Jones, Lois Mailou 1905–

Lois Mailou Jones 1905–

At a Glance…

Taught Art

To Paris and Back

Discovered Culture of Haiti

Selected works

Sources

Painter, educator

In 1937, Lois Jones was where many young American painters of the time thought it essential to be—Paris. She was already a respected educator at Howard University in Washington, D.C., before she received the fellowship money she needed to travel overseas. A fervent admirer of Cezanne, Jones went to Paris to study European styles of art such as impressionism and cubism, to ground her work more fully in the classical tradition; but something else happened there—she discovered her African heritage.

Jones felt a sense of freedom upon entering a city where racism still existed to be sure, but not in the intense, open way it did in the United States. Beyond that, Paris was at that time “in a fever about Africa,” as Jones put it. With African art exhibited bountifully around the city, Jones began to acquire an education in the traditions of black art, which she had not been able to receive in the States. It led to her painting,Les Fetiches,a painting of African masks done in a modernistic style. It became one of the most important American paintings of the first half of the twentieth century, as it introduced the use of African themes and imagery to classically trained American painters.

Lois Jones credited her drive and ambition to her father who was supporting his family as a building superintendent when she was born. He was also taking classes at law school at night. He received his law degree ten years after her birth when he turned 40. On the other hand, Jones’s artistic inclination must have come in large part from her mother, a beautician who kept their house beautifully adorned at all times with perhaps the same bright colors that would later figure in some of her daughter’s work.

Young Lois knew what she wanted to do and attended a high school for the practical arts. Imitating her father, she started a pattern she would continue to follow and took extra classes on the side, this time in drawing at the Boston Museum. During her high school years, she also assisted the costume designer Grace Ripley in making costumes for a dancing company in Boston. Jones told Titobia Benjamin in an interview inEbony that the masks she made for these dances were in a sense her first brush with African art.

As Jones had received her high school education on scholarship, she was admitted to the Boston Museum

At a Glance…

Bom November 3, 1905, in Boston, MA; daugh ter of Thomas Vreeiand and Carolyn Dorinda (Adams) Jones. Married Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Nobel, 1953.Education: Boston Museum School of Fine Art, diploma, 1927; Boston Normal Art School, teaching certificate, 1928; Howard University, A.B., 1945. Attended Designers Art School, 1928 and Académie Julien, Paris, 1938.

Palmer Memorial Institute, teacher 1928-30; Howard University, art instructor, 1930-45, professor, 1945-77, professor emeritus, 1977—.

Selected collections: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; National Women’s Museum of Art, Washington, DC.

Selected awards: Honorary Degrees from Howard University and Colorado State Christian College; Robert Woods Bliss Award, 1941; First Place, National Museum of Art Competition, 1949, 1953, 1964; First place, Luban Watercolor Award, 1958; Franz Bader Award, 1962; Alumni Award of Howard University, 1978; Candace Award of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982; Women’s Caucus Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art, 1986.

Addresses: Office— 4706 17th Street NW, Washington, DC 20011.

School of Fine Arts program on the basis of winning the highly contested Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design. Her teachers there included Alice Morse and Anson Cross. She was one of the first blacks to graduate from that institution, adding to that degree a teaching certificate in art, which she earned concurrently at the Boston Normal Art School. Ludwig Frank, an internationally known designer, was teaching at yet another art school, the Designers Art School of Boston. Jones’s work came to Frank’s attention, and he secured her a scholarship to study with him. Her work in design enabled her to support herself for the next few years creating patterns for curtains and upholstery.

Taught Art

Despite going on to study at Harvard and Columbia, Jones was disappointed when she was told that there would be no position open for her at the same Museum School at which she had thrived as a student. Henry Hunt Clark suggested instead that she look for a position in the South where she could help her people. Jones applied to Howard University, but she was a little late and James A. Porter, who would later write insightfully about her work, had already been awarded a position in the Art Department. No other teaching jobs were open, so Jones decided to take Clark’s advice and head south.

One of her teachers at the Museum School, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, found her a job at the Palmer Memorial Institute, one of the first black college prep schools in the nation, as the head of the art department. As many other eager, young prep teachers have had to do both before and since, Jones also had to coach athletics and lead extra curricular activities such as dance. In her position as a chair of Palmer’s art department, she invited the chair of Howard University’s art department down to speak to her students. James Vernon Herrin, who was also the founder of Howard’s art program, saw immediately that she was drawing out an unusually high level of achievement from her students.

Herrin invited to Jones to teach art at Howard. She would remain there until her retirement as a teacher in 1977. Her students found her a demanding teacher who could be critical of their work and did not mind letting the class see her displeasure. One student who exhibited in a 1995 Howard University show of Jones’s and her most distinguished students’ work recalled: “Your work would be criticized in front of the class, and she could be really brutal. I remember being very angry and hurt… But when you met her standards, when you progressed, she loved you like a mother.” Jones’s technique must have worked. Students of her students who went on to distinguished art careers include David Driskell, Alma Thomas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Sylvia Snowden. Not as well known outside of his field was Edward T. Wellborn, who took design classes with her and went on to become chief designer for Oldsmobile.

