The Man
Conté crayon and charcoal on cream wove paper
Support size: 36 x 24 1/8 inches
Circa 1955
As exhibited in:
Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, 2010, Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina
Black Artists in America: From Civil Rights to the Bicentennial, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, 2023, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 2024
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2023, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022
John Thomas Biggers believed “that self-dignity and racial pride could be consciously approached through art,” especially his own social realist murals and late-career symbolic paintings. Biggers’s parents were dedicated to the education of their seven children born and raised in Gastonia, North Carolina. As a boy, Biggers attended nearby Lincoln Academy, an all-black boarding school. In 1941, he matriculated at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, a school known for advocating “considerable intellectual freedom in its classrooms” and celebrating African heritage. Having enrolled with the intent of studying plumbing, a first-semester course with artist-educator Viktor Lowenfeld set Biggers on a different course. The Jewish émigré encouraged students to explore themes of racism and persecution, as did fellow teachers Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. Lowenfeld included Biggers’s powerful mural, Dying Soldier, in the landmark exhibition Young Negro Art, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.
Following two years of service in the United States Navy during World War II, Biggers went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees (1948) as well as a doctorate in education (1954) at Pennsylvania State University. A technically gifted draughtsman and skilled lithographer, Biggers—working primarily in conté crayon and oil paints—created striking images of unidealized figures coping with poverty and despair. In 1949, Biggers moved to Houston, Texas, where he served as founder and chairman of Texas State (now Texas Southern) University’s art department, a post he held until 1983.
In 1995, the artist was the subject of a major one-man traveling exhibition, The Art of John Biggers: View from the Upper Room, curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—the same museum that in 1950 had barred Biggers from attending a reception in honor of his first prize-winning entry at the then-segregated institution.
Other works by this artist