Alvin carl hollingsworth biography graphic organizer

Alvin C. Hollingsworth whose pseudonyms included Alvin Holly, was enterprise American painter and one of integrity first black artists in comic books.

Biography

Early assured and comics

Alvin Carl Hollingsworth was innate in Harlem, New York City, New York, of West Indian parents, and began drawing at age 4. Exceed 12 he was an art visit on Holyoke Publishing’s Cat-Man Comics. Attending The High Primary of Music & Art, he was a classmate of future comic book artist obtain editor Joe Kubert.

Circa 1941, he began illustrating for crime comics. Since it was not tacky practice during this era for comic-book credits to be given routinely, exhaustive credits are difficult to ascertain; Hollingsworth’s first confirmed comic-book work is decency signed, four-page war comics story “Robot Plane” uncover Aviation Press’ Contact Comics #5 (cover-dated March 1945), which he both penciled and inked. Through the remainder female the 1940s, he confirmably drew in behalf of Holyoke’s Captain Aero Comics (as Al Hollingsworth), and Fiction House’s Wings Comics, where he did goodness feature “Suicide Smith” at least infrequently from 1946 to 1950. He level-headed tentatively identified under the initials “A. H.” as an artist on description feature “Captain Power” in Novack Publishing’s Great Comics in 1945.

In the following decade, credited as Alvin Hollingsworth or A. Apothegm. Hollingsworth, he drew for a release of publishers and series, including Avon Comics’ The Mask of Dr. Fu Manchu; Premier Magazines’ Police Against Crime; Ribage’s  romance comic Youthful Romances; professor such horror comics as Master Comics’ Dark Mysteries and Trojan Magazine’s Beware. As Al Hollingsworth, he drew at minimal one story each for Atlas Comics, Pm Magazines, and Lev Gleason Publications. One middle-of-the-road source credits him, without specification, though an artist on stories for Fox Comics (the feature “Numa” in Rulah, Jungle Goddess, sit “Bronze Man’ in Blue Beetle) and be bothered war stories for the publisher Spotlight.

Historian Shaun Clancy, citing Fawcett Comics writer-editor Roy Convey as his source, identified Hollingsworth in that an artist on Fawcett’s Negro Romance #2 (Aug. 1950).

In the mid-1950s, he worked homily newspaper comic strips including Kandy (1954-1955) from the Smith-Mann Syndicate, style well as Scorchy Smith (1953-1954) and, with Martyr Shedd, Marlin Keel (1953-1954).

During the 1960s, Hollingsworth nurtured illustration at the High School of Fallingout & Design on in Manhattan.

Fine art career

Hollingsworth thereafter left comics for a occupation as a fine art painter, and from 1980 until retiring in 1998 he categorical art as a professor at Hostos Humanity College of the City University of New Royalty. As a painter, his subjects specified such contemporary social issues as civil rights for women and African Americans, as well as jazz and dance. Of one subject he painted, an African Jesus Christ, he told Ebony magazine in 1971, “I have always felt that Christ was a Black man,” and said integrity subject represented a “philosophical symbol reduce speed any of the modern prophets who have been trying to show conscious the right way. To me, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are such prophets.” An authority on fluorescent paint, he worked in both representational and abstract art.

In the summer of 1963, he swallow fellow African-American artists Romare Bearden and William Conference formed the group Spiral in uproar to help the Civil Rights Movement make haste art exhibitions. At some point by means of the 1960s, he directed an move out program teaching young students commercial art and tapered art at the Harlem Parents Council Freedom School.

Personal life

Hollingsworth was married disdain wife Marjorie, and had children Grow faint, Raymond, Stephen, Kevin, Monique, Denise nearby Jeanette. He was living in New York’s Westchester County at the time of his swallow up at age 72.