Teach about Black Artists: Clementine Hunter Art Project and History Lesson

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Hunter lived and worked most of her life on the Melrose cotton plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana. She did not start painting until the 1940s when she was already a grandmother. Her first painting, executed on a window shade using paints left behind by a plantation visitor, depicts a baptism in Cane River.

Hunter painted at night, after working all day in the plantation house. She used whatever surfaces she could find, drawing and painting on canvas, wood, gourds, paper, snuff boxes, wine bottles, iron pots, cutting boards, and plastic milk jugs.

Working from memory, Hunter recorded everyday life in and around the plantation, from work in the cotton fields to baptisms and funerals. She rendered her figures, usually Black, in expressionless profile and disregarded formal perspective and scale.

Though she first exhibited in 1949, Hunter did not garner public attention until the 1970s when both the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited her paintings.

Even with such success, Hunter chose to stay in Louisiana, working at Melrose Plantation until 1970 when she moved to a small trailer a few miles away on an unmarked road.

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Clementine Hunter was Louisiana's most celebrated and beloved folk artist. She is also Louisiana's most famous female artist. Hunter a self-taught African-American artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, lived and worked on Melrose Plantation. Her work depicted plantation life in the early 20th century, documenting a bygone era. Her first paintings sold for as little as 25 cents. By the end of her life, her works were exhibited in museums around the world and sold by dealers and galleries for thousands of dollars. Hunter was the granddaughter of a former slave. Hunter received an hoary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Northwestern State University in 1986. Though she is considered a folk artist legend, she spent her entire life in poverty, even though she was selling her pieces of art in the 1970's for hundreds of dollars. She died in 1988 in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

Hunter is one of the most well-known self-taught artists, often referred to as the black Grandma Moses. Hunter painted from memory, and her works portray cotton and pecan picking, washing clothes, baptisms, and funerals. Many of her paintings feature similar subjects, but each painting is unique. Hunter's work features colorful displays of plantation life with powerful expressive force. 

Hunter was the first African-Amerian artist to have a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and prominent collectors include Oprah Winfrey and the late Joan Rivers, among many others . Her work can also be seen in the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of American Folk Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and the New York Historical Association. 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Kimmy Cantrell Black History Art Lesson

 

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Kimmy Cantrell discovered his artistic vision in high school when he fell in love with clay in an art class. After his first hand-built vase was chosen for display at the local board of education, his teacher suggested he study art in college. Instead he decided to study business at Georgia State University and spent fifteen years in distribution management. In 1991 he accepted a job in Tifton, a small rural town four hours south of Atlanta. It was there, after almost twenty years, he decided to reconnect with clay. First there were vases, then bowls with faces, leading to clay pieced collages. The self-taught evolution of his art continues today.

Kimmy Cantrell enjoys developing fresh variations on several recurring themes: faces, still lifes, nudes and fish. Kimmy uses many forms to tell his stories, from free standing sculptures to still life collages. He uses asymmetry to challenge traditional definitions of beauty. “I want to show the beauty within flaws,” he explains. “Imperfections tell stories that are far more compelling than perfection.”

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 Sculptor Kimmy Cantrell is known for colorful ceramic masks depicting expressive asymmetrical faces with exaggerated eyes and whimsical features. Cantrell uses his art as a way to challenge traditional European conceptions of beauty. After a 20 year career in business, Cantrell reconnected with his sculpting practice in 1994 and has worked as a professional artist ever since. He is self taught, and his style draws inspiration from the folk art of William Edmondson as well as from Cubism. Cantrell also creates mixed-media collages and still lifes from clay and metal. 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: William H Johnson Art Lesson Black History

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William Henry Johnson, one of the great painter/poets of American experience, left South Carolina, the state of his birth, in 1917, when he was only 17, and found a place in the Harlem home of an uncle who made a good living as a porter on the trains that ran north and south. Johnson’s journey was part of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of Black Americans from the South that had begun in earnest that year and that in the years to come would thoroughly transform American society and culture. The double “North/South” consciousness of Black migrants to American cities would become Johnson’s core subject.

Soon after arriving in New York, Johnson was already able to imagine himself as a professional artist, even with few Black figures as precedents and little formal education of his own. By working as a stevedore, cook, and porter, he saved the money to attend the National Academy of Design, where he excelled to the degree that his teachers raised funds to allow him to study in Europe. There he schooled himself in the lessons of European modernism, using bright colors and loaded brushstrokes to create expressionist landscapes that found small but steady sales. After marrying Holcha Krake, a Danish artist, designer, weaver, and ceramist, in 1930, he spent time in Scandinavia and developed a deep interest in folk art and culture that he carried into his later work.

