Jones, Loïs Mailou (1905–1998)

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Jones, Loïs Mailou (1905–1998)

African-American artist and educator. Name variations: Lois Mailou Jones; Madame Vergniaud Pierre-Noël. Born on November 3, 1905, in Boston, Massachusetts; died on June 9, 1998, in Washington, D.C.; second child and only daughter of Thomas Vreeland Jones (a lawyer) and Carolyn Dorinda (Adams) Jones (a hairdresser and hat designer); graduated from the High School of Practical Arts, Boston, 1923; attended Boston Normal Art School (now the Massachusetts College of Art), Boston, 1926; graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1927; graduate work at the Designers Art School, Boston, 1927–28; attended summer session at Harvard University, 1928; attended summer session at Columbia University, New York, 1934; attended Académie Julian, Paris, France, 1937; Howard University, Washington, D.C., A.B. in art education (magna cum laude), 1945; married Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël (a graphic artist), on August 8, 1954 (died 1982).

Works include:

Negro Youth (1929); Negro Shack I, Sedalia, North Carolina (1930); Mememsha by the Sea (1930); Brother Brown, Greensboro, North Carolina (1931); Portrait of Hudson (1932); The Ascent of Ethiopia (1932); Brown Boy (1935); Le Petit Déjeuner, Paris (1937); Rue St. Michael, Paris (1938); Place du Tertre (1938); Les Fetiches (1938); Les Pommes Vertes (1938); La Cuisine dans l'Atelier de L'Artiste, Paris (1938); Tête de Nègre (1939); Dans un Cafe a Paris (1939); Indian Shops, Gay Head, Massachusetts (1940); Jennie (1943); Mob Victim (Meditation, 1944); Cockfight (1960); Market, Haiti (1960); Bazar Du Quai Haiti (1961); Marché Haiti (1963); Vévé Voudou II (1963); Letitia and Patrick, Haiti (1964); Vendeuses de Tissues (1964); Homage to Oshogbo (1971); Dahomey (1971); Magic of Nigeria (1971); Moon Masque (1971); Ubi Girl from Tai Region (1972); Street Vendors, Haiti (1978); Petite Ballerina (1982); Initiation, Liberia (1983); Mère Du Senegal (1985); The Water Carriers, Haiti (1985); Haiti Demain? (Haiti Tomorrow?, 1987); Le Château Neuf De Grasse (1989).

Acknowledged by the art world as one of America's premier painters just two years before her death, black artist Loïs Mailou Jones waited 75 years for the recognition she deserved much earlier. "At 90, I arrived," she gleefully told an interviewer for the AARP Bulletin in 1996. Jones, who endured years of racial and sexual discrimination to pursue her goal of becoming an artist, combined painting with a long and distinguished teaching career in the art department at Howard University, an African-American institution in Washington, D.C. To view her work, which encompassed a broad range of styles from the impressionistic landscapes and still lifes of her early works to the political allegories and cubistic canvases of her Haitian and African periods, is to journey through an entire century of American art history, notes Tritobia Hayes Benjamin , in her biography of the artist, The Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones. "Just as American art has unfolded, embracing different styles and different cultures, so too has Jones' career." For Jones, however, process was the ultimate joy. "The wonderful thing about being an artist," she said, "is that there is no end to creative expression. Painting is my life, my life is painting."

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905, Jones credited her mother Carolyn Adams Jones , a hairdresser and hat designer, with inspiring her art career, and said her father Thomas Vreeland Jones, who earned his law degree at age 40, gave her the determination to succeed. The family lived on the top floor of the office building that Thomas Jones managed in downtown Boston, but spent the summers on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where they owned a house. The island landscapes and the ocean views over-whelmed Jones, even as a young girl. "This beauty affected my life to the extent that I am to this day a great lover of nature," she said. "I think that my experiences on the Vineyard interested me in painting and have motivated me to paint the beauty of the island even to this day." Jones also remembered her mother hanging her paintings on a clothesline and inviting her friends over for punch and a private showing of her daughter's work. "Mother's garden was my gallery," she fondly recalled. At the Vineyard, a haven for artists, Jones also met African-American sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller who inspired and encouraged her in her art. One of Jones' earliest works of note, The Ascent of Ethiopia, was inspired by Fuller's sculpture The Awakening of Ethiopia (1914), one of the first works to present a positive image of a black subject.

