Untitled (North Carolina Landscape)
Watercolor on paper
Support size: 20 1/4 x 14 1/4 inches; Image size: 17 3/4 x 13 inches
1939–1940
As Exhibited in: Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, 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
Like many other artists employed under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Russell “Rex” Gordon Goreleigh relocated from his home in the urban Northeast to a distant city to do his job. In his case, that city was Greensboro, North Carolina, where he taught at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina and nearby Bennett College for women. He worked alongside fellow WPA artist Norman Lewis, and together the pair operated an art center housed within the Carnegie Negro Library. Goreleigh’s time in the South inspired a series of gouache illustrations for the Britannica Junior Encyclopedia, as well as several landscape scenes.
Born in Pennsylvania, Goreleigh first turned to art as a means of coping with a childhood speech impediment. In 1920, he moved to New York to study acting at the famous Lafayette Theater in Harlem. After seeing one of the Harmon Foundation’s exhibitions of African American artists’ works, Goreleigh determined to become a painter and enrolled in courses at the Art Students League. Following a year’s study abroad, Goreleigh was one of several black artists chosen by the Federal Art Project in 1938 to establish community art centers in cities across the country. He taught for a brief time at the Harlem YMCA before departing for Greensboro. Around 1940, he went to Chicago and served as the manager of the South Side Community Art Center—the only WPA community center still in operation—where his colleagues included Charles White and Margaret Burroughs.
Due in large part to his success in Chicago, Goreleigh was recruited to be the first director of Princeton Group Arts in New Jersey, an organization dedicated to promoting racial and religious integration through teaching theater, music, dance, painting, sculpture, writing, and crafts. Founded in 1947, the center welcomed over two hundred students each week, many attending on scholarship. According to a 1952 article in Jet magazine, “In Goreleigh’s classes, it is commonplace to see Negro automobile mechanics discussing techniques with debutantes.”