Artists & Sculptors Collection
Andrea Clark
Asheville, NC - “I had never seen the South before, and it was a different beat,” says Clark, who moved in with family on Valley Street. “I loved listening to people’s stories—people who were interested and interesting.”
-- 2020 article in The Laurel Of Asheville titled: History Feature: Andrea Clark Honored for Photos of Urban Renewal in Asheville
Black History-White Artists-Black Models
"One of the central aims of "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today," which is currently up at Wallach Art Gallery, is to recognize the centrality of black women in the French artistic canon. One under-acknowledged figure of the Parisian art world was Aïcha Goblet...
Dana King
“It Makes One Speechless”: 350 Sculptures Invoke First Enslaved Africans
Dana King’s sculptures surround a plinth in San Francisco that formerly held a statue of Francis Scott Key, an anti-abolitionist.
by Emily Wilson / Hyperallergic
July 4, 2021
SAN FRANCISCO — On a recent Friday morning, Dana King drove across the Bay Bridge from her home in Oakland to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to check on “Monumental Reckoning,” 350 sculptures she created to represent the first Africans kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1619.
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David C. Driskell (1931 – April 1, 2020)
Highly regarded as an artist, scholar, and curator, David Driskell is cited as one of the world’s leading authorities on African American Art. He has been the recipient of ten honorary doctoral degrees and has contributed significantly to scholarship in the history of art on the role of Black artists in America...
Ernest Eugene “Ernie” Barnes Jr.
(1938-2009)
Ernest Eugene Barnes Jr.(Ernie) was born July 15, 1938, in a poor section (called "the bottom") in Durham, North Carolina. His father, Ernest Barnes Sr., worked as a shipping clerk at Liggett Myers Tobacco Company and his mother, Fannie Mae Geer, was employed as a domestic for Frank Fuller Jr., a wealthy Southern attorney who would be one of many who guided Barnes into the world of art.
Harry Roseland's "To the Highest Bidder"
This is the painting that Oprah has in her hallway that she mentions in interviews as keeping her grounded.
"According to a segment shared widely by CNN, during the opening of the exhibit last week, Winfrey said that she keeps a 6-foot painting of an enslaved woman on the auction block holding her daughter’s hand placed prominently in her home so that amid all of that opulence she remains grounded.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937)
The Banjo Lesson
Tanner had been studying and working in Paris until he developed a bout of typhoid fever and was advised to return to the United States to recover his health and dwindling finances.
Henry Tanner painted The Banjo Lesson in 1893 after a series of sketches he made while visiting the Highlands, Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina four years before in 1899. Tanner's time in North Carolina was pivotal in shifting his focus toward creating art that challenged the negative depictions of Black life in America. the African Americans living in the Appalachian Mountains were the poorest Blacks he’d ever seen, and reminded him of his mother’s enslavement past. His heart ached.
John Biggers
He was one of the most important African American artists of the twentieth century. John Biggers was a muralist who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and toward the end of World War II.
Biggers was born in a shotgun house built by his father in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father Paul was a Baptist preacher, farmer, shoemaker, schoolteacher, and principal of a three-room school. His mother Cora was a housekeeper for white families.
Malvin Gray Johnson
Johnson was an influential African American artist during the Harlem Renaissance in the early 20th century.
He started creating artwork as a child. His first drawing lesson was given to him by his sister Maggie, after which he started creating paintings for the local annual fair. At eleven years old, Johnson made New Year’s calendars and sold them to his community.[1]
Vinnie Bagwell
Vinnie Bagwell is credited with reframing public art to include historic Black images. Her first public artwork, “The First Lady of Jazz” at the Yonkers Metro-North/Amtrak train station was commissioned by the City of Yonkers. It is the first public artwork of a contemporary African-American woman to be commissioned by a municipality in the United States. “Walter ‘Doc’ Hurley”, a 7’ bronze of a Hartford local legend is the first public artwork of a contemporary African American in the State of Connecticut.
