Spinning the Wool
Oil on paperboard
23 7/8 x 29 7/8 inches
1966
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
The prints and paintings produced by Claude F. Clark, Sr., bespeak the challenges faced by African Americans grappling with cultural identity and racial oppression. As an artist-educator, Clark’s career bridges the gap between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s−1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s−1970s.
Born in Rockingham, Georgia, Clark did not grow up in the Deep South that would later become central to his work. His family was part of the Great Migration of African Americans that abandoned the rural South in the 1920s for the urban North. After graduating from a predominantly white high school, Clark enrolled at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art on a four-year scholarship. After receiving his certificate from the institution in 1939, he undertook studies at the Barnes Foundation School of Art in nearby Merion, even as he worked as a printmaker for the Works Projects Administration’s Federal Arts Project. While employed in the WPA’s graphics division, Clark learned about various forms of printmaking from his co-workers, including Dox Thrash.
Clark returned to the South in 1948 to become chair of the art department at Talladega College, Alabama’s oldest private historically black college. Throughout his time there, Clark was deeply frustrated by the racial barriers African Americans faced beyond the campus. In 1955, he moved to California, where he pursued graduate studies and later resumed teaching. During his lengthy tenure at Merritt College, Clark authored a curriculum relevant to African American culture by writing A Black Art Perspective: A Black Teacher’s Guide to a Black Visual Arts Curriculum (1970).
Clark largely drew from cultural observations as well as personal experiences when creating his prints and paintings. Though he favored simplified forms, basic design, and a saturated color palette (hallmarks of modern abstraction), Clark never abandoned representational art. The emotive quality of his work and sense of movement is expressed through his paint application, which varies between broad, broken brushwork and layering of paint with a palette knife to create a highly textured surface.