Explore powerful artworks by African American artists who formed collectives during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Jones-Hogu was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1938.[3] She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[1][4] She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Institute of Design in Chicago, as well as a master's degree in printing from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.[1][4][5] She later pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Independent Film and Digital Imaging at Governors State University while in her early seventies.[4][2][3] She wished to earn the degree to document artists and their work.[5] She was described as very private and thoughtful.[2] She had one son, Kuumba Hogu, who remarked that he wanted his mother to be remembered through her artwork.
Elizabeth Catlett (April 15, 1915[2] – April 2, 2012)[3] was an American-Mexican graphic artist and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C. to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of freed slaves. It was difficult for a black woman in this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching. However, a fellowship awarded to her in 1946 allowed her to travel to Mexico City, where she worked with the Taller de Grfica Popular for twenty years and became head of the sculpture department for the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plsticas. In the 1950s, her main means of artistic expression shifted from print to sculpture, though she never gave up the former.
Her work is a mixture of abstract and figurative in the Modernist tradition, with influence from African and Mexican art traditions. According to the artist, the main purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics. While not very well known to the general public, her work is heavily studied by art students looking to depict race, gender and class issues. During her lifetime, Catlett received many awards and recognitions, including membership in the Saln de la Plstica Mexicana, the Art Institute of Chicago Legends and Legacy Award, honorary doctorates from Pace University and Carnegie Mellon, and the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award in contemporary sculpture.
Los Mailou Jones (November 3, 1905 – June 9, 1998)[1] was an influential artist and teacher during her seven-decade career. Jones was one of the most notable figures to attain notoriety for her art while living as a black expatriate in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s.[2] Her career began in textile design before she decided to focus on fine arts. Jones looked towards Africa and the Caribbean and her experiences in life when painting. As a result, her subjects were some of the first paintings by an African-American artist to extend beyond the realm of portraiture. Jones was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance movement and her countless international trips. Lois Mailou Jones' career was enduring and complex. Her work in designs, paintings, illustrations, and academia made her an exceptional artist that continues to receive national attention and research.
Early life and education (1905–1928)[edit] Los Mailou Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts,[3] to Thomas Vreeland and Carolyn Jones. Her father was a building superintendent who later became a lawyer after becoming the first African-American to earn a law degree from Suffolk Law School.[4] Her mother worked as a cosmetologist.[5] During her childhood, Jones' parents encouraged her to draw and paint using watercolors. Her parents bought a house on Martha's Vineyard, where Jones met those who influenced her life and art, such as sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, composer Harry T. Burleigh, and novelist Dorothy West.
From 1919 to 1923, Jones attended the High School of Practical Arts in Boston. During these years, she took night classes from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through an annual scholarship. Additionally, she apprenticed in costume design with Grace Ripley. She held her first solo exhibition at the age of seventeen in Martha's Vineyard.[1] Jones began experimenting with African mask influences during her time at the Ripley Studio. From her research of African masks, Jones created costume designs for Denishawn.
From 1923 to 1927, Jones attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to study design, where she won the Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design yearly. She took night courses at the Boston Normal Art School while working towards her degree. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she received her graduate degree in design from the Design Art School of Boston in 1928. Afterwards, she began working at the F. A. Foster Company in Boston and the Schumacher Company in New York City. During the summer of 1928, she attended Harvard University where she decided to focus on painting instead of design.[1]
Jones continued taking classes throughout her lifetime. In 1934, she took classes on different cultural masks at Columbia University. In 1945, she received a BA in art education from Howard University, graduating magna cum laude.
Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an African-American artist. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, educated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bearden moved to New York City after high school and went on to graduate from NYU in 1935. He began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he endeavored to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front. He later returned to Paris in 1950 and studied Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1950.
Bearden's early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community. After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s, when Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the struggle for civil rights.
Bearden was the author or coauthor of several books, and was a songwriter who co-wrote the jazz classic "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine, a former high school classmate at Peabody High School, and Dizzy Gillespie. His lifelong support of young, emerging artists led him and his wife to create the Bearden Foundation to support young or emerging artists and scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts. His work in collage led the New York Times to describe Bearden as "the nation's foremost collagist"[1] in his 1988 obituary.
Barkley L. Hendricks (April 16, 1945 – April 18, 2017) was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career (from photography to landscape painting), Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits. In these portraits, he attempted to imbue a proud, dignified presence upon his subjects. He frequently painted black Americans against monochrome interpretations of urban northeastern American backdrops. Hendricks' work is unique for its marriage of American realism and post-modernism. Although Hendricks did not pose his subjects as celebrities, victims, or protesters, the subjects depicted in his works were often the voices of the under-represented blacks of the 1960s and 1970s. Hendricks even stood alongside his subjects and featured himself in works, like in Brilliantly Endowed (Self portrait), 1977 where he painted himself nude in response to an art critic's comments on his show.
