Study for "The Wall" - I Have a Dream, #11
Oil on board
16 inches diameter
1968
As Exhibited in: Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Charles White’s artistic gifts became evident in grade school when his teachers praised him as “gifted with the paintbrush and the pencil.” Although his home life was unstable and impoverished, White’s single mother encouraged his talent, along with his love of reading. White’s youthful proficiency resulted in a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the few schools open to black artists at that time. After completing the school’s two-year program in just twelve months, in 1938 White joined the ranks of artists employed by the Works Progress Administration. He worked briefly in the easel division of the Illinois branch of the Federal Art Project before transferring to the mural department. In that position, White executed Five Great American Negroes, the first of many important murals he would create. White’s FAP responsibilities included developing and teaching at the nascent South Side Community Art Center.
Following a six-month courtship in Chicago, White married fellow artist Elizabeth Catlett in December 1941. The couple immediately moved to New Orleans where Catlett was chair of the art department at Dillard University, and White obtained an appointment to teach drawing for one semester. A year later, White won a Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship; as part of the award’s stipulations, the couple relocated to New York before making an extended tour of the South. White would later recount the trip as “one of the most deeply shaking and educative experiences of my life.” In early 1943, White began work on a massive mural of African American history, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, at Hampton Institute. (In August 2021, the Hampton University Museum received a $75,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to preserve the mural.)
During his Hampton residency, White was able to advise and instruct students—not only in technical skills but in their understanding of African American achievement. He believed his time on campus was a great success: “I feel that I have been quite instrumental in interesting the entire Hampton community in the function of art in advancing the cause of the Negro people and that I have helped to stimulate the art students to express themselves more freely and with greater understanding of their role as Negro artists.”
White spent the spring semester of 1945 as an artist-in-residence at Howard University in Washington, DC. The appointment meant a lighter teaching load for White, who by that time was recovering from pulmonary tuberculosis, which he had contracted while serving in the US Army the previous year. White returned to Howard in 1978 as a visiting distinguished professor, mentoring graduate students. The appointment was short-lived; White died on October 3, 1979.
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