MEXICO CITY (AP) — Sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, a U.S. expatriate renowned for her dignified portrayals of African-American and Mexican women and who was barred from her home country for political activism during the McCarthy era, has died. She was 96. See Artwork Maria Antonieta Alvarez, Catlett’s daughter-in-law, said the artist died Monday in [...]
By Melinda Brocka Bearden was born on this day 100 years ago, September 2, 1911, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Early in his career, his work was influenced by Mexican muralists, including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In the 1930s, he studied under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in New York. [...]
Trained as a classical painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at Yale University, Barkley L. Hendricks rose to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s, a time when the urban cultural scene was flourishing. His cool, unpretentious portraits of lonesome figures lounging in urban settings embody an era when art, sex and [...]
Elizabeth Catlett has said that the purpose of her art is to “present black people in their beauty and dignity for ourselves and others to understand and enjoy.” As a sculptor and printmaker, she blends figurative and abstract traditions with social concerns, and has maintained a deep belief in the democratic power of printed art to reach a large audience.
Via PBS.org Ellis Wilson, whose father was also an artist, was born in Mayfield, Kentucky in 1899. Wilson went north to Chicago in the early 1920s to study and participate in the African American arts movement that was emerging in urban centers. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1923 and later moved [...]
Born in 1891 in New Orleans and raised in Chicago, Motley knew as a child that he wanted to be an artist. He studied art at the Institute of Chicago and in 1928, became the second African American artist to have a solo exhibition in New York City. Motley’s early artistic endeavors include “Old Snuff Dipper”, a realistic portrait a working class southerner that won a Harmon Foundation award. After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929, Motley left for Paris where he painted Parisian genre scenes, including “Blues”.
By HOLLAND COTTER Published: June 13, 1998 Lois Mailou Jones, an American painter and an art teacher for almost a half century at Howard University in Washington, died at her home in Washington on Tuesday. She was 92. Ms. Jones was an iconic figure, and an important historic link in a path-breaking generation of black [...]
Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in 1859 in Pittsburgh into a middle class family. At the age of 13, after observing an artist at work at a neighborhood park, Turner decided to become an artist. Tanner’s father, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, discouraged his artistic pursuits, hoping that he would instead enter [...]
By ANDREW GREINER The Pharaoh of Pop doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as King of Pop, but visitors to Chicago’s Field Museum could swear that’s Jacko’s face on a 3,000-year-old Egyptian bust. The spitting image limestone sculpture has been on display at the museum since 1988, but recently started drawing attention because [...]
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