Lois Mailou Jones (November 3. 1905 – June 9 1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. Jones is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Early life and education Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts,Loïs Mailou Jones website. to Thomas Vreeland Jones and Carolyn Adams. Her father was a building superintendent who later became a lawyer after becoming the first African-American to earn a law degree from Suffolk Law School.Finley, Cheryl, "Loïs Mailou Jones: Impressions Of The South." Southern Quarterly 49.1 (2011): 80–93. Humanities Source. Her mother worked as a cosmetologist.Betty Laduke, "Lois Mailou Jones: The Grande Dame of African-American art", Woman's Art Journal (Vol. 8, No. 2, Autumn 1987 – Winter 1988), 32; phone conversation between Lois Jones and Betty Laduke. Jones's parents encouraged her to draw and paint using watercolors during childhood. Her parents bought a house on Martha's Vineyard, where Jones met those who influenced her life and art, such as sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, composer Harry T. Burleigh, and novelist Dorothy West.
From 1919 to 1923, Jones attended the High School of Practical Arts in Boston. During these years, Jones took night classes from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through an annual scholarship. Additionally, Jones apprenticed in costume design with Grace Ripley. Jones held her first solo exhibition at the age of seventeen in Martha's Vineyard.Carla M. Hanzal, Loïs Mailou Jones: a life in vibrant color, Mint Museum of Art, October 2009, Chronology, pp. 134–140. Jones began experimenting with African mask influences at the Ripley Studio. From her research of African masks, Jones created costume designs for Denishawn.
From 1923 to 1927, Jones studied design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she won the Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design yearly. Jones took night courses at the Boston Normal Art School while working towards her degree. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she received her graduate degree in design from the Designers Art School of Boston in 1928. Afterwards, Jones began working at the F. A. Foster Company in Boston and the Schumacher Company in New York City. During the summer of 1928, she attended Howard University, where she decided to focus on painting instead of design.
Jones continued taking classes throughout her lifetime. In 1934, she took classes on different cultural masks at Columbia University. In 1945, she received a BA degree in art education from Howard University, graduating magna cum laude.
Career and life Jones's career began in the 1930s and she continued producing artwork until she died in 1998 at 92. Her style shifted and evolved multiple times in response to influences in her life, especially her extensive travels. She worked with different mediums, techniques, and influences throughout her career. Her extensive travels throughout Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean influenced and changed how Jones painted. She felt that her most significant contribution to the art world was "proof of the talent of black artists". Jones wished to be known as an American painter with no labels. Her work echoes her pride in her African roots and American ancestry.
1928–1936 Jones' teaching career began shortly after finishing college. The director of the Boston Museum School refused to hire her, telling her to find a job in the Southern United States where "her people" lived. In 1928, Jones was hired by Charlotte Hawkins Brown after some initial reservations, and subsequently founded the art department at Palmer Memorial Institute, a historically black prep school, in Sedalia, North Carolina. As a prep school teacher, Jones coached a basketball team, taught folk dancing, and played the piano for church services. In 1930, Jones was recruited by James Vernon Herring to join the art department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Jones remained as professor of design and watercolor painting until her retirement in 1977. Jones worked to prepare her students for a competitive career in the arts by inviting working designers and artists into her classroom for workshops. While developing her work as an artist, Jones became an outstanding mentor and strong advocate for African-American art and artists.
In the early 1930s, Jones began to seek recognition for her designs and artwork. She began to exhibit her works with the William E. Harmon Foundation with a charcoal drawing of a student at the Palmer Memorial Institute, Negro Youth (1929). In this period, Jones shifted away from design and began experimenting with portraiture.
Jones developed as an artist through visits and summers spent in Harlem during the onset of the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement. Aaron Douglas, a Harlem Renaissance artist, influenced her seminal art piece The Ascent of Ethiopia. African design elements can be seen in the paintings of both Douglas and Jones. Jones studied actual objects and design elements from Africa.
In her works Negro Youth and Ascent of Ethiopia, the influence of African masks are evident in the profiles of the faces. The chiseled structures and shading renderings mimic three-dimensional masks that Jones studied. Jones would utilize this style throughout her career.
During this period, Jones occasionally collaborated with poet Gertrude P. McBrown; for example, McBrown's poem "Fire-Flies" appears with an illustration by Jones in the April 1929 issue of the Saturday Evening Quill. Illustrated by Lois Mailou Jones She became a key illustrator for The Associated Publishers – founded in 1921 by Carter G. Woodson – illustrating McBrown's Picture-Poetry Book (1935) and many pieces in The Negro History Bulletin (starting in 1937).
