Heritage: Illustration for Important Events and Dates in Negro History
Brush and ink over lithograph on paper
Support size: 7 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches
1936
Work on loan: Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware
As Exhibited in:
Jazz Age Illustration, 2024, Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, Delaware
Roots/Routes: Mobility and Displacement in Art of the American South, 2023, Richardson Family Art Center, Wofford Collecge, Spartanburg, South Carolina
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
In the compendium of influential twentieth-century artist-educators, Loïs Mailou Jones ranks toward the top. Over her lengthy tenure at Howard University, 1930−1977, Jones taught generations of students, many of whom would go on to their own distinguished careers as fine artists and instructors. Reflecting on her contribution to the education of African American artists, Jones noted that the relationships had been mutually beneficial: “Association with my pupils kept me young in my work and kept my interest in painting fresh and ever renewed.”
Having completed an undergraduate degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in her hometown of Boston. In 1928, she accepted a post at Palmer Memorial Institute, a preparatory school for African American youth in rural Sedalia, North Carolina. During her two-year residency, she established a thriving art department, which soon attracted the attention of another artist-educator, James Herring, who recruited her to Howard University. Jones would remain at Howard for forty-seven years, teaching exceptional students such as Elizabeth Catlett, David Driskell, and Alma Thomas. One of her familiar admonitions to students bespoke her own “indefatigable” rigor: “Talent is the basis for your career as an artist—but hard work determines your success.”
In addition to her responsibilities at Howard, Jones freelanced as an illustrator. Her primary client was the black-owned-and-operated Associated Publishers, a subsidiary of the larger Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History), founded in 1915 by Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson. Known as the “father of black history,” Woodson sought to document and disseminate the chronicle of African American heritage. The ASNLH introduced Negro History Week in 1926, an observance celebrated today as Black History Month.
Jones provided illustrations for Associated Publishers’ children and adult books between 1936 and 1965. Heritage is one such illustration. The image, a “mural-like panoramic depiction of African American achievement,” was executed in 1936 as a headline banner for a poster-sized broadside titled Important Events and Dates in Negro History. The month-by-month timeline noted key commemorations—beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863—and accompanied Woodson’s seminal 1936 textbook, The African Background Outlined, or Handbook for the Study of the Negro. The stand-alone tract was also marketed for sale in trade publications through the 1960s. The text listing was framed by a graphic border of African motifs that signal Jones’s deepening interest in ancestral legacy as well as her early experience as a textile designer. She returned to the image in the 1970s, embellishing the scene with brush and ink.
Other works by this artist