In the fall of 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Johnson and Krake returned to New York, settling in Greenwich Village. Their repatriation was prompted by their alarm at the rise of fascism—the previous year, Johnson’s brother-in-law, the Expressionist artist Christoph Voll, had lost his teaching position in Germany and had had his work denigrated in the Nazis’ Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition in Munich. Johnson also spoke of a desire to come home to “paint his own people.” In these lean Depression years he found employment, in spring 1939, through the Work Projects Administration (WPA), as an artist/instructor at the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC), the largest WPA-funded center in the country. There Johnson found himself at the heart of a vibrant community of artists, including Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Selma Burke, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, and others.

Johnson’s work changed dramatically in New York. He learned screenprinting at the HCAC, where a workshop dedicated to the technique had been set up, and before and after teaching classes at the center he spent time creating hundreds of prints. Screenprinting was generally used for commercial art, but the fine artists at the HCAC were imaginatively repurposing it. The method helped Johnson to define a new visual language of simplified forms and flat planes of bright color laid down in inexpensive opaque inks. It also seems to have served as a prompt for him, allowing him to let go of the painterly expressionist idiom he had honed in Europe in order to embrace something that seemed newer and bolder, that mixed high and low, that could speak plainly of a new kind of urban experience with folk origins. Johnson made prints and paintings in parallel in these years, often tackling a subject virtually simultaneously in both mediums, and the spare forms and vibrant colors that he used in his prints carried over into his painted work too.

In both, Johnson began focusing on images of Black life in the urban North and rural South. Many of his images of this period depict the Harlem community and touch on the forces that made it what it was. The screenprint Blind Singer (c. 1940), for example, pays homage to two street performers. They wear city clothes—suit and tie, hats and heels—but the guitar speaks of the blues, with that music’s deep roots in the South, where it evolved from the songs of Black sharecroppers, and of those earlier enslaved, before making its way to urban areas with the Great Migration.

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Teach About Black Artists Series: Alma Woodsey Thomas History Lesson and Art Project

 

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Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, the oldest of four girls. In 1907, her family moved to Washington, D.C., seeking relief from the racial violence in the South. Though segregated, the nation’s capital still offered more opportunities for African Americans than most cities in those years.

As a girl, Thomas dreamed of being an architect and building bridges, but there were few women architects a century ago. Instead, she attended Howard University, becoming its first fine arts graduate in 1924. In 1924, Thomas began a 35 year career teaching art at a D.C. junior high school. She was devoted to her students and organized art clubs, lectures, and student exhibitions for them. Teaching allowed her to support herself while pursuing her own painting part-time.

Thomas’s early art was realistic, though her Howard professor James V. Herring and peer Loïs Mailou Jones challenged her to experiment with abstraction. When she retired from teaching and was able to concentrate on art full-time, Thomas finally developed her signature style.

She debuted her abstract work in an exhibition at Howard 1966, at the age of 75. Thomas’ abstractions have been compared with Byzantine mosaics, the Pointillist technique of Georges Seurat, and the paintings of the Washington Color School, yet her work is quite distinctive.

Thomas became an important role model for women, African Americans, and older artists. She was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and she exhibited her paintings at the White House three times.

 

“Miss Alma Thomas was a trailblazing pioneer,” said Melanee C. Harvey, art history coordinator and assistant professor of Howard University Department of Art. “During her time as a student at Howard, she embodied the spirit of creating across the Arts by designing costumes for the theatrical productions of the Howard Players and studying sculpture in the Department of Art.

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Jacob Lawrence History Lesson and Art Project

 

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The paradox that the most effective propaganda for understanding the Negro problem should be visual truth is the essence of Jacob Lawrence’s work. For this young Negro has, in his own words, “tried to paint things as I see them.” In this lies his power as a painter; his perception and his comprehension are never literary, and his mode of expression is pictorial rather than illustrative. Lawrence’s pride (certainly merited) is the fact that his work has reached a wide public through acceptance of museums across the country, a tribute to a painter with a purpose rather than a propagandist.

Assigned to “Station Museum of Modern Art” by the Coast Guard for the opening of his one man show, he looked at his gouaches, some of which he had never seen hung before, with modest pleasure. The forthright paintings, devoid of bitterness or overstatement, are reflections of the sincerity and honesty of the man.

The way Lawrence sees is in terms of pattern in bright primary color, unmodulated (so that no black and white reproduction can do him justice), and in simplification of form. Form is simplified in order to articulate the essentials. Detail is suppressed except where it functions both as part of design and basic part of fact. His steep perspective generates immediacy.

