Mother and Child
Oil on paper mounted on board
25 3/8 x 19 3/4 inches
1952
As Exhibited in: Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
In a 2009 reflection, James McMillan wrote that he had “understood quite early that my art could not be about ‘Art for Art’s sake’ only. It had to be about Life itself and at its fullest, as we live it and come to understand it.” For nearly seventy years as a practitioner and educator, McMillan boldly addressed the issues of racism and injustice on canvas and in the classroom, putting his “art to purpose.”
James McMillan’s parents—college graduates determined to confront prejudice in the Jim Crow South—were the exception, rather than the rule, in Sanford, North Carolina. Through their work as teachers and as leaders of the local NAACP chapter, McMillian learned that education and a sense of civic responsibility were essential to personal fulfillment and societal change. After graduating as class valedictorian at the age of fifteen, McMillan received a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, DC, the center of African American intellectualism at that time. The Howard community embraced the young prodigy, who studied under academic luminaries such as James Herring, James Porter, James Wells, Alain Locke, and Loïs Mailou Jones, a lifelong mentor. His studies were interrupted by World War II in 1943 when he was drafted into the US Navy.
Following military service, McMillan returned to Howard and completed his degree in 1947. That same year, he was awarded a competitive fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Subsequently, McMillan was invited to establish and chair an art department at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Despite his ambivalence about teaching, he accepted the position largely for the financial stability it offered. The security of an academic career versus the freedom to spend his days making art was a recurrent conflict for McMillan. He later earned an MFA in sculpture from Catholic University (1952) and pursued advanced doctoral study at Syracuse University.
McMillan took a year-long European sabbatical in 1950, enrolling at the prestigious Académie Julian. Living in Paris had been a perpetual dream, and he flourished in the racially tolerant, cosmopolitan environment. He worked prodigiously—honing his draftsmanship, broadening his aesthetic range, and exhibiting at Parisian galleries—while reveling in the city’s liberal social milieu. But the harsh racial realities of home haunted him: “this couldn’t go on forever. . . . we couldn’t always hide out. . . . I felt I had to go back, and if there was anything that could be done, I had to be a part of it.” Dating to 1952, Mother and Child draws on traditional Madonna imagery, transferring the setting to a sharecropper’s shack in the segregated South and permeating it with bleak despair. As in many of his figural paintings, McMillan dramatically enlarges the subjects’ hands, a choice that has been ascribed to McMillan’s belief that “redemption is in your own hands.”