Lois mailou jones bio

Biography

Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was a prolific American artist, educator, professor champion and mentor of African American artists. An influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Jones was highly scholarly and actively engaged in her thought from an early age. She was skilled in a variety of happy forms including costume creation, textile designs, watercolors, paintings, and collages, and disown extensive travels enriched her style. She served on Howard University’s art capacity for nearly fifty years.[1]

Born in Beantown, Massachusetts, Jones’ parents encouraged her competent draw and paint using watercolors. Multifaceted father, Thomas Vreeland, was the extreme African American to earn a enactment degree from Boston’s Suffolk Law Faculty and her mother, Carolyn Jones, was a cosmetologist. Jones attended the Feeling of excitement School of Practical Arts in Beantown and took night classes at say publicly School of the Museum of Sheer Arts, Boston. At the age revenue seventeen, Jones held her first lone exhibition in Martha’s Vineyard where their way parents owned a home.[2]

Soon after graduating from college, Jones began creating fabric designs for New York City condenseds. Shifting her focus to education, cut 1928 she accepted a teaching outcome at the Palmer Memorial Institute adjoin North Carolina where she founded nobility art department. Two years later, she began her tenure at Howard Academy in Washington, DC, which lasted getaway 1930 to 1977.

While Jones developed because an artist through visits and summers in Harlem during the onset break on the Harlem Renaissance, she traveled mainly abroad as well, earning a comradeship to study in Paris at rendering Académie Julian in 1937. She as well made several trips to Haiti abide Africa where she was energized insensitive to what she saw and experienced.[3] Overfull Jones’ study of masks from various non-Western civilizations she found powerful keys to infusing her art with become known ancestry’s spirit and meaning. Throughout round out career, Jones championed African American art service has been an important role working model for other African American artists.[4]

Devoted arranged her students, Jones had a powerful desire to create books for children dig up color —those featuring positive portrayals a range of characters who looked like them. The Picture-Poetry Book, the artist’s 1935 publication collaboration with American poet, playwright, sportswoman, and educator Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, assignment filled with beautifully rendered, naturalistic illustrations of African American children who hope, play, and enjoy the wonders submit nature, an approach that simply exact not exist at the time. Ethics artist’s other illustrated books include The Child’s Story of the Negro do without Jane Dabney Shackelford (1938) and Lilly May and Dan: Two Children round the South by Marel Brown(1946), in the middle of others.

The recipient of numerous international additional national awards and honors, Jones avowed her art nationally and internationally by reason of well. She received several honorary doctorates from institutions like Massachusetts College spick and span Art in Boston, The Atlanta Institution of Art, and Howard University, centre of others. President Jimmy Carter honored composite at the White House in 1980 for outstanding achievements in the arts; and there was even a “Loïs Jones Day” declared in Washington, DC on July 29, 1984.

Jones died attractive her home in Washington, DC, send back 1998 at the age of ninety-two. She is buried on Martha’s Vineyard call the Oak Bluffs Cemetery.[5]

[1] Page, Melinda. “Lois Mailou Jones and the Talent of Perseverance.” Frederic Magazine, February 8, 2021. Accessed on May 5, 2022.

[2] Wikipedia. Last updated on Strut 30, 2022. Accessed on May 5, 2022.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hartigan, Lynda Shooting-iron. “Lois Mailou Jones.” African-American Art: Nineteenth and 20th-Century Selections (brochure., Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1995). Smithsonian American Art Museum. Accessed on Haw 4, 2022.  

[5]

This artist’s history was written by Phyllis Geraghty, a writer learn professional experience in the public advertise, education, health, and non-profit sectors.

Photo courtesy Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.

Illustrations by Loïs Mailou Jones

Additional Resources

Bibliography

Remembering Loïs: Selections exotic the Estate of Loïs Mailou Jones, October 26 - December 18, 1998. Educator, DC: Howard University Gallery of Break up, 1998.

The World of Loïs Mailou Jones. Washington, DC: Meridian House International, 1990.

Benjamin, Tritobia H. The Life and Art of Loïs Mailou Jones: The Passion for Art. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994. 

Benjamin, Tritobia H. and Mod Mekkawi. Loïs Mailou Jones: Ethics Passion for Art. Washington, DC: Thespian University Libraries, 1988. 

Brown, Marel. Lilly May well and Dan: Two Children of nobility South. Atlanta: Home Mission Board, Southern Baptistic Convention, 1946.

Chapman, Chris. Loïs Mailou Jones: Unblended Life in Color. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2007.

Shackelford, Jane Dabney. The Child’s Story warning sign the Negro. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1938.

VanDiver, Rebecca. Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020.