African-American Art Pioneer/Printmaker: Dr. Margaret Burroughs

To celebrate the work of this fine artist, Benedictine University's Fr. Michael E. Komechak, O.S.B. Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition of prints and other works by Dr. Margaret Burroughs, March 9-April 25, 2015. www.ben.edu/artgallery

Margaret Taylor-Burroughs (1915–2010), was an African-American artist and writer and a co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History. Burroughs was born Victoria Margaret Taylor in St. Rose, Louisiana, and her family migrated to Chicago in 1922. She attended Englewood High School along with Gwendolyn Brooks, who in 1985-1986 served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (and later became United States Poet Laureate). Burroughs earned teacher's certificates from Chicago Teachers College in 1937, then went on to earn a B.S. in Education 1946, and her M.A. in Art Education in 1948, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Taylor-Burroughs first married the artist Bernard Goss in 1939, but they divorced in 1947. In 1949 she married Charles Gordon Burroughs, and they had been married for forty-five years when he died in 1994.

Burroughs and her artist colleagues helped to establish the South Side Community Art Center, whose opening in 1941 was dedicated by the First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt. She is also credited with the founding of Chicago's Lake Meadows Art Fair in the early 1950s. At its inception there were very limited venues and galleries for African American Artists to exhibit and sell their artwork. Mrs. Burroughs also helped start the National Conference of African-American Artists, and she taught art and poetry to prison inmates, according to the Chicago Park District.

Margaret and her husband Charles co-founded what is now called the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago in 1961. Originally known as the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art, it made its debut in the living room of their house at 3806 S. Michigan Avenue in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Taylor-Burroughs served as its as Executive Director until 1984 and was then named Director Emeritus, remaining active in the museum's operations and fundraising efforts.

The museum moved to its current location in Washington Park in 1973, and today is the oldest museum of African-American culture in the United States. Both the current museum building and the Burroughs' former S. Michigan Avenue home are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Margaret Burroughs has created many of her own works of art as well. 'Art is communication,' she has said. 'I wish my art to speak not only for my people - but for all humanity.' Burroughs was impacted by the achievements of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois. In many of Burroughs' pieces, she depicts people with half black and half white faces. In "The Faces of My People" Burroughs carved five people staring at the viewer. While Burroughs is attempting to blend together the black and white communities, she also shows the barriers that stop the communities from uniting. "Burroughs sees her art as a catalyst for bringing people together….”

The contribution of Burroughs to the artists on south side of Chicago and beyond was felt when eulogies at her passing were published….
Cheryl Blackwell Bryson, chairwoman of the DuSable Museum's board of trustees, said: "Not everybody can build an institution that becomes a road map for other ethnic groups around the world to emulate, an institution that is designed to impact lives."
Mayor Richard Daley said: "Through her artistic talent and wide breadth of knowledge, she gave us a cultural gem, the DuSable Museum of African American History. But she herself was a cultural institution."



President Barack Obama praised Mrs. Burroughs' generosity and commitment, saying "Michelle and I are saddened by the passing of Dr. Margaret Burroughs, who was widely admired for her contributions to American culture as an esteemed artist, historian, educator and mentor," Obama said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to Dr. Burroughs' family and loved ones. Her legacy will live on in Chicago and around the world."

Teaching:
DuSable High School, 1946 - 1969
Kennedy-King College, 1969 - 1979
Elmhurst College, 1968

Collections/Awards/Legacy:
Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College
1975 - President's Humanitarian Award
1985 - Chicago Park District Commissioner by Harold Washington, a position she held until shortly before her death in 2010.
1989 - Chicago Women's Hall of Fame
President Jimmy Carter appointed her a member of the National Commission on African-American History and Culture.
1989 - Paul Robeson Award
1994 – Proclamation for “Dr. Margaret Burroughs’ Day”, by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley
2010 - The Legends and Legacy Award, the Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago's Own Printmaker, Eldzier Cortor

The joy of this blog is when I find some new, or elder, printmaker’s work that I haven’t seen before. We have some mighty fine colleagues out there, and Eldzier Cortor is one of the good ones. I hope you enjoy his work as much as I do. Recently, a major gift of Cortor’s work was given to the Art Institute of Chicago, and anyone can make an appointment go see Cortor’s prints in their fabulous Print & Drawing Room.

Notable for his prints and paintings, African-American artist and printmaker Eldzier Cortor was born in 1916, in Tidewater, VA, to John and Ophelia Cortor. His family was a part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial north at the beginning of the 1900s. His family moved to the south side of Chicago when Cortor was about a year old. He later attended Englewood High School with other notable African-American artists, such as Margaret Burroughs and Charles Wilbert White.

He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, gaining a degree in 1936. While there, he came under the influence of instructor Kathleen Blackshear, who led students to explore the regional arts of Africa and other non-Western cultures at University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, and the Field Museum. Studying the African sculptures at the Field Museum transformed his work. "That was the most important influence in all my work, for to this day you will find in my handling of the human figure that cylindrical and lyrical quality I was taught...to appreciate in African art."

He also studied at the Institute of Design. Cortor, like his peers in the Harlem Renaissance, sought to reclaim his ancestral heritage as a means of informing and empowering his art. He searched for positive Black imagery, which he found in Chicago’s South Side working-class, in the former slave cultures of the U.S. South and Caribbean, and, finally, in the iconic Black female figure.

In 1940 he worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), where he drew scenes of Depression-era Bronzeville, a near south side Chicago neighborhood. Cortor received two Rosenwald Foundation grants, in 1944 and 1945, to live with the Gullah people in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. In 1949, Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti, and he taught at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince from 1949–1951.

During his career, Cortor produced several prints in the mid-1950s with Japanese printmaker Jun’ichiro Sekino, who was a leading member of the Sosaku Hanga, or Creative Prints, movement. Between 1955 and 1998, he made experimental prints at New York’s famous Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

Cortor was one of the first African-American artists to make African-American women his primary theme, saying, "the Black woman represents the Black race, continuance of life." These women have been a central focus of Eldzier Cortor’s work for much of his career; their elongated sculptural features appearing timeless and modern. It was when Cortor lived with the Gullah people that he became fascinated with their deep cultural African ties to their ancestry, and this prompted him to depict Woman as an archetypal image.

Cortor’s work is also influenced by surrealism, "who often uses the female figure in a surreal interior and exterior environment." While much of his work displays a strength and hopefulness, other series, such as his Haitian-influenced slaughterhouse series speak of suffering, oppression and racism. The lasting impression of Cortor’s work shows his pride of his ancestry, and love of the female form. These compositions show off, unabashedly, Cortor’s free expressive color, form and loose compositions; and the female nude as tall, lean powerful and sensual figures. His gift to the Art Institute of Chicago cannot be diminished in importance because he is one of the major figures of Chicago’s African American art scene. We can only hope to see more of his work as he continues to make art, and especially prints.

Exhibitions:
1938 - "An Exhibition in Defense of Peace and Democracy", the Chicago Artists' Group
1940 - "The Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro", in Chicago.
1967 - City College of New York, "The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800 - 1950"
1976 - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Two Centuries of Black American Art", (which toured the U.S. in 1977.)
1988 - "Three Masters", Kenkeleba Gallery, NY, (with Hughie Lee-Smith and Archibald Motley)
2002 - "Eldzier Cortor: Master Printmaker", Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, MA
2010 - Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
2010 - Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, IN
2013 - San Antonio Museum of Art, TX

Collections:
Howard University
The Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Art Institute of Chicago

Awards:
Art Institute of Chicago, Advisory Committee’s Legends and Legacy Award

Publications:
Matthew Backer and Jennifer Heusel, “Black Spirit”: Works on Paper by Eldzier Cortor (Indiana University Art Museum, 2006).

Elizabeth Catlett Prints: Serving Notice to the People

Alice Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington DC in 1915 (or 1919), the youngest of three children. Both of her parents were educators, and she, too, chose a profession that blended education as well as the arts. She studied design, printmaking and drawing at Howard University  and received her B.S. degree in 1935. Working as a high school teacher in North Carolina, Catlett left the position after two years, because low wages available to African-Americans. In 1940 Catlett became the first student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. While there, she studied with Grant Wood, at whose urging Catlett began to work with the subject of  African-Americans, especially black women.

