10 facts about Charles White:
- Charles White was a draftsman, printmaker, and painter.
- Charles White had lived in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
- Charles White became a key figure within a vibrant community of creative artists, writers, and activists.
- Charles White became one of the 20th century’s most important and dedicated teachers, contemporary artists David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall were among many of his students.
(all above from https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3930)
- At his early age, his mother often left him at the public library.
- He developed his art skill when he was little when his mother brought him oil paints when he was seven.
- “White also played music as a child, studied modern dance, and was part of theatre groups; however, he stated that art was his true passion.”
- He developed his painting skills in Art Institution of Chicago
- He had been abused by his stepfather, and it had made he escaped to art more often.
- He became to volunteer his talents as a teenager and became the house artist at the National Negro Congress in Chicago.
(all above from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_White_(artist))
10 facts about the artwork:
- This drawing was drawn with black ink.
- 1969
(from https://collections.lacma.org/node/237726)
- “Mr. White’s works were reproduced and placed on bus stops, telephone poles, and made as posters to be seen by the public.”
(https://unframed.lacma.org/2015/07/21/power-charles-white)
- “He also worked counter to the prevailing artistic trends of the time, making drawings and paintings, working meticulously with charcoal and ink.”
- his artwork limning faces and bodies, capturing the intensity of pain and anguish.
- he fits his human subjects into backgrounds that were at turns abstract, minimal or teeming with the social strife of mural art.”
- This drawing depicts a pregnant woman from the side, solitary and statuesque against a shaded background.
- “Images he made of workers in the 1940s and 1950s have both muscularity and soulfulness, a sense of the full human being that surpasses similar images by Thomas Hart Benton or John Steuart Curry 20 years earlier.”
- “Black bodies become monumental in some of his best-known works, including the 1972 “Mississippi,” which shows a black woman shrouded in a pyramid of fabric, with a bloody handprint just above her head has a similar painting style and meaning with ‘seed of love’.
- He remains, if not marginal, a respectable figure on the sidelines of 20th-century American culture.
(all above from https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/charles-white-who-made-some-of-this-countrys-greatest-art-transcends-labels/2018/10/18/84df8d16-d178-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f28d062f6646)
10 facts of the time period:
- civil right movement
- black art movement
- On July 15, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy accepts the Democratic nomination for president at Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA>.
- On October 1, 1962, James H. Meredith becomes the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi.
- Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique critiques the myth that a woman’s identity is linked to childrearing and the accomplishments of their husbands.
- The 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrive in Vietnam on March 8, 1965.
- After 13 years, NBC cancels Howdy Doody. The last episode airs September 24, 1960.
- Harper Lee’s 1961 book To Kill A Mockingbird is a bestseller.
- Apollo astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee die during a simulated launch exercise on January 27, 1967.
- Western movie hero John Wayne wins the 1969 Best Actor Oscar for his role in the movie True Grit beating now legendary actors Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Dustin Hoffman, and Jon Voight.
(all above from https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/fast_facts/1960_fast_facts.html)