Jones' parents steered their talented daughter to the High School of Practical Arts in Boston, where she could pursue her art training within a general secondary course of study. After school and on Saturdays, Jones attended the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and also apprenticed with costume designer Grace Ripley who was a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. (Jones assisted Ripley in designing costumes and masks for the Ted Shawn School of Dance and a branch of the Bragiotti School located in Boston.) After graduating from high school in 1923, Jones received a scholarship to the Museum School full time. In addition to the design curriculum, she completed elective courses in anatomy, perspective, the history of design, stained glass, book decoration, settings and costumes. In her senior year, she won the prestigious Nathaneil Thayer prize for excellence in design. Upon her graduation in 1927, Jones applied to the Museum School for an assistantship, only to be told by the director that she should go to the South to help her "own people." Undeterred, Jones worked as a textile designer while taking advanced courses at the Designers Art School. There, she studied with Ludwig Frank, an internationally recognized German textile designer, and also worked on a freelance basis for department stores and textile manufacturers, including the F.A. Foster Company in Boston and the Schumacher Company in New York. Although Jones was pleased to see her designs on display in interior decorator shops, she was upset by the fact that she was never acknowledged for her work. It was this desire for recognition that changed Jones from a designer into a painter.

In 1930, after a stint heading up the fledgling art department at Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, a private African-American boarding school, Jones joined the staff of the art department at Howard University. During her 47-year tenure there, she touched the lives of some 2,500 art students, grounding them in the fundamentals and urging them to "marry" their art. "Talent is the basis for your career as an artist," she told them, "but hard work determines your success." Jones also involved her students in practical hands-on experience outside the classroom and initiated travel tours to help round out their educational experience. Many of her students went on to notable careers, including painter-historian David Driskell, sculptor-printmaker Elizabeth Catlett , and painter Robert Freeman.

Jones received her earliest recognition as an artist through the Harmon Foundation of New York, founded in 1922 to "assist in the development of a greater economic security for the Negro race." The foundation held annual competitions for black writers and artists, and it was in the 1930 competition that Jones won honorable mention for the charcoal drawing Negro Youth (1929). Benjamin points to this drawing as marking a shift in Jones' work "away from classroom exercises to portraiture as well as compositions predicated on design principles." The paintings of this period, including works like Negro Shack I, Sedalia, North Carolina (1930), Mememsha by the Sea (1930), Portrait of Hudson (1932), and Brown Boy (1935), also reflect the renewed interest in African subjects and portrayal of the black experience that sparked the Harlem Renaissance. Benjamin also notes that Jones' breakthrough painting The Ascent of Ethiopia (1932), which was exhibited with the Harmon Foundation in 1933, further expresses this move toward cultural identity and "echoes the political tenor of the times."

In 1937, Jones received a Rockefeller grant to study at the Académie Julian in Paris and took a yearlong leave of absence from teaching. The racism and prejudice that had plagued her in America were not evident in Paris, and Jones felt liberated for the first time in her life. Her year abroad was both productive (she produced over 40 works) and influential in the development of her artistic personality. "France really was the making of me," she later recalled. "It put my feet firmly on the ground and made me realize that I am talented and I can do it." In Paris, and on the Riviera, Jones moved from the realism of her early period to impressionist landscapes, to Cézannesque portraits and still lifes. She met Symbolist painter Émile Brenard, who let her share his studio and also introduced her to his circle of friends. While in France, she exhibited some of her textile designs for the first time in Asnières, and in 1938 she exhibited two oil paintings (Les Pommes Vertes and La Cuisine dans l'Atelier de L'Artiste, Paris) in the Salon de Printemps exhibition at the Sociètè des Artistes Français. At the end of the year, Jones applied for an extension of her leave from the university but was ordered back to the classroom. However, she returned to France intermittently throughout her life, painting the beautiful French countryside both south and north of Paris.

Back in America, Jones was once again confronted with the racial discrimination she had left behind, particularly when it came to exhibiting her work. Many galleries and museums at the time were simply closed to black artists. In 1941, when Jones submitted her painting Indian Shops, Gay Head, Massachusetts (1940) to a competition at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art, she was forced to send it via her close friend, Céline Tabary , who was visiting her from France at the time. "If I had brought my entry down myself, and the guards had seen me," she recalled, "they would have put it in the reject pile right away. But because Céline took it, it was accepted." When her entry won the prestigious Robert Woods Bliss Prize, Jones had her certificate forwarded in the mail. She did not claim credit for the prize until two years later.

During the 1940s, Jones was encouraged by Alain Locke, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance and a colleague at Howard, to address the black experience in her painting. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Jones created numerous character studies of blacks, including The Janitor (1939), Jennie (1943), and the powerful Mob Victim (1944), a moving commentary on the fate of victims of the lynching mobs that were prevalent in America during the early decades of the 20th century. Her model had actually witnessed a lynching and imitated in his pose the stance of the victim. "The sympathetic restrained depiction of imminent death is infused with dignity," writes Benjamin in her description of the work. "Jones had originally painted a rope around the subject's neck, but she deemed its inclusion too severe and removed it, relying instead on a sensitive interpretation of the victim's countenance and his contemplative mood."