 

Lawrence seems to have been born with a sense of pattern. “I always used to make designs as a kid,” he says. “Used to make masks, and designs for rugs—for anything. And I’ve always been interested in stage designs. I’ve even made some theater models.” To design state-sets is one of his post-war hopes, along with a Guggenheim, a trip to Mexico, a series of paintings on John Henry, and a try at silk-screens.

Born in Atlantic City, his mother brought him as a child to Harlem via Philadelphia. His first break, he thinks, was that his work “as a kid” came to the attention of Charles Alston, the Negro painter, who was then studying at Columbia. Alston urged him to come to the 135th Street Public Library classes. He continued studying with Alston and Henry Bannarn. The Federal Arts Project and beginning in 1941 a Rosenwald Fellowship three years running gave him his next opportunities.

Lawrence has painted Negro themes always, from historical series to contemporary life, which he considers “all part of the same problem, and its progress.” His honeymoon to New Orleans in 1941 was his first trip South, where Jim Crowism and the desperate economic plight of the Negroes became an emotional reality. “It didn’t surprise me,” he says, “but for the first time I really felt it.” On Coast Guard duty in the South later he started pen and ink drawings. “Maybe because of the way they think, Southerners look different—cold, inhuman,” he added, indicative of the man who feels through his eyes.

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Teach about Black Artists: Yinka Shonibare Black History Art Lesson

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 Shonibare’s artwork explores contemporary African identity and its relationship to European colonialism through painting, sculpture, installation, and moving image. Shonibare is best known for his work with visual symbols, especially the richly patterned Dutch wax fabric produced in Europe for a West African market that he uses in a wide range of applications. His tableaux of headless mannequins costumed in this fabric evoke themes of history and its legacy for future generations. Through these works he explores the complex web of interactions, both economic and racial, that reveal inequalities between the dominant and colonized cultures of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

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The British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare makes work – often in sculpture, painting and tapestry – that looks unflinchingly at race, class and colonialism. The 58-year-old, who is partly paralysed after contracting a virus of the spine in his late teens, was one of the original YBAs and was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2004. His 2010 sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, a scaled-down replica of HMS Victory with sails made from his signature batik fabric, was one of the most memorable artworks on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth and now has a permanent home outside the Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Shonibare was recently given the 2021 Art Icon award by the Whitechapel Gallery.

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These Western–style nineteenth–century costumes, worn by mannequins as if part of a historical display, are made from so-called African fabrics. "African fabric signifies African identity," explains the artist, "rather like American jeans (Levi's) are an indicator of trendy youth culture. In Brixton, African fabric is worn with pride amongst radical or cool youth [....] It becomes an aesthetics of defiance, an aesthetics of reassurance, a way of holding on to one's identity in a culture presumed foreign or different."

Although typically African and worn as an expression of an idealized unified identity, these wax–print fabrics are actually Dutch and were made in factories in England, where Yinka Shonibare, who was brought up in Nigeria, now lives and works. Originally made in Holland with an Indonesian technique, and exported to Africa, such fabrics bespeak colonial trade. The title is taken from a line in Alfred Hitchock's 1959 film North by Northwest, and like the cultural conflation of the work, poses a question about identity and becoming.

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Teach About Black Artists Series: Betye Saar Black Artist Lesson Plan and History Lesson

 

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 Born in Los Angeles, Saar moved with her family to Pasadena in the early 1930s, shortly before the death of her father in 1931. Pasadena provided a rich cultural and artistic founda­tion, and she actively took part in arts and crafts classes that allowed her to experiment with a variety of approaches to making objects. Initially a design student at Pasadena City College, Saar transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, to study interior design. After graduating in 1949, she built an arts community with two recent Los Angeles trans­plants, jewelry designer Curtis Tann and artist William Pajaud. Later Saar and Tann founded an enamel business, Brown and Tann, that was featured in Ebony magazine in October 1951.

After taking postgraduate courses in print­making, Saar began creating color etchings, ink drawings, and intaglio prints that shifted her practice away from design into fine art. From these early stand-alone pieces, she began combining her prints with other objects, such as found photographs, or placing them in window frames. Her experiments throughout the 1960s led to her embrace of assemblage, a medium that allowed her to make densely layered works with an equally complex variety of autobiographical and political undertones. Like many of her generation, Saar was deeply affected by the Watts rebellion in 1965 and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. In Black Girl's Window (1969), a significant marker of this moment, Saar uses the window as a formal device to explore the effects of race both personally and conceptually. Cosmo­logical elements (stars, the sun, a crescent moon) and pictorial emblems (a skeleton and a roaring lion, among others) in Black Girl's Window also reflect Saar's turn toward mysti­cal iconography, which she describes as a pursuit of “occult atmosphere” in her work.

