Museums Celebrate The Black Women Artists History Has Overlooked
See their work. Know their names. Learn their stories.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the artist; c. Lois Jones Mailou
On the first day of Black History Month, the good people at Google blessed the internet with a doodle honoring Edmonia Lewis, the first woman of African-American and Native American descent to earn global recognition as a fine arts sculptor.
Lewis, who grew up while
slavery was still legal in the United States, became known for her
hand-carved, marble sculptures of influential abolitionists and
mythological figures. In part because Lewis made all of her sculptures
by hand, few originals or duplicates remain intact today. She died in
relative obscurity in 1907, and, to this day, remains lesser known than many of her white, male contemporaries.
This well-deserved tribute
to Lewis got us thinking about the other black women artists whose
contributions to the history of art have been similarly overlooked or
undervalued. So we reached out to museums across the country, asking
which artists past and present deserve our attention, too. Below are
nine of those artists:
1. Pat Ward Williams (b. 1948)
Whitney Museum of American Art / Purchased with funds from The Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation
Pat Ward Williams is a Los
Angeles-based contemporary photographer whose work explores the personal
and political lives of African-Americans. Initially, the artist set out
to disrupt the homogenous way black life was captured on camera. “We always looked so pitiful, like victims,” she told the LA Times. “I knew I was a happy person. There were aspects of the black community that weren’t being shown.”
Attempting to break past
photography’s tendency to linger on surfaces, Williams incorporates
other media and methodology into her process, yielding mixed media
collages that collapse past and present, history and imagination.
Her most famed work,
featured above, features a photo of a bound black man chained to a tree,
pulled from a 1937 issue of Life magazine. “Who took this picture?”
Williams writes in the margins of the photo. “How can this photograph
exist?”
Jamillah James, a curator at
the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, wrote to The Huffington
Post: “Pat Ward Williams’ prescient, complex meditations on race,
history, and representation, such as her landmark “Accused/Blowtorch/
Shared courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
2. Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Loïs Mailou Jones was a
Boston-born painter whose plentiful, 70-year art career spanned North
America, Europe and Africa. Her eclectic style shifted over time, taking
inspiration from African masks, French impressionist landscapes and
bright Haitian patterns. An active member of the Harlem Renaissance, she
used vibrant visuals to heighten the urgency of her politically charged
works, which addressed the joys and challenges of black life.
“Mine is a quiet exploration,”
the artist famously said, “a quest for new meanings in color, texture
and design. Even though I sometimes portray scenes of poor and
struggling people, it is a great joy to paint.”
Throughout her career, Jones
experienced discrimination as a black artist. For example, when she
first began showing her artwork, she reportedly asked white friends to deliver her works to exhibitions in an effort to hide her black identity. She did so with reason ― according to The New York Times, she’d had an award rescinded when the granter learned she was black.
After teaching at an
African-American art school in segregated North Carolina, Jones
eventually took a position at Howard University in Washington, D.C.,
where she taught for 47 years. Upon retiring, she continued to paint and
exhibit her work until she died at 93 years old. Despite not being a
household name to some, her art lives on in esteemed institutions like
the National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.
Shared courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
3. Alma Thomas (1891–1978)
Smithsonian American Art Museum / Bequest of the artist
Alma Thomas, born in
Columbus, Georgia, moved to Washington, D.C., with her family as a child
to avoid the racial violence in the American South. Interested in art
from a young age, Thomas was the first student to graduate from Howard
University with a degree in fine art. There, she studied under Loïs
Mailou Jones while adopting an aesthetic of her own.
Thomas’ style pulls elements
from Abstract Expressionism and the Washington Color School, drawing
from the splendor of nature to create nonrepresentational canvases that
sing with soft vitality. Famously, Thomas was most inspired by her
garden and would watch with fascination as the scenery changed around
her.
“I got some watercolors and
some crayons, and I began dabbling,” she said. “Little dabs of color
that spread out very free ... that’s how it all began. And every morning
since then, the wind has given me new colors through the windowpanes.”
Jones taught at a junior
high school for most of her life, making work on the side. She had her
first exhibition at 75 years old, later becoming the first woman to have
a solo exhibition at The Whitney.
Shared courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
4. Laura Wheeler Waring (1877–1948)
Smithsonian American Art Museum/ Gift of the Harmon Foundation
Laura Wheeler Waring, raised
by a pastor and teacher in Hartford, Connecticut, was interested in art
as a child. In 1914, she travelled to Europe, where she studied the old
masters at the Louvre and specifically the works of Claude Monet. When
she returned to the United States, due to the encroachment of World War
I, Waring went on to teach and lead the departments of art and music at
the Cheyney Training School for Teachers.
Although Waring worked in
landscapes and still lifes, she is most celebrated for her paintings,
which depicted accomplished black Americans with dignity and strength.
Her most well-known series is the 1944 “Portraits of Outstanding
American Citizens of Negro Origin,” which featured depictions of individuals including W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson and James Weldon Johnson.
During the Harlem
Renaissance, Waring also contributed pen and ink to the NAACP magazine
The Crisis, working alongside activists to address probing political
issues. An exhibition of Waring’s work showed a year after her death at
the Howard University Gallery of Art.
Shared courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
5. Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939)
The Studio Museum in Harlem / Gift of the Lannan Foundation
Born in Philadelphia,
Barbara Chase-Riboud began taking art classes at a young age. As a
student at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, she sold a woodcut
to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By the time she graduated
from Yale with an MFA, she had a sculpture on view at the Carnegie
Mellon Institute.
The artist is known for her
larger-than-life sculptures made from cast metal and shrouded in skeins
of silk and wool, the strange lovechildren of a suit of armor and a
ballgown skirt. At once strong and fluid and feminine and mechanical and
natural, the stunning works became a symbols for feminine strength, as
well as a visual manifestation of transformation and integration.