To Paris and Back

At the end of seven years, college educators are usually awarded a sabbatical, or time off from teaching. The instructors are expected to use the time to travel, work on research, or write. In 1937, Jones won a fellowship to go to Paris on her sabbatical. There, she came to the attention of Emile Bernard, an important French painter of strange paintings with elusive meanings; but it was also here that she began to draw upon her own heritage in her work. Paradoxically, she arrived in Paris more of a French painter than when she left. She got there and started painting traditional street scenes of the beautiful boulevards, but in a city that accepted those of African descent easily and appreciated African art, she began to realize the immense value of her own artistic traditions.

Black American folk artists had kept the heritage alive continuously since arriving on slave ships; but once African American artists became classically trained, they tended to denigrate the value of their own tradition. It was Jones who reversed this trend, and it was her time in Paris that gave her the confidence to create work recognizably influenced by African art. At the end of her time in Paris, she exhibited her ground-breaking painting,Les Fetiches.Perhaps her first masterpiece,Les Fetiches now hangs in the National Museum of American Art.

On her return to the United States, Jones had her first big solo show at the Robert Vose Galleries in Boston. It was critically acclaimed and led to one exhibition after another in a stream that continued throughout the 1940s. Jones also experienced racism with the white art establishment, but she found ways around the prejudice. She entered and won the Corcoran Galley Robert Woods Bliss Competition, which was closed to blacks, by having a white friend drop off and pick up her work. The white friend also accepted the award, so it was not until two years later that she claimed the proper credit for her painting,Indian Shops, Gay Head.She also took another degree, this one an A.B. in art education from Howard and graduated magna cum laude.

Dealing with such tight strictures of racism after the freedom of Paris, Jones brought to her work a new social awareness that was displayed in works such as MobVictim,a piece in which she used as a model a witness to a lynching. Soon after her return, she also met Alain Locke, who along with Langston Hughes, was the most visible poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, which was sometimes called the New Negro Movement, was a center of black cultural identity. Of course the new direction in Jones’s painting toward her own heritage greatly interested him, and he encouraged her to deal not only with her African cultural heritage but also with the social and racial injustices of her society. Jones would later refer to her work of the 1940s as her Locke Period.

Discovered Culture of Haiti

In 1953 Jones inaugurated a new phase of her life both socially and artistically when she married the Haitian graphic designer, Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel. They honeymooned in Haiti, and Jones fell in love with the people and the activity of the market. Cubist elements remained in her work, but her work picked up a new sense of freedom, and she became bolder with color. In Haiti she found exuberance and expressed it in her art in works such asPeasants on Parade,which she produced about ten years after she first saw Haiti.

Jones’s husband worked as a designer for the World Health Organization of the United Nations, and she frequently traveled with him. Still, of all the cultures she had witnessed closely, Haiti’s culture continued to influence her most. In the 1970s, she was still producing paintings such as her highly acclaimed,Ubi Girl from the Tai Region,which now hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—a school she once attended but one at which she could not secure a teaching assistantship.

In 1969, Howard University gave Jones a grant to go to Africa to photograph and archive the work of contemporary artists. She returned with more than 1,000 slides for Howard’s library. Perhaps the trip to Africa gave her work a further push as she continued to combine a clean line and decorative elements with a brightly colored tendency toward abstraction. In the 1970s, the art world began to acknowledge the impact and importance of her art. Retrospectives of her work were held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and at the Howard University Gallery. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter presented her with an award of international recognition. Further retrospectives have followed in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, her art was used in the poster for the motion picture,Cry, the Beloved Country.

However, just as Lois Jones has begun to achieve the recognition she deserves in the wider art world, the art world is becoming segregated again—this time by choice, not by force. Numerous black artists have begun calling for separatism, because they believe that whites cannot understand or appreciate the basis of their art. Jones is adamant in standing against this attitude. She told aWashington Post reporter in 1995, “Artists from different races and cultures … don’t make the effort to get know each other like they used to… The ignorance of not getting together is terrible.”

Jones stated that the media also gives black artists short shrift when it comes to actually affording them attention. She noted that her own exhibits draw predominantly black audiences. Whites either do not know or ignore her work. This does not change her hope that “African American art will always be part of American art… I don’t want it to be viewed as something separate… [I don’t want to be] separated from my colleagues, and by that I mean other artists. There is a connection. Art… can help to strengthen that connection.”

Selected works

Les Fetiches,1938.

Indian Shops, Gay Head,1941.

Mob Victim,1944.

Ville d’Houdain,1949.

Peasants on Parade,1962.

Vendeuses de Tissus,1964.

Ubi Girl from the Tai Region,1972.

Le Chien Sophistique,1994.

Sources

Books

Hine, Darlene Clark, editor,Black Women in America,Carlson Publishing, 1993, pp. 649-652.

Salem, Dorothy C, editor,African American Women,Garland Publishing, 1993, pp. 288-291.

Periodicals

Washington Post,December 26, 1995, pp. C1, C9.

—Jim McDermott