After seeing Joseph Cornell's retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967, Saar too began to encase her objects in boxes and containers that further demarcate their sym­bolic use. Likened to ritual, Saar's process, and the resulting work, became associated with spiritual practices, particularly those of Africa, Haiti, and Mexico. Though Saar did not travel to Africa until 1977, she and fellow artist David Hammons saw African art at the Field Museum in 1970 while in Chicago for the National Confer­ence of Artists. The connection to other cultures deepened her interest in finding links to a shared universality that could be transmitted by the charge of gathered objects.

Some of these objects were gathered by the artist during trips throughout the world, including Europe, Mexico, and Haiti, or at swap meets and flea markets in Los Angeles. At the latter, Saar collected appalling Americana—negative images of African Americans that she would later reuse in her assemblages. Other objects were personal. As a child she was enchanted with her aunt Hattie Parson Keys's trove of family documents, including photo­graphs. After her aunt's death in 1974, Saar inherited these items and transformed them into assemblages, including Record for Hattie (1975), in which an open case reveals a compart­mentalized reliquary of photographs, jewelry, and small tufts of fabric used for quilting. Like much of Saar's work from the decade, memory, nostalgia, and history are conflated with her own personal and familial objects. 

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“To me the trick is to seduce the viewer.
If you can get the viewer to look at a
work of art, then you might be able
to give them some sort of message.”

-Betye Saar

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her mystical assemblages became increasingly radical. Saar has since repurposed washboards, jewelry boxes, and racist ephemera as a way of reclaiming images and artistic power. For her best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), Saar arms a Mammy caricature with a rifle and a hand grenade, rendering her as a warrior against not only the physical violence imposed on black Americans, but also the violence of derogatory stereotypes and imagery.

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Prince Twins 7 7 Black Artist Art Lesson

 

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 Twins Seven Seven, born Omoba Taiwo Olaniyi Oyewale-Toyeje Oyelale Osuntoki (3 May 1944 – 16 June 2011) was a Nigerian painter, sculptor and musician. He was an itinerant singer and dancer before he began his career as an artist, first attending in 1964 an Mbari Mbayo workshop conducted by Ulli Beier and Georgina Beier in Osogbo. Twins Seven Seven went on to become one of the best known artists of the Osogbo School. 

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The palm wine tapper's family

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Twins Seven Seven's work is influenced by traditional Yoruba mythology and culture, and creates a fantastic universe of humans, animals, plants and Yoruba gods. Visually, his work resembles Yoruba carvings in the segmentation, division and repetition of his compositions; conceptually, it reflects this influence in the emphasis on transformation and balance, as well as its embodiment of dualities such as the earthly and the spiritual, past and present, industry and agriculture. Early works such as Dreams of the Abiku Child (1967) make allusion to concepts or figures in Yoruba cosmology and mythology, such as the abiku (devil child), and the orisha Osun. However, Twins Seven Seven also described his work as "contemporary Yoruba traditional art", not only paying homage to the influence of his cultural background but also to noting his responsiveness to current events and the postcolonial experience.

Some of his early work was influenced by his reading a copy of Amos Tutuola's book My Life in the Bush of Ghosts that was gifted to him by Georgina Beier.  However, as he progressed as an artist, Twins Seven Seven focused more on imagery based on Yoruba folklore and his own dreams.

He attempted to avoid exposing himself to other painters who could potentially influence his unique individual painting style. Upon his first visit to the United States, he refused to attend a Picasso show, stating: "No, I don't want to risk being influenced by anyone else. All I am doing is in me already. I am not going to sit down in a studio and learn to mix colors like an European painter."

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 He was in line to become King of Ibadan upon which he would be named Osuntoki II. However, he first had to become the head of his clan, Mogaji. When the old Mogaji died, Twins Seven Seven was elected by his family to take his place, but the coronation kept being pushed back, and he died before he could assume this position.

 

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Twins Seven-Seven spent much of the last 15 years of his life living and working in Philadelphia. In 2005 he was named UNESCO Artist for Peace in an award ceremony in Paris. His work is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and other major international collections. In 2010 he was the subject of an exhaustive monograph and biography, Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America, by Henry Glassie. A talented musician, he continued to perform throughout his career. Several of his early recordings have recently been reissued.