Born on April 16, 1945, in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Tioga. [2] Barkley Leonnard Hendricks was the eldest surviving child of Ruby Powell Hendricks and Barkley Herbert Hendricks. His parents had moved to Philadelphia from Halifax County, Virginia during the Great Migration when large numbers of African Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States. Hendricks attended Simon Gratz High School and graduated in 1963. He attended Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). After graduating PAFA in 1967, Hendricks decided to enlist in the New Jersey National Guard and found work as an arts and crafts teacher with the Philadelphia Department of Recreation.[3] In 1970, he began attending Yale University and graduated in 1972 with both a bachelor's and master's degree.
William T. Williams (born July 17, 1942, in Cross Creek, North Carolina, United States) is an American painter. He is Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, whose faculty he joined in 1971.
Williams is a recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. He is also a recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem's Artist Award in 1992 and received The James Van Dee Zee Award from the Brandywine Workshop for lifetime achievement in the arts in 2005.
He received the 2006 North Carolina Award for Fine Arts, the highest civilian honor the state can bestow.[2] Williams is represented in numerous museum and corporate collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Menil Collection, Fogg Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Library of Congress, Yale University Art Gallery, Chase Manhattan Bank, AT&T, General Mills Corporation, UnitedHealth Group, Southwestern Bell Corporation and Prudential Financial Insurance Company of America.
He has exhibited in over 100 museums and art centers in the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, People's Republic of China and Japan.
Hughie Lee-Smith (September 20, 1915 – February 23, 1999) was an American artist and teacher whose signature works were slightly surreal in mood, often featuring distant figures seen under vast skies in desolate urban settings.
Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida to parents Luther and Alice Williams Smith; in art school he altered his last name to sound more distinguished.[1] As a child Lee-Smith moved to Atlanta to live with his grandmother, where the carnivals he attended would later provide imagery for his art.[2] At age 10 he moved to Cleveland, and attended classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and later the Cleveland Institute of Art and the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute, the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts (Center For Creative Studies, College of Art & Design), and received a Bachelor of Arts from Wayne State University in Detroit. He began to teach art, and performed with an interracial dance company.[2] His early work reflected social concerns inspired by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the work of Works Progress Administration artists of the period.[3] Lee-Smith was employed by the WPA in Ohio, and while in the Navy painted a mural entitled History of the Negro in the U.S. Navy.
Marie Edwards Johnson-Calloway (April 10, 1920 – February 11, 2018) was an American artist. She worked in the fields of painting and mixed-media assemblage.
Born Marie Edwards in Pimlico, Baltimore, the African-American Johnson-Calloway first attended Coppin State Teacher's College. In 1952 she earned a bachelor's degree in art education from Morgan State College, and in 1968 she received a Master of Arts in painting from San Jose State University. She taught at San Jose City College for many years, and has worked with the Bay Area Women Artists of Northern California on community-based projects. The Oakland Art Museum is among institutions which contain examples of her work.[4] Johnson-Calloway has also taught at San Francisco State University and at the California College of Arts and Crafts.[3] Twice-married, she has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Oakland, California. She served as president of the San Jose chapter of the NAACP, and has long been active in civil rights as well. Johnson-Calloway died in February 2018 at the age of 97.
In a career that spanned half a century, painter Vincent Smith documented in brilliant color some of the most compelling events in twentieth-century America. From the be-bop-fueled improvisation of 1940s Harlem jazz clubs, to the visceral tug of civil rights workers confronting deep-seated hate with soul-clearing hope, to the creative militancy of the Modern Arts Movement, Smith was there, brush in hand, bearing witness. "A figurative painter with an often subtle, social thrust, he placed his subjects in a stylized way against geometric, textured and intricately colored backgrounds," noted the New York Times. "I always knew that I was either going to do something or do nothing," he told American Visions. "And when I thought of myself as a painter, I dreamed of myself as a great painter." He succeeded.
African-American artist Walter Henry Williams was born in Brooklyn, New York, August 11, 1920. He studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School with Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam and Gregorio Prestopino under the G.I. Bill between 1951 and 1955 and began to exhibit his work in 1954. He also spent the summer of 1953 studying art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Williams won a Whitney fellowship to study in Mexico after graduating in 1955 and spent the years 1959 - 1963 there. He won the National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1960 and the Silvermine Award in 1963, among others.
Williams made his first trip to Denmark between 1956 and 1957. According to the "History of African-American Artists" by Bearden and Henderson, after Williams' four years of living in racially liberal Mexico he "felt the freedom from racial prejudice was essential for his further development." After he returned to the U.S. from Mexico in 1963 he decided to return to Denmark in 1964 and married Marlena Jacobson the same year.
