Untitled (North Carolina Landscape)

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created an ambitious relief program know as the Work Progress Administration (WPA), which employed many artists for public projects. One such project, the establishment of an arts center in Greensboro, North Carolina, brought Northern African American artists Rex Goreleigh and Norman Lewis to the South. While Lewis left after a year, Goreleigh stayed behind, continuing to teach art local colleges. This untitled watercolor documents Goreleigh’s North Carolina sojourn with its farm houses and red soiled fields. Goreleigh likely worked on this painting multiple times as he dated the work twice, once in 1939, and again in 1940.