 

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Teach about Black Artists: Lois Mailou Jones Black History Art Lesson

 

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As a black female painter, Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was well aware of the upward battle facing her in order to succeed in the art world. Born in Boston, Jones grew up in a building supervised by her father. After attending night school to get his law degree, however, Mr. Jones switched career paths, for which Jones credits him as a major inspiration for her own work ethic.¹ The Jones family vacationed at Oak’s Bluff in Martha’s Vineyard, a place that Jones praised for its inclusivity and enthusiasm for its resident artists. Inspired by nature, Jones would paint watercolors of the island.² Her parents, supportive of their daughter’s creativity, sent her to an arts high school and to extracurricular arts classes at the Museum of Fine Arts. Jones then received a full scholarship to the Museum School where she majored in design. Right out of school, Jones began a successful career in the textile design industry.

 Dream of Nigeria

Following Jones’ immediate career boom, she experienced two events that would shape her outlook on her career and lead her to join Howard University’s art department in 1930.³ The first was a visit to a design firm where Jones saw a print of hers, Ganges, upholstered on their furniture. When she showed the head designer this print in her portfolio, he was so surprised that he called down all of his colleagues to look at this “colored girl” who had designed the Ganges fabric.⁴ This experience was an early wakeup call to Jones that her racial identity, whether she liked it or not, would impact her career. She also became aware of the limitations of the design world, namely its anonymity.⁵ This prompted Jones to leave textile design in favor of painting, hoping that high art would bring her name recognition.⁶ 

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However, when Jones approached her alma mater of the Museum School asking for a teaching position in fine art, they turned her down and instead suggested that she “go down South and help [her] people.”⁷ Rejected from her hometown, Jones did indeed head south to Howard. Despite the circumstances, Jones enjoyed a successful teaching career and artistic success while at Howard, traveled to Europe and Asia with students, while also keeping in dialogue with many important black cultural advocates.⁸ Jones’ art always gravitated to the styles of Post-Impressionism and early Modernism, but her work went through multiple phases of heavy African diasporic influence, most notably from Haitian culture. ⁹

However, Jones did not want her identity to affect the public’s reading of her artwork. Seeing how she was put on spectacle and ghettoized early in her career, Jones’ concern was that her artistic merit would be ignored. She refused to be hindered by her race or gender, and thus obsessively managed her public persona. Friend and writer Tritobia Hayes Benjamin said of Jones, “Lois was the quintessential self-publicist… She had every newspaper, report, and other documentation relating to her career and its development.”10 By keeping all public records of herself and her art, Jones knew exactly how the media was reading her and how to present herself to curators, collectors, journalists, and so forth. Jones also refused to deliver her artwork to galleries herself, or even accept awards in public. Instead, she would have one of her white friends do it for her. 11 Jones defended her right to remain faceless, saying, “I felt it was better to get as strong as possible before I let them know that Lois Jones was Black.”12 Jones had a vision of how she should appear to the public and tried everything in her power to maintain that vision.

Such control undoubtedly helped Jones advance her career. However, in order for Jones to receive the level of success that she desired, she had to maintain a certain degree of anonymity. Jones regretted that she had to prove herself as an artist and had to fight against the modifiers “African American” or “female.” With careful control over her public image, however, Jones fought against classification and lifted herself into the world of high art.

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Black History Artist Spotlight: Horace Pippin

 

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 Horace Pippin, Harmonizing (1944).

Horace Pippin was the first African American artist to be the subject of a monograph and, during his life, was featured in both commercial and museum exhibitions around the country, At the time of his death, in 1946, the New York Times noted that Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation, described Pippin as the most important Black painter in America. And yet, in the years since, his name has faded into relative obscurity.

Born February 22, 1888, Pippin was a direct descendant of enslaved peoples and a World War I veteran. While serving with the all-Black 369th Infantry, also known as the Harlem Hellfighters, Pippin was wounded by a German sniper. He lost mobility in his right arm and never completely regained it. When he returned from the war, Pippin began making art in part as a form of physical therapy. He taught himself to paint by holding the brush in his right hand and using his left arm to move it.

After completing his first oil painting in 1931, Pippin went on to complete some 140 canvases between then and his death, 15 years later. Some of Pippin’s paintings depicted scenes from the war, as well as the racism he encountered upon his return to the US. Others are history paintings, biblical scenes, or simply show Black people in everyday life. 

 Holy Mountain

One reason that Pippin remains relatively unknown in the mainstream art world likely has to do with lacking the particular narratives about education, influence, and lineage that art history tends to value. Pippin was self-taught, disabled, and a veteran.

Whose stories are told? Whose are valued? Despite being one of the most important artists of his time—and his influence on contemporary painting remains clear—Pippin has received little recognition.

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