In 1953, Jones married the distinguished Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël, whom she had first met in 1934, during a summer session at Columbia University. The marriage transformed both her life and her art, beginning with her first visit to the Caribbean nation of Haiti in 1954, at the invitation of Haitian president Paul Magloire who commissioned a series of paintings on Haitian life. In conjunction with the commission, she also taught at the Centre d'Art during the absence of its director. At the end of her first visit, Jones had an exhibition of her work sponsored by Haiti's first lady Madame Magloire , and was awarded the "Honneur et Mérite au Grade de Chevalier" for outstanding achievement in art. The exhibition was later seen at the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C., during a visit by President and Madame Magloire to the United States. For more than three decades, Jones and her husband made annual trips to Haiti to paint and relax. (Pierre-Noël died in 1982 and was buried near the couple's Port-au-Prince home.) Inspired by the exuberance of Haitian life, Jones abandoned the formality and restrained palette of her traditional painting for a more aggressive, colorful, and hard-edged style. "The colors, the black people, the drumming and the fire dancers—Haiti was excitement and color," she later remembered. The titles of her Haitian paintings reveal the inspiration she found all around her: Cockfight (1960), Market, Haiti (1960), Bazar Du Quai, Haiti (1961), and the later Street Vendors, Haiti (1978) and The Water Carriers, Haiti (1985).

Jones' regular visits to Haiti were interrupted in 1986, when Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was ousted from the country. The Haitian boat exodus of 1987, which focused international attention on the problems within that country, was the subject of one of Jones' most exciting and disturbing works, Haiti Demain? (Haiti Tomorrow?). Produced in her Washington studio and executed in the intense colors that characterized her painting at the time, the work is a political statement indicting the government for its failure to address the social and economic problems of the people. "Haiti is projected as a Kaleidoscope of impending death, wracked with problems of graft, corruption (implied by the floating money in the upper left of the painting), and military control," writes Benjamin. "From afar, Jones composed this heart-wrenching scenario that was so prophetic regarding Haiti's direction."

From 1970 to 1971, Jones embarked on a sabbatical year in Africa to research art under a Howard University grant. She toured 11 countries, compiling information on contemporary African artists and photographing works of art for a comprehensive international archive of black artists which is now housed at the university. The African influence on Jones' work was immediate and powerful. Upon her return to Washington in 1971, she completed four pictures—Homage to Oshogbo, Dahomey, Magic of Nigeria, and Moon Masque—all of which explore the theme of reawakening that she had touched upon in her earlier work Ascent of Ethiopia. Utilizing stylized forms of indigenous African art—masks, Dahomean appliques, collage, trompe-d'oeil faces—Jones created canvases that startle the viewer with their power. The painting Ubi Girl from Tai Region (1972), described by Benjamin, illustrates how Jones sometimes used a number of different African motifs within a single canvas. "The painting features the head of a young initiated woman from the Ivory Coast, masks from Zaire, and a heddle pulley, also from the Ivory Coast, combining Western portraiture with the geometric patterning of African textiles." Jones liked to point out that much of her African work is closely linked to Haiti, which she believed never severed its ties to Mother Africa. "Some of my most creative compositions for which I researched African icons, patterns, masks, and sculptures were actually done in my Haitian studio."

From 1937 on, Jones exhibited in over 50 shows, including a retrospective of her work at Howard University in 1972 and a 1995 exhibition at Washington's Corcoran, where she had once been forced to hide her identity. Her work hangs in the country's most prestigious galleries, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in Washington, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1962, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London. She was honored by foreign heads of state and was one of ten artists commemorated in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter.

In 1989, on her 84th birthday, Jones suffered a massive heart attack, and a week later underwent triple bypass surgery. Her recovery was such that she was able to participate in a solo retrospective exhibition of 76 works, The World of Loïs Mailou Jones, held at the Meridian International Center in January 1990. Jones continued to work, albeit on a modified schedule. Among her last commissions was the movie poster for Cry the Beloved Country, and a portfolio accompanying the poems of the former president of Senegal, Léopold Stenghor. She also continued to travel to Haiti and to her beloved Martha's Vineyard, where she hosted President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton at an exhibit of her work at the Granary Gallery of Art in West Tisbury in August 1993. In her later years, she came full circle, frequently returning to the impressionistic style of her past. Jones, however, remained a forward thinker to the end. "I will be painting until the last day," she said. The artist died at her home in Washington on June 9, 1998.