“I love silk, and
it’s one of the strongest materials in the world and lasts as long as
the bronze,” the artist said. “It’s not a weak material vs. a strong
material [...] the transformation that happens in the steles is not
between two unequal things but two equal things that interact and
transform each other.”
Chase-Riboud, who currently
lives between Paris and Rome, is also an award-winning poet and
novelist, known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings, about the non-consensual relationship between former President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings.
Shared courtesy of theThe Studio Museum in Harlem.
6. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960)
Brooklyn Museum Fund for African American Art in honor of Saundra Williams-Cornwell
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was
raised in Rhode Island by an African-American mother and a
Narragansett-Pequod father. She attended the prestigious Rhode Island
School of Design where she studied painting and drawing, notably
portraiture, and worked as a housekeeper to pay tuition. She graduated
amidst the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance.
In 1922, Prophet moved to
Paris, in part frustrated by the racism rampant in the American art
scene. Despite being broke and exhausted, she was creatively invigorated
by the change of scenery and began creating sculptural portraits from
materials including wood, marble, bronze, plaster and clay. Of the
works, art historian James Porter wrote (quoted in Notable Black American Women):
”The pride of race that this sculptor feels resolves itself into an
intimation of noble conflict marking the features of each carved head.”
Despite the fact that her
sculptures were exhibited at high-society salons, Prophet herself
remained impoverished abroad, eventually forcing her to move back to the
States. There she continued to submit her sculptures to galleries and
competitions, while also teaching art at both Atlanta University and
Spelman College. (She was rumored to bring a live rooster to class for
her students to sketch.)
Eventually, Prophet moved
back to Rhode Island ― in part, again, to escape segregation ― at which
point her career slowed down dramatically. Although few of her
sculptures are accounted for today, one is housed in the permanent
collection of The Whitney in New York City.
Shared courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
7. Maren Hassinger (b. 1947)
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles / Gift of the artist
Born and raised in Los
Angeles, Maren Hassinger began dancing at the age of 5. She intended to
continue studying dance as a student at Bennington College, but ended up
switching to sculpture. In 1973, she graduated from UCLA with a
master’s degree in fiber art.
In her work, Hassinger
combines elements of sculpture, performance, video and dance to
investigate the relationship between the natural and industrial worlds.
Her commonly used materials include wire, rope, garbage, leaves,
cardboard boxes and old newspapers, often arranged to encourage
movement, as if the sculptures themselves are engaged in a dance.
Hassinger’s work explores
personal, political and environmental questions in an abstract language
that allows viewers to come to their own conclusions. “All the pieces
with boxes are about our gross need to consume, and where it leads us,”
she once told BOMB. “Where is the bleeding heart in all of this? I
don’t think my work has so much to do with ecology, but focuses on
elements, or even problems we all share, and in which we all have a
stake.”
Since 1997, Hassinger has
served as the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland
Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
Shared courtesy of the Hammer Museum.
8. Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982)
Gift of Judith Alexander / Photo by Gavin Ashworth
Nellie Mae Rowe was born in
rural Georgia, one of nine daughters. Her father, a former slave, worked
as a blacksmith and basket weaver; her mother made quilts and clothes.
She married at 16 and, when her husband passed away, married another
widower at 36. When he died, Rowe was 48 years old and began a new life
as an independent woman and an artist.
Rowe referred to her
blossoming interest in art as a chance to re-experience childhood. She
began to adorn the exterior of her house, which called the “playhouse,”
with stuffed animals, life-sized dolls, animal-shaped hedges and
sculptures made of chewing gum.
Along with her
installations, Rowe created vibrant and flat drawings from humble
materials like crayon, cardboard and felt-tip markers. Her images
normally consisted of humans and animals swallowed by colorful, abstract
designs and often referenced personal struggles in her own life. When
she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981, Rowe channeled her emotions into
her work, grappling with her changing body and attitudes towards death
through bold, symbolic imagery.
“I feel great being an artist,” Rowe famously said. “I didn’t even know that I would ever become one. It is just surprising to me.”
Shared courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum.
9. Senga Nengudi (b. 1943)
Hammer Museum / Photo by Robert Wedemeyer
Senga Nengudi was born in
Chicago, Illinois, and moved to Los Angeles, California, soon after. She
studied art and dance at California State University, where she
received her BA and MFA. In between degrees, she spent a year studying
in Tokyo, where she was inspired by Japanese minimalist tradition as
well as the Guttai performance art groups.
In the 1960s and ‘70s,
Nengudi was an elemental force in New York’s and Los Angeles’ radical,
avant-garde black art scenes, though her acclaim never quite spread to
the mainstream. Along with artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger,
she formed Studio Z, an artist collective that shared a love for
abandoned materials and overlooked spaces. The collective often wore
costumes and carried instruments to improvise performances at unlikely
locales like freeway underpasses or abandoned schools.
Nengudi’s most iconic
sculptural performance project, called “R.S.V.P.,” featured pantyhose as
a central material. Exploring the everyday object’s relationship to
skin, constriction, elasticity and femininity, Nengudi stretched and
warped the sheer undergarments so they resembled sagging body parts and
abstract diagrams. She’d often recruit collaborator Hassinger to
activate the sculptures by dancing through them, privileging
improvisation as the mode of ritual.
“When we were kicked off the boat,
improvisation was the survival tool: to act in the moment, to figure
something out that hadn’t been done before; to live,” Nengudi told
Hyperallergic. “And the tradition goes through Jazz. Jazz is the perfect
manifestation of constant improvisation. It has to be in place at all
times. Constant adjustment in a hostile environment, you have to figure
something out right away.”
Shared courtesy of the Hammer Museum.
CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to reiterate that the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was non-consensual.
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