. His base had

always been New York, and if he left for any reason, he always returned. He even took a job teaching at Tyler University in Philadelphia—with the caveat that he must actually live in New York. That was in 1973, when he got a loft on Cooper Square in New York, and has worked there ever since.

Whitney has had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, and his work is included in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum (KC), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

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Walter WILLIAMS (1920-1998) Painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Walter Williams studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School under Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam, and Gregoria Prestopino.

He also spent a summer studying art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1955, Williams won a Whitney Fellowship that permitted him to work and travel in Mexico. He also won a National Arts and Letters Grant in 1960 and the Silvermine Award in 1963.

Williams moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in the 1960’s to escape the discrimination of the United States, While he was in Copenhagen, he created a series of colorful woodcuts of black children playing in fields of flowers. He returned to the United States to serve as artist-in-residence at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Here, he completed a body of work informed by the experiences of being an African American living in the South. Walter H. Williams died in Copenhagen in June1988.

Williams’ work has been featured in major exhibitions including, An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1983; Unbroken Circle: Exhibition of African American Artists of the 1930s and 1940s, Kenkeleba House, NY, 1986; Black Motion, SCLC Black Expo 72, Los Angeles, CA; Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972; and 10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe: paintings, prints, drawings, and collages, Den Frie, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1964.

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Michael Kelly WILLIAMS (b. 1950) Williams studied at the Cass Technical High School in Detroit, and earned his BFA in printmaking in 1975 at the University of Michigan. He worked at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (1979-1983) and earned his MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College in 1996. He worked as artistin-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem from 1986-1987. His work is in the collections of the Schomburg Center, Library of Congress, Detroit Institute of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Bronx Museum of Art.

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William T. WILLIAMS (b. 1942) William T. Williams was born in 1942 in North Carolina and raised in New York.

He attended the Pratt Institute, where he earned his BFA and Yale University where he earned his MFA in 1968. Williams also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Just one year after his graduation, his career took off in a monumental form.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased his work, Elbert Jackson, L.A.M.F. Part II. Williams participated several group exhibitions, including AfroAmerican Artists Since 1950, Brooklyn College Art Gallery, NY; the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In addition, he curated the exhibition, X to the Fourth Power, which included his work along with Mel Edwards and Sam Gilliam, for the Studio Museum in Harlem. He also began teaching at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York - a position he held for four decades. His first solo exhibition was held at Reese Palley Gallery, NY in 1971.

Williams has remained a committed abstractionist throughout his career, although not purely intellectual, rather he uses color and form to engage the viewer in the “intense emotional quality of memory.” Specifically Williams’ memories of his childhood in North Carolina, the pattern of a stained glass church window, or his grandmother’s quilts.

In 1975, Williams began a collaboration with Robert Blackburn at his Printmaking Workshop. The two created 19 editions.

Since then he has collaborated with the Brandywine Workshop and Lafayette College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute.

Recent exhibitions include Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, 2019; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, through March 15 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, April 26, 2020 — July 19, 2020; Black Refractions: Highlights from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Smith College Museum of Art, MA, through April 17, 2020 and Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, May 9-Aug 2, 2020; With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, now through May 18, 2020.

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John WILSON (1922-2015) John Wilson was a Boston painter, sculptor and printmaker who was influenced by the Mexican muralists, in terms of both style and subject matter, and addressed issues of racism and oppression of African American people in his art. He grew up in Roxbury and took art classes at Roxbury Memorial High School before continuing his education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also studied in Paris with Fernand Leger. Upon his return to the U.S., he married Julie Kowitch, a teacher, and traveled to Mexico. He later taught at Pratt University in New York, and Boston University.

Wilson’s bronze sculpture of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is on permanent display at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C.

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Fred WILSON (1932-2012) The basis for my designs comes from abstract to reality with patience as the key; patience being a measure of time, to be attained through love and understanding of persons and one’s self.

Fred Wilson was born in Chicago, and studied at Fresno State College and Los Angeles State College. He was a printmaker and sculptor. He received a Certificate of Merit for sculpture at the Los Angeles Design West Show (1962); he also exhibited at the Ankrum Gallery (Contemporary Artist of Los Angeles), 1965; Muddy Wheel Exhibit #1, #2, 1969; and the Destination 90 Forum, Northridge (1969).

This example is very similar to his work illustrated in Black Artists on Art, Volume 2; Woman of the World, 1967, clay.

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Richard YARDE (1939-2012) Richard Yarde was born in Boston, and grew up in the Roxbury neighborhood (although his parents were from Barbados). He studied at Boston University (MFA, 1964). Drawing was the essential element to all of Yarde’s work, whether it be an actual drawing, print or painting. He develops an underlying rhythm within the composition with a grid. That said, his work is direct; when he works in watercolor, for example, there is no possibility of revision. He most recently taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

REF: Syncopated Rhythms, 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery , 2005.

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Hartwell YEARGENS (1915-2005) Born in Kansas City in 1915, Yeargans studied sign painting at Lincoln High School. He was encouraged to move to New York in 1936 by his brother, James Conroy Yeargans. James was working for the WPA on murals at Harlem Hospital. Hartwell landed a job in the defense industry drafting ship designs during WWII. When the war ended, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied painting with Louis Kantor. He focused on printmaking in the 1960s, studying with Tom Yamamoto at Goddard College (Vermont; he earned a BA in Fine Art and Education). He later became an instructor of printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, 196971. He was included in some important exhibitions of African American Art at the Philadelphia Civic Center (1969) and the Whitney Museum (1971). He began to concentrate on color woodblock prints such as this one, and had a one-person exhibit (Exhibition of Graphics by Hartwell Yeargans, Montreal, 1967). He also exhibited at Black Power in the Arts in Flint, Michigan in 1970.

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