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

The Pride of South Side Chicago: Charles W. White

Charles W. White (1918-1979) is considered one of America's most recognized African-American Social Realist artists. White’s works is largely devoted to the portrayal of Black America.

Two personal experiences greatly affected White, which later came to influence his artwork. First, he was physically assaulted for walking into a restaurant in New Orleans. Second, in Virginia, White was forced, at gunpoint, to the rear of a streetcar. Additionally, he developed a deeply-rooted anger against injustice after learning that several of his relatives had been lynched.

White’s artwork’s subjects include scenes depicting US African-American history, their socio-economic struggles, human relationships, and portraits. His artwork possessed great draftsmanship, sensitivity and affirmed the humanity of African- American culture.

“I use Negro subject matter because Negroes are closest to me. But I am trying to express a universal feeling through them, a meaning for all men… -- I’ve had my work in museum’s where I wasn’t allowed to see it. But what I pour into my work is the challenge of how beautiful life can be.”

Born in 1918 to Ethel Gary and Charles White Sr., on the South Side of Chicago, White was the son of an African-American domestic worker and a railroad dining car waiter of Indigenous American descent. Art became a refuge from his unhappy home and their extreme poverty, and from the violence often found in his neighborhood. As a child, while his mother was working, White would often spend hours alone at the public library or the Art Institute of Chicago.

By the age of seven, he showed an interest in art, making objects from found materials and using paint set that his mother bought him for his birthday. At fourteen he joined the Arts and Crafts Guild and he worked as a sign letterer for the Regal Theater. White’s drawings won a competition, so he attended a weekend “honors” class at the Art Institute. Artists Charles Sebree and Margaret Burroughs also attended this class. When he was 16-years-old, he met and hung out with many artists like poet Gwendolyn Brooks, author Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright.

By the age of twenty he graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938 and then he began working on projects through the Works Progress Administration.

White moved to New York in 1942, studying for a short period of time at the Art Students League, and met many social activists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals. He met and married sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, who then taught in New Orleans at Dillard University. He had won two scholarships, one to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the other to the Frederic Mizes Academy of Arts, both of which were withdrawn when it was discovered White was African-American.

White and Catlett left New York to teach at Hampton Institute in Virginia until White was drafted in 1943. Soon after, he contracted tuberculosis while serving in the Army and spent three years in a Veterans hospital in Beacon, New York. Forced to limit his exposure to oil paints, he began to focus more on drawing, worked on subjects of social injustice, as well as incidents of African- American history.

He then returned to New York City and had a one man show at the American Contemporary Artists (ACA) Gallery in September 1947. That fall, White and Catlett went to Mexico at the invitation of muralist David Siqueiros. They studied and worked for one year at Mexico’s graphic workshop Taller de Grafica Popular before his health deteriorated again and he was forced to return to New York where he had lung surgery. His marriage to Catlett ended soon after his travels to Mexico.

In 1950, White married Frances Barrett. They chose to move to California for the weather, to help improve White’s ailing health. During this period, White’s works were being discovered by the Black Consciousness movement of the 1960s and several black colleges sought to exhibit his work.

White died on October 3, 1979, in California, of congestive heart failure.

In a monograph written by Andrea Barnwell, Director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, she says "Charles White's art, easily identifiable by its bold figures, left an indelible imprint. This romantic revolutionary believed wholeheartedly in the art, mission, compassion, and dreams of all black people."

Selected Exhibitions and Other Accolades:
the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Smithsonian Institution, National Academy of Design, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Recipient of the Julius Rosenwald Foundation study grant.
Elected to the National Academy of Design in 1972.
Chair of the Drawing Department at Otis College of Art and Design.
Taught at the Otis Art Institute from 1965 - 1979.
Received an honorary doctor of arts degree from Columbia College Chicago.
Featured LACMA's first exhibition devoted exclusively to African-American Artists.
Hampton University. mural: The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy

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).