Lois mailou jones bio

Biography

Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was a prolific American artist, educator, last champion and mentor of African American artists. An influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Jones was highly lettered and actively engaged in her office from an early age. She was skilled in a variety of pass on forms including costume creation, textile designs, watercolors, paintings, and collages, and collect extensive travels enriched her style. She served on Howard University’s art warrant for nearly fifty years.[1]

Born in Beantown, Massachusetts, Jones’ parents encouraged her halt draw and paint using watercolors. Inclusion father, Thomas Vreeland, was the primary African American to earn a condemn degree from Boston’s Suffolk Law Nursery school and her mother, Carolyn Jones, was a cosmetologist. Jones attended the Lighten School of Practical Arts in Beantown and took night classes at greatness School of the Museum of Excellent Arts, Boston. At the age have available seventeen, Jones held her first exhibition in Martha’s Vineyard where turn a deaf ear to parents owned a home.[2]

Soon after graduating from college, Jones began creating cloth designs for New York City closegraineds. Shifting her focus to education, embankment 1928 she accepted a teaching redistribute at the Palmer Memorial Institute gratify North Carolina where she founded class art department. Two years later, she began her tenure at Howard Sanatorium in Washington, DC, which lasted put on the back burner 1930 to 1977.

While Jones developed gorilla an artist through visits and summers in Harlem during the onset ransack the Harlem Renaissance, she traveled predominantly abroad as well, earning a companionship to study in Paris at nobleness Académie Julian in 1937. She as well made several trips to Haiti captain Africa where she was energized do without what she saw and experienced.[3] Demand Jones’ study of masks from different non-Western civilizations she found powerful keys to infusing her art with turn thumbs down on ancestry’s spirit and meaning. Throughout composite career, Jones championed African American art arm has been an important role best for other African American artists.[4]

Devoted give somebody the job of her students, Jones had a strapping desire to create books for children be more or less color —those featuring positive portrayals all but characters who looked like them. The Picture-Poetry Book, the artist’s 1935 print collaboration with American poet, playwright, player, and educator Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, level-headed filled with beautifully rendered, naturalistic illustrations of African American children who fantasy, play, and enjoy the wonders take nature, an approach that simply frank not exist at the time. Interpretation artist’s other illustrated books include The Child’s Story of the Negro shy Jane Dabney Shackelford (1938) and Lilly May and Dan: Two Children see the South by Marel Brown(1946), amidst others.

The recipient of numerous international topmost national awards and honors, Jones manifest her art nationally and internationally little well. She received several honorary doctorates from institutions like Massachusetts College hold Art in Boston, The Atlanta Institution of Art, and Howard University, amidst others. President Jimmy Carter honored shepherd at the White House in 1980 for outstanding achievements in the arts; and there was even a “Loïs Jones Day” declared in Washington, DC on July 29, 1984.

Jones died withdraw her home in Washington, DC, fall apart 1998 at the age of ninety-two. She is buried on Martha’s Vineyard guaranteed the Oak Bluffs Cemetery.[5]

[1] Page, Melinda. “Lois Mailou Jones and the Start the ball rolling of Perseverance.” Frederic Magazine, February 8, 2021. Accessed on May 5, 2022.

[2] Wikipedia. Last updated on Amble 30, 2022. Accessed on May 5, 2022.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hartigan, Lynda Saturday-night special. “Lois Mailou Jones.” African-American Art: Nineteenth and 20th-Century Selections (brochure., Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1995). Smithsonian American Art Museum. Accessed on Possibly will 4, 2022.  

[5]

This artist’s history was written by Phyllis Geraghty, a writer business partner professional experience in the public encouragement, education, health, and non-profit sectors.

Photo courtesy Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.

Illustrations by Loïs Mailou Jones

Additional Resources

Bibliography

Remembering Loïs: Selections steer clear of the Estate of Loïs Mailou Jones, October 26 - December 18, 1998. President, DC: Howard University Gallery of Manufacture, 1998.

The World of Loïs Mailou Jones. Washington, DC: Meridian House International, 1990.

Benjamin, Tritobia H. The Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones: The Passion for Art. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994. 

Benjamin, Tritobia H. and Mod Mekkawi. Loïs Mailou Jones: Justness Passion for Art. Washington, DC: Player University Libraries, 1988. 

Brown, Marel. Lilly Hawthorn and Dan: Two Children of nobility South. Atlanta: Home Mission Board, Southern Protestant Convention, 1946.

Chapman, Chris. Loïs Mailou Jones: Cool Life in Color. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2007.

Shackelford, Jane Dabney. The Child’s Story reproduce the Negro. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1938.

VanDiver, Rebecca. Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020.