THE MW GALLERY

Hale Woodruff, (1900-1980)

Selections from the Atlanta Period: Giddap, 1935 (reprinted 1996)

Linocut

Hale Woodruff’s lifelong passion for art led him to work and create in many places over the world. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1900, he taught himself to draw cartoons at a young age. He attended college at the John Herron Art Institute of Indianapolis, and continued art studies at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. Following that, he lived in Paris for four years, taking courses at the Académie Scandinave and Académie Modern. In 1931, Woodruff returned to the United States and began teaching at Atlanta University, where he instituted an annual exhibition of paintings. He taught at New York University from 1945 to 1968, retiring with the honorific title, professor emeritus. He continued to take an active role in the art world until his death in 1980. Woodruff’s works are included in the permanent collections of institutions all over the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute.

Copyright: Elnora, Inc./E.T. Williams

Hank Willis Thomas, (b. 1976)

Branded Head, 2003

Photograph

Hank Willis Thomas studied art and photography at New York University and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the late 1992. He continued his education at California College of the Arts earning his Master in Fine Arts in photography and a Master of Arts in Art Criticism. His work primarily deals with themes of identity, history, and popular culture. He currently works and lives in New York City.

© Hank Thomas

William T. Williams, (b. 1942)

Sweet Pat, 1971

Acrylic on Canvas

Born in Cross Creek, North Carolina and moved to Queens, New York at age 4.  It was a chance encounter with Jacob Lawrence that helped convince Williams that he could be a professional artist.  He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, attended summer program at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan Maine, and MFA from Yale University, School of Art and Architecture.

© William T. Williams

Charles White, (1918-1979)

Woman of Dignity, c. 1965

Oil on board

At the age of seven, Charles White taught himself to paint, and later received many scholarships to pursue his artistic endeavors, completing his education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Raised during the Great Depression, he was inspired by his mother—a strong woman who lead the family through hardship. This is evident in his works, as he became well-known for his depictions of strong, proud African-American men and women.  Charles White contracted tuberculosis while in military service; this forced him to find art materials that were gentler than oil paints and solvents on his respiratory system. He taught at both Dillard University in New Orleans and Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

Copyright 1965 The Charles White Archive

Kara Walker, (b. 1969)

African/American, 1998

Linocut

Ms. Walker earned a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Her work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions. In 1997, she became the youngest recipient ever of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant.

Walker came on the contemporary art scene in the 1990’s when she revived the art of cut-paper silhouette, popular in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as a women’s art, and began using it as a means to explore the history of race relations in the United States. She has earned critical acclaim for her large, room-sized installations that depict fictional narratives drawn from the antebellum South. Her images often feature racially stereotyped characters engaging in taboo acts of sex, violence, and degradation, and can be provocative, unsettling, and difficult to view.

African/American © 1998 Kara Walker

Dox Thrash, (1893-1965)

Coal Breakers, c. 1943

Carborundum mezzotint

Thrash was born in Griffin, Georgia, wanted to be an artist from the time he was a young boy. In 1937, Thrash joined the government-sponsored Federal Arts Project as a seasoned printmaker, and worked for Philadelphia’s Fine Print Workshop division. During his first year at the Workshop, Thrash discovered that carborundum, a granular substance made of silicon crystals and carbon, typically used to resurface or remove images from lithographic stones, was an excellent medium for preparing the surfaces of copper printing plates. This discovery significantly impacted the art of printmaking because of the dramatic tonal effects artists were able to achieve using the technique. Although Thrash focused primarily on portraits early in his career, after he found his niche in printmaking, he expanded his imagery to include works depicting contemporary issues, particularly images reflecting the social evolution of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century.

Courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell

Shinique Smith, (b. 1971)

Untitled, 2005

Mixed media on canvas

A Baltimore native, Shinique Smith is inspired by the multitude of things that we consume and discard.  Smith earned her BFA and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and her MAT from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University.  Smith has shown at the Denver Art Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, National Portrait Gallery, DC, New Museum, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, PS1/MoMA, MOCA North Miami, and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. She has received awards and fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Smith currently lives and works in Hudson, NY. 

Courtesy of the artist

Betye Saar, (b. 1926)

Sandy, 2002

Mixed media on paper

Betye Saar is an assemblage artist living and working in Los Angeles, California.  She is known for her multimedia collages, box assemblages, altars and installations consisting of found objects and other materials.  She is a graduate of UCLA and continued graduate studies at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California and California State University at Northridge. Among the numerous honors she has received are National Endowment for the Arts awards in both 1974 and 1984.  She has received honorary degrees from California College of the Arts & Crafts, Otis/Parson, Los Angeles, California, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California, and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts. In 1994, Saar, along with Los Angeles-based artist John Otterbridge, represented the United States at the 22nd Biennial of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Estate of Betye Saar Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

Alison Saar, (b. 1956)

Swing Low: A Harriet Tubman Memorial, 2007

Bronze

Alison Saar’s sculptures and installations explore themes of African cultural diaspora and spirituality. Her studies of Latin American, Caribbean and African art and religion have informed her work. Saar’s highly personal, often life-sized sculptures are marked by their emotional candor, and by contrasting materials and messages that imbue her work with a high degree of cultural subtext.

The daughter of acclaimed artist, Betye Saar, Alison received a BA from Scripps College (Claremont, CA) in 1978, having studied African and Caribbean art with Dr. Samella Lewis. She received an MFA from Otis Art Institute, now known as Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA) in 1981. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections.

Courtesy of Phyllis Kind Gallery

Julie Mehretu, (b. 1970)

The Twoandthreezeros Portfolio: Untitled, 2000, 2000

Lithograph

Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu is well-known for her wall-size paintings and intensely detailed drawings and prints. To escape political upheaval in Ethiopia, Mehretu’s family moved to the United States in 1977. Raised in East Lansing, MI, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College. In 1997, she received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Among her many accomplishments are having works in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and receiving a 2005 MacArthur fellowship, commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant.” Currently, Mehretu lives and works in Harlem, New York, and Berlin, Germany.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; © Julie Mehretu

Allie McGhee, (b.1941)

Blue Views, 2002

Mixed media and acrylic on wood

McGhee was born in West Virginia and moved to Detroit, Michigan at the age of eleven. He studied commercial art at Ferris State College in Big Rapids, MI, and continued his studies at Eastern Michigan University.  McGhee began his artistic career creating figurative, semi-abstract works, but he soon developed an abstract painting style, focusing more on the energy of a painting than its obvious content. He explains his transition between his artistic styles: “it’s a long, developmental period, just as when you grow older, you see things differently in life. I paint things differently than I did when I was a child. You would draw a tree as something brown and cylindrical with a big glob of green at the top. But, as you grow older, you see that a tree is much more than that; you examine it from all possible perspectives: scientifically, philosophically, spiritually.”

Courtesy of Allie McGhee

William Majors, (1930-1982)

Genesis II, 1965

Etching

Born and raised in Indiana, William (Bill) Majors received his BFA degree from the John Herron Art Institute.  He also studied at the Cleveland School of Art and in Florence, Italy from 1960–1961. He was a member of the historic African American artists’ group Spiral and extensively exhibited in New York during the 1960s before moving to teach in colleges and universities in California (’69-’71) and subsequently in New England (’71-’82).

Majors’ visual themes were often abstract interpretations of the Old Testament, but he had many influences, ranging from masters of Italian Renaissance to his contemporaries, particularly the New York School of abstract painters and sculptors he encountered when he moved to the city in 1962. At other times, he was inspired to interpret contemporary episodes, such as the Civil Rights events taking place in the United States.

© Susan Stedman, William Majors Estate

Titus Kaphar, (b. 1976)

Revisionist, 2013

Oil on canvas

Artist Titus Kaphar was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is the first recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship. He received his BFA from San Jose State University and MFA from Yale University, School of Art. Kaphar makes oil-on-canvas copies of European and American portrait paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries and reconfigures them in strategic ways to create a dialogue about race, art and representation. His work is at once beautiful and halting as he dances between fictional narrative and history.

©Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Richard Hunt, (b.1935)

Wave and Branch, 2000

Bronze

A native of Chicago, Richard Hunt attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from which he received a BA in Art Education in 1957. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art purchased his metal sculpture Arachne—a remarkable accomplishment so early in his career. In 1971, Hunt became the first African American artist to have a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Over forty years later, Hunt has produced over 100 public art commissions for American cities, campuses and corporations—more than any other artist working in the United States. His works are in the collections of major museums in the U.S. and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of the 20^th Century (Vienna, Austria) and the National Museum of Israel (Jerusalem).

©Richard Hunt

Satch Hoyt, (b. 1957)

From Mau Mau to Bling Bling, 2003

Assemblage

Satch (short for Satchidananda) Hoyt was born in London, England to a white British mother and a father of African-Jamaican ancestry.  He has lived and worked in Paris, France, New York City, and currently resides in Berlin, Germany.  Nearly all of his works contain sound or musical elements—what Hoyt refers to as a “soundscape.”

©Satch Hoyt

Chester Higgins, (b. 1948)

Moslem Woman, New York City, 1990

Silver gelatin print

Chester Higgins, Jr. was born and raised in Alabama.  While attending Tuskegee University, he saw photographs that had been taken by his first mentor P.H. Polk. Polk’s images served to dignify African Americans in the rural South during the 1930s.  Graduating in 1970 from Tuskegee University, Higgins arrived in New York City and began his professional career.

Higgins’ photography can be found within the pages of the New York Times, where he has been a staff photographer since 1975. His photographs have appeared in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines.

Copyright, Register, Chester Higgins, Jr. All Rights Reserved.

Sam Gilliam, (b. 1933)

Like Black Pepper, 2007

Acrylic on birch plywood construction

Born to a nurturing family in 1933, Sam was encouraged to pursue his artistic talents from a young age. He earned his master’s degree in fine arts in 1961 at the University of Louisville. After moving to Washington DC in 1962, Gilliam became immersed in the works of a group of abstract painters known as the Washington Color School and began exhibiting his boldly-colored, geometrically-composed artwork.

As years progressed, Gilliam favored softer shapes and varying hues over the straight lines and contrasting colors of his earlier work. He began experimenting with canvas presentations in the late 1960s, and used bevel-edged canvases to draw attention to the relationship between the painting and the wall. In his more recent works, he has been exploring pouring techniques, combining them with brushwork to create pristine surfaces.

©Sam Gilliam

Ed Clark, (b. 1926)

Untitled, 1997

Etching

Ed Clark was born in the Storyville section of New Orleans.  His family moved to Chicago when he was eight years old.  After serving in the Air Force during World War II, he enrolled in the school of the Art Institute of Chicago using funding provided by the G.I. Bill.  In 1952, he moved to Paris and studied at the L’Academie de la Grande Chaumière.  Paris in the mid-1950s was home to many American artists and writers where Clark developed lifelong friendships during his stay, before returning to the U.S. in 1957.

In the late 1960s, Clark’s primary motif was the oval, an abstract arc of color.  Sometimes the oval appears as one, sometimes in pairs, yet the form always dominated the picture plane.  These images became Clarks’ trademark and were the central focus of his work for about 20 years, and sporadically since then.

©Ed Clark

Chakaia Booker, (b. 1953)

Minor Illusion, 2007

Stainless steel, rubber, and wood

A native of Newark, New Jersey, Ms. Booker earned a BFA in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976 and a MFA from the City College of New York in 1993.  She has been making wearable sculptures since the 1980’s. Over time and many experiments, her medium became tires for the creation of her sculptures.  She has had numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands.

©Chakaia Booker

Camille Billops, (b. 1933)

The Story, 1992

Colored pencil on paper

Camille Billops works as a sculptor, book illustrator and film maker.  She graduated from California State University with a BA and City College of New York with an MFA.   She and her husband James Hatch, Professor of English at CCNY, co-founded the Hatch-Billops Archives of Black American Cultural History. The archives, housed in New York City, is a collection of visual materials, oral histories, and thousands of books chronicling black artists in the visual and performing arts.

Courtesy of Camille Billops