Lois Mailou Jones


Loïs Mailou Jones was an influential artist and teacher during her seven-decade career. Jones was one of the most notable figures to attain notoriety for her art while living as a black expatriate in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Her career began in textile design before she decided to focus on fine arts. Jones looked towards Africa and the Caribbean and her experiences in life when painting. As a result, her subjects were some of the first paintings by an African-American artist to extend beyond the realm of portraiture. Jones was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance movement and her countless international trips. Lois Mailou Jones' career was enduring and complex. Her work in designs, paintings, illustrations, and academia made her an exceptional artist who continues to receive national attention and research.

Early life and education (1905–1928)

Lois Mailou Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Thomas Vreeland and Carolyn Jones. 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. Her mother worked as a cosmetologist. During her childhood, Jones' parents encouraged her to draw and paint using watercolors. 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, she took night classes from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through an annual scholarship. Additionally, she apprenticed in costume design with Grace Ripley. She held her first solo exhibition at the age of seventeen in Martha's Vineyard. Jones began experimenting with African mask influences during her time at the Ripley Studio. From her research of African masks, Jones created costume designs for Denishawn.
From 1923 to 1927, Jones attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to study design, where she won the Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design yearly. She 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 Design Art School of Boston in 1928. Afterwards, she 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 in art education from Howard University, graduating magna cum laude.

Career and life (1928–1998)

Jones’ career began in the 1930s and she continued to produce art work until her death in 1998 at the age of 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 long career. Her extensive travels throughout Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean influenced and changed how she painted. She felt that her greatest contribution to the art world was "proof of the talent of black artists". She 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 South where "her people" lived. In 1928 she 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, she coached a basketball team, taught folk dancing, and played the piano for church services. In 1930, she 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. She 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 own work as an artist, she 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 art work. 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. In this period, she shifted away from designs 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 both Douglas and Jones' paintings. Jones studied actual objects and design elements from Africa.
In her works Negro Youth and Ascent of Ethiopia the influence of African masks are seen 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 she 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.

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, she 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 Artists Français for her Parisian debut. Jones loved her time in Paris as she felt fully accepted in society as opposed to the United States at this time. The French were appreciative of paintings and talent. After she was granted an extension of her fellowship to travel to Italy, she returned to Howard University and taught watercolor painting classes.
In 1938, she produced Les Fétiches, 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. She was able to 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.
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. She also completed Parisian Beggar Woman with text supplied by Langston Hughes. In 1938, Jones' first solo exhibition was hung in the Whyte Gallery and would later be exhibited at the Howard University Gallery of Art in 1948.
Her main source of inspiration was Céline Marie Tabary, also a painter, whom she 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.
In 1941, Jones entered her painting Indian Shops Gay Head, Massachusetts into the Corcoran Gallery's annual competition. At the time, the Corcoran Gallery prohibited African-American artists from entering their artworks themselves. Jones had Tabary enter her painting to circumvent the rule. Jones ended up winning 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. In spite of 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.
Over the course of 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. She painted her striking painting Mob Victim after walking along U St Northwest in Washington, DC. She saw a man walking and was prompted to ask him to pose in her studio. She 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 , The Janitor and The Pink Table Cloth.
Previously in 1934, Jones met Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel, a prominent Haitian artist, while both were students at Columbia University. They corresponded for almost 20 years before marrying in the south of France in 1953. Jones and her husband lived in Washington, D.C. and Haiti. Their frequent trips to Haiti inspired and impacted Jones' art style significantly.

1954–1967

In 1954, Jones was a guest professor at Centre D'Art and Foyer des Artes Plastiques in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where the government invited her to paint Haitian people and landscapes. Her work became energized by the bright colors. She and her husband returned there during summers for the next several years, in addition to frequent trips to France. Jones completed 42 paintings and exhibited them in her show Oeuvres des Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël, which was sponsored by the First Lady of Haiti. As a result of her paintings, Jones was given the Diplôme et Décoration de l'Ordre National "Honneur et Mérite au Grade de Chevalier." In 1955, she unveiled portraits of the Haitian president and his wife commissioned by United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Jones's numerous oils and watercolors inspired by Haiti are probably her most widely known works. In them her affinity for bright colors, her personal understanding of Cubism's basic principles, and her search for a distinct style reached an apogee. In many of her pieces one can see the influence of the Haitian culture, with its African influences, which reinvigorated the way she looked at the world. These include Ode to Kinshasa and Ubi Girl from Tai Region. Her work became more abstract, vibrant, and thematically after moving to Haiti. Her previously impressionist techniques gave way to a spirited, richly patterned, and brilliantly colored style.
In the 1960s, she exhibited at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cornell University, and galleries in France, New York and Washington, D.C. In 1962, she initiated Howard University's first art student tour of France, including study at Académie de la Grande Chaumière and guided several more tours over the years.

1968–1988

In 1968, she documented work and interviews of contemporary Haitian artists for Howard University's "The Black Visual Arts" research grant.
Jones received the same grant in 1970 as well. Between 1968 and 1970, she traveled to 11 African countries, which influenced her painting style. She documented and interviewed contemporary African artists in Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Zaire, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. Her report Contemporary African Art was published in 1970 and in 1971 she delivered 1000 slides and other materials to the University as fulfillment of the project.
On May 22, 1970, Jones took part in a national day of protest in Washington, DC, that was created by Robert Morris in New York. They protested against racism and the Vietnam War. While many Washington DC artists did not paint to be political or create their own commentary on racial issues, Jones was greatly influenced by Africa and the Caribbean, which her art reflected. For example, Jones' Moon Masque is thought to represent then-contemporary problems in Africa.
In 1973, Jones received the "Women artists of the Caribbean and Afro-American Artists" grant from Howard University. In the same year, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Colorado State Christian College.
Her research inspired Jones to synthesize a body of designs and motifs that she combined in large, complex compositions. Jones's return to African themes in her work of the past several decades coincided with the black expressionistic movement in the United States during the 1960s. Skillfully integrating aspects of African masks, figures, and textiles into her vibrant paintings, Jones became a link between the Harlem Renaissance movement into a contemporary expression of similar themes.
On July 29, 1984, Lois Jones Day is declared in Washington, DC.

1989–1998

Jones continued to produce exciting new works at an astonishing rate of speed. She traveled to France and experimented with her previous Impressionist-Post-impressionist style that started her career in Paris. Her landscapes were painted with a wider color palette from her Haitian and African influences.
On her 84th birthday, Jones had a major heart attack and subsequently a triple bypass.
The Meridian International Center created a retrospective exhibition with the help of Jones herself. 1990 exhibition toured across the country for several years. The exhibition was the first exhibition of Jones that garnered her nationwide attention. Despite her extensive portfolio, teaching career, and cultural work in other countries, she had been left out of the history books because she did not stick to typical subjects that were suitable for African Americans to paint.
Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton collected one of her island seascapes, Breezy Day at Gay Head, while they were in the White House.
In 1991, The National Museum of Women in the Arts held an exhibition that showcased some of Jones' children's books illustrations.
In 1994, The Corcoran Gallery of Art opened The World of Lois Mailou Jones exhibition with a public apology for their past racial discrimination.
In 1997, Jones' paintings were featured in an exhibition entitled Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris 1945–1965 that appeared at several museums throughout the country including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Studio Museum of Harlem. The exhibition also featured the works of Barbara Chase-Riboud, Edward Clark, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Herbert Gentry, and Larry Potter. The exhibition examined the importance of Paris as an artistic mecca for African-American artists during the 20 years that followed World War II.
In 1998, Jones died with no immediate survivors at the age of 92 at her home in Washington, DC. She is buried on Martha's Vineyard in the Oak Bluffs Cemetery. Howard University hosted the exhibition Remembering Lois.

Legacy

Lois Mailou Jones' work is in museums all over the world and valued by collectors. Her paintings grace the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Portrait Gallery, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Palace in Haiti, the National Center of Afro-American Artists among others.
After her death, her friend and adviser, Dr. Chris Chapman completed a book entitled Lois Mailou Jones: A life in color about her life and the African-American pioneers she had worked with and been friends with, including Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Dorothy West, Josephine Baker, and Matthew Henson.
The Lois Mailou Jones Pierre-Noel Trust founded a scholarship in her name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a scholarship fund for the Department of Fine Arts at Howard University.
In 2006, Lois Mailou Jones: The Early Works: Paintings and Patterns 1927–1937 opened at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibition showed 30 designs and paintings from the beginning of her career.
From November 14, 2009, to February 29, 2010, a retrospective exhibit of her work entitled Lois Mailou Jones: A life in vibrant color was held at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. The traveling exhibit included 70 paintings showcasing her various styles and experiences: America, France, Haiti, and Africa.
Jones is featured in the 2017 publication, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. She was included in the 2018 Columbus Museum of Art exhibition and catalogue of I too sing America: the Harlem Renaissance at 100.
Pupils of Jones included Georgia Mills Jessup.

Awards and honors