Catlett moved to Chicago in 1941, studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago, and printmaking at the Art Students League of New York in 1942-1943. After graduation she moved to New Orleans to teach at the historically black institution Dillard University, and met and married Charles White. Five years later, after her divorce from White, she left New Orleans for New York to study with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. He encouraged Catlett to work in a more abstract direction. While in New York, she became the Promotion Director of Harlem’s George Washington Carver School which boasted famed photographer Roy DeCarava as one of their students.

In 1946, Catlett received a fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico where she studied at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Esmeralda, Mexico. In 1947, she married Mexican artist Francisco Mora, settled there permanently, and later become a Mexican citizen. Eventually she gave up her American citizenship and was declared an ‘undesirable alien’ by the US State Department; a situation which forced her to obtain a special visa to attend the opening of her 1971 solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Catlett worked with a group of printmakers at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, (People's Graphic Arts Workshop) in Mexico City. Artists Leopoldo Méndez, Raul Anguiano, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O'Higgins organized the group in 1937, and focused their art toward creating a social change. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration. She and other artists created a series of linoleum cuts on black heroes and "did posters, leaflets, collective booklets, illustrations for textbooks, posters and illustrations for the construction of schools, against illiteracy in Mexico."

Catlett was arrested during a railroad workers’ strike in Mexico City in 1949. Like other artists and activists, she felt the political tensions of the McCarthy years. The TGP was thought to have ties to the Communist Party; and although Catlett never joined the party, her first husband had been a member, so she was closely watched by the United States Embassy.

She continued to teach even after becoming a successful artist, and in 1958 she became the first female Professor of Sculpture and Head of the Sculpture Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She retired to Cuernavaca, in 1975. Thereafter, she continued to be active in the Cuernavaca art community.In 1980, Catlett donated a collection of her personal papers, exhibition catalogs, and other documentary materials to the Archives of American Art in the Smithsonian Institution.

Catlett was a sculptor and printmaker who was widely regarded as one of the most important African American artists of the 20th century; whose long career stretched from pioneering in academia, blending art with political/social movements like the Chicago Renaissance of the 1940s, the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Mexican Public Art Movement, Feminism and confronting injustices against African-Americans. Catlett often drew upon her personal experiences as an African-American woman in a period of unbridled racism but she also embraced influences such as pre-Columbian sculpture, and the works of artists Henry Moore and Diego Rivera.

She was concerned with the social dimension of her art. “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.” For example, her Sharecropper print refers to the injustices of an unfair system exerted on the poor and showed her lifelong concern for the oppressed and the dignity of women. She was a ground-breaking personality and her tenacity to seek a career when segregation presented limited opportunities drove her to make art and speak the truth of her own experiences. She was as much beloved in Mexico as the US, and worked up until her death at age 96.

 

Awards and Honors:

Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, 1946

50 year retrospective exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, 1998

Women's Caucus For Art, NY

Elizabeth Catlett Week in Berkeley, CA

Elizabeth Catlett Day in Cleveland, OH

Honorary citizen of New Orleans, LA

Honorary Doctorate from Pace University, NY

2003 International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award

Included in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” , 1976  “Stargazers:Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation w/ 21 Contemporary Artists,” Bronx Museum, NY

Sculpture Commissions:

First prize in sculpture, the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1939

The National Council of Negro Women in New York

Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong Park, New Orleans, LA

Howard University,  Washington, D.C.

“Invisible Man” Memorial to Ralph Ellison, in Riverside Park, West Harlem, NY

And several in Mexico and Mississippi

Collections:

Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico

The Museum of Modern Art, NY

Museum of Modern Art, Mexico

National Museum of Prague

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

Worcester Art Museum, MA

The University of Iowa, IA

Howard University, Washington, DC

Fisk University, NY

Atlanta University, GA

the Barnett-Aden Collection, FL

Schomburg Collection, NY

Museum of New Orleans, LA

The High Museum, GA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY