James Weldon Johnson
Oil on linen canvas
36 x 30 1/8 inches
Circa 1943
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
Laura Wheeler Waring’s curriculum vitae would be impressive at any point in time but is especially remarkable for a female African American at the dawn of the twentieth century. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she attended Hartford Public High School—the second-oldest public high school in the country. To raise money for post-secondary tuition, she accepted a part-time job as a drawing instructor at the school now known as Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the nation’s oldest HBCU. By 1908, she was able to matriculate at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; upon her graduation in 1914, she became the first African American to receive the coveted William Emlen Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship, which funded a brief sojourn in Paris.
When the advent of World War I forced an early return to the United States in the autumn of 1914, Waring resumed her position at Cheyney University. During her almost forty-year tenure at the institution, Waring developed both the art and music departments, and conducted the Cheyney Choir from 1921 to 1934. For two summers, 1918 and 1920, Waring taught—and perhaps took—summer school classes at both Harvard University and Columbia University.
While Waring executed landscapes and still lifes, her real forte was portraiture. In 1943, the Harmon Foundation commissioned her to paint a series of portraits for a traveling exhibition entitled Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin; her selection was based in large part on her “ability to capture the nuances of the African-American psyche on canvas, through the use of discursive brushwork and carefully selected, often sumptuous color.” Among her sitters were such influential individuals as Marian Anderson, W. E. B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson. In 1966, forty-one of the series’ original fifty canvases were donated to the National Portrait Gallery.
The portrait displayed here is nearly identical to another Waring portrayal of the distinguished writer and civil rights activist owned by the National Portrait Gallery. A native of Florida, Johnson penned the poem that became the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” after being set to music. The hymn was adopted by the NAACP as the “black national anthem” in 1919, an appellation that endures to the present day.