Typically, Tyrone Geter’s works are realistic and largely figurative. Much of his subject matter is highly personal, as he once explained: “Throughout my career, the human form has been the mechanism that makes it possible for me to speak my truth about my life, beliefs, and the varied and colorful histories of my people. Early in my career, I believed that the more realistic the style and technique, the more significant and profound the statement; that the ability to communicate experiences was greatly improved by a well-rendered figure.”
Geter was born in Anniston, Alabama, where his family members were former sharecroppers. In 1959, when he was in his mid-teens, Geter moved to Dayton, Ohio, as a member of the Great Migration—the movement of Black Americans from the rural South in pursuit of a better life in the North. At Roosevelt High School his talent for drawing figures was recognized by his art teacher, who encouraged young Geter to go to college. He attended Columbus College of Art and Design, a private college located in the state’s capitol; he remained there a year before transferring to Ohio University in Miami. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1973, and two years later his Master of Fine Arts degree, only the second Black person to do so. While at the university, he served as a teaching assistant in the area of Black studies and co-taught a course about African American art history. He then moved to Boston and taught part-time at Framingham State College (now Framingham University) and held a position at the Office of Arts and Humanities, Boston.
With a grant from Boston’s Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, in 1979 he started a seven-year interlude in Nigeria, a truly life-changing period. He taught at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria and became actively engaged in exploring nearby towns and meeting people. He found that drawing—usually with pencil and/or charcoal—was the most suitable medium for this purpose as it was more spontaneous than painting and the materials were easy to transport. He recounted: “The experience taught me to understand the nature of life in a society where life and nature are sometimes both hard and cruel, but always in conversation. Further, I experienced a lesson in the creative process that no art school could ever teach me.” The resultant drawings with their frontally posed sitters are compelling images that document “a turning point in my development and the most important influence in my life and art.”
In 1987 he returned to Ohio and assumed a teaching position at the University of Akron where he remained for twelve years. Two years later he was selected as an artist-in-residence at Cincinnati’s Taft Museum in a series named for Robert Scott Duncanson, the Black landscape painter who in the early 1850s had painted murals for the former residence. In this role Geter conducted workshops and gave lectures in schools, community centers, and churches. In the 1990s he illustrated several children’s books focusing on Black subjects; one reviewer commended his “handsome illustrations [which] joyfully embrace the faith and spirituality within an African-American community and beyond.”
While he has been recognized for his considerable talent as a draftsman and illustrator, Geter excelled and experimented in multiple mediums and styles and even enhanced some of his large scale drawings with collage elements—paper and fabrics—affixed to the surface. His oils and pastels display an expressive use of color, a quality clearly evident in his mural celebrating the touring dance craze “The Big Apple” at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center created after he relocated in 2002 to South Carolina. He returned to the South to take a position of professor of art at Benedict College, an historically Black educational institution. He also served as director of the Henry Ponder Gallery of Art which is dedicated to the preservation and display of African American culture. In 2019 the South Carolina Arts Commission chose Geter for the South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts.