![]() White and Catlett worked at Mexico City’s Taller de Gráfica Popular, or People’s Graphic Arts Workshop, that espoused the populist political ideals that were the corner-stone of post-revolutionary Mexico. Living in Mexico in the mid-1940s deepened White’s social commitment. “I began to understand the beauty of my people’s speech, their poetry, their folklore, their dance and their music,” he said, adding, “as well as their staunchness, morality and courage.” ![]() Beaten for entering a New Orleans restaurant, White encountered the brutalities of segregation firsthand. The Julius Rosenwald Fellowship he received in the early 1940s enabled White and his then-wife, sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (b. He also was involved with the founding of the federally funded South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. White’s first murals, for the Chicago Public Library (now lost) and Virginia’s Hampton Institute, depicted black heroes in a heavily stylized and symbolic technique. Relatively little money was spent on this federally funded arts program, yet during the 1930s and 1940s, it started and sustained the careers of many artists-particularly African Americans. Painting is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent.”Ī job with the Works Progress (later Projects) Administration/federal Arts Project (WPA/FAP), offered him the opportunity to work professionally with other artists. I am interested in creating a style that is much more powerful, that will take in the technical and, at the same time, say what I have to say. By the time he was twenty-two, he proclaimed: “The old masters pioneered in the technical field. In 1937, White won a scholarship to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During this formative period, he also discovered the writings of Alain Locke at the neighborhood library he also met Chicago’s black cultural leaders. In between after-school jobs to get through the Depression, he found refuge in the museum galleries. “ I see my totality of 300 years of history of black people through one little fraction…a family…my family…I don’t try to record it, but use it symbolically to make a broad universal statement about the search for dignity…the history of humanity.” Harvest Talk, 1953, makes that universal statement.īorn and raised on Chicago’s South Side, White was gifted as a child and studied art at settlement house art classes as well as at The Art Institute of Chicago. “I’ve only painted one picture in my entire life,” declared Charles White.
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