1937–1953 In 1937, Jones received a fellowship to study in Paris at the Académie Julian. She produced more than 30 watercolors during her year in France. In total, Jones completed approximately 40 paintings during her time at the Académie, utilizing the en plein air method of painting that she used throughout her career. Two paintings were accepted at the annual Salon de Printemps exhibition at the Société des Artistes Français for her Parisian debut. Jones loved her time in Paris as she felt entirely accepted in society as opposed to the United States at this time. The French were appreciative of paintings and talent. After being granted an extension of her fellowship to travel to Italy, Jones returned to Howard University and taught watercolor painting classes.
She was the most prominent black children's illustrator of the mid-century, illustrating many children's books through Woodson's Associated Publishers during this period, including Jane Dabney Shackelford's The Child’s Story of the Negro (1938), Helen Adele Whiting's Negro Art, Music, and Rhyme (1938) and Negro Folk Tales (1938), Carter G. Woodson's African Heroes and Heroines (1939), Effie Lee Newsome's Gladiola Garden (1940), and Derricotte, Turner, and Roy's Word Pictures of the Great (1941), as well as Marel Brown's Lilly May and Dan: Two Children of the South (1946) through the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In 1938, Jones produced Les Fétiches (1938), an African-inspired oil painting that is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Jones painted Les Fétiches in a Post-Cubist and Post-Primitive style. Five African masks swirl around the dark canvas. Jones could view and study many different African objects and masks at the Musée de l'Homme and galleries through her fellowship in Paris. In Les Fétiches, masks from Songye Kifwebe and Guru Dan are visible.
In 1941, Jones entered her painting Indian Shops Gay Head, Massachusetts into the Corcoran Gallery of Art's annual competition. At the time, the Corcoran Gallery prohibited African-American artists from entering their artworks. Jones had Tabary enter her painting to circumvent the rule. Jones won the Robert Woods Bliss Award for this work of art, yet she could not pick up the award herself. Tabary had to mail the award to Jones. Despite these issues, Jones worked harder notwithstanding the racial biases found throughout the country at this time. In 1994, the Corcoran Gallery of Art gave a public apology to Jones at the opening of the exhibition The World of Lois Mailou Jones, 50 years after Jones hid her identity.
Jones' Les Fétiches was instrumental in transitioning "Négritude" — a distinctly francophone artistic phenomenon — from the predominantly literary realm into the visual. Her work provided an important visual link to Négritude authors such as Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Jones also completed Parisian Beggar Woman with text supplied by Langston Hughes. In 1938, the first solo exhibition by Jones was hung in the Whyte Gallery and would later be exhibited at the Howard University Gallery of Art in 1948.
Jones painted "Arreau, Hautes-Pyrenees" in France during one of her many trips there between the years of 1945 and 1953, when she shared a summer studio with Celine Marie Tabary in Cabris, France While in France a part of her inspiration was Tabary, also a painter, whom Jones worked with for many years. Tabary submitted Jones' paintings for consideration for jury prizes since works by African-American artists were not always accepted. Jones traveled extensively with Tabary, including to the south of France. They frequently painted each other. They taught art together in the 1940s. Arreau, Hautes-Pyrenees which is an oil on canvas landscape that stars a hillside in the South of France. The French influence and post-impressionist influences are highlighted as Jones employees use rich oranges, yellows, and tans, complemented with clean blues and delicate greens while remaining in a tonally warm palette. The geometric houses echo an asymmetric composition that echoes the post-impressionist influences on Jones at the time. This influence can be recognized through her landscape and documentary portraits of people and landscapes in France and America between the years of 1948–1953.
Over the next 10 years, Jones exhibited at the Phillips Collection, Seattle Art Museum, National Academy of Design, the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Pennsylvania's Lincoln University, Howard University, galleries in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1952, the book Loïs Mailou Jones: Peintures 1937–1951 was published, reproducing more than one hundred of her art pieces completed in France. At the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Jones exhibited with a group of prominent black artists, such as Jacob Lawrence and Alma Thomas. These artists and others were known as the "Little Paris Group."
Alain Locke, a philosophy professor at Howard University and founder of the Harlem Renaissance, encouraged Jones to paint her heritage. Jones painted her striking painting Mob Victim (Meditation) after walking along U St Northwest in the District of Columbia. Jones saw a man walking and asked him to pose in her studio. Jones wanted to depict a lynching scene. The man had seen a person being lynched before and mimicked the pose that the man held before being lynched. The painting illustrates a contemplation of imminent death that many male African Americans were facing during the 1940s. Other paintings that came out of Locke's encouragement were Dans un Café à Paris (Leigh Whipper), The Janitor and The Pink Table Cloth.