Lois Mailou Jones (November 3. 1905 – June 9 1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. Jones is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Early life and education

Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Thomas Vreeland Jones and Carolyn Adams. 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. Jones's parents encouraged her to draw and paint using watercolors during childhood. 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, Jones took night classes from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through an annual scholarship. Additionally, Jones apprenticed in costume design with Grace Ripley. Jones held her first solo exhibition at the age of seventeen in Martha's Vineyard. Jones began experimenting with African mask influences at the Ripley Studio. From her research of African masks, Jones created costume designs for Denishawn. to study design, where she won the Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design yearly. Jones 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, Jones received her graduate degree in design from the Design Art School of Boston in 1928. Afterward, Jones began working at the F. A. Foster Company in Boston and the Schumacher Company in New York City. During the summer of 1928, Jones attended Howard University, where she decided to focus on painting instead of design. 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 Southern United States where "her people" lived.

In the early 1930s, Jones began to seek recognition for her designs and artwork. Jones 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 (1929). In this period, Jones shifted away from designs and began experimenting with portraiture. 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. Jones would utilize this style throughout her career.

During this period Jones 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.

She became a key illustrator for Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers, illustrating McBrown's Picture-Poetry Book (1935) and many pieces in The Negro History Bulletin (starting in 1937).

1937–1953

In 1937, Jones received a fellowship to study in Paris at the Académie Julian. Jones produced more than 30 watercolors during her year in France. as well as Marel Brown's Lilly May and Dan: Two Children of the South (1946) through the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

In 1938, Jones produced Les Fétiches (1938), 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. Jones could 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 also completed Parisian Beggar Woman with text supplied by Langston Hughes.

thumb|right|The Lovers (Somali Friends) (1950) at the [[National Gallery of Art in 2022]]

Jones painted "Arreau, Hautes-Pyrenees" in France during one of her many trips to France between the years of 1945-1953 where she shared a summer studio with Celine Marie Tabary in Cabris, France While in France a part of her inspiration was Tabary, also a painter, whom Jones 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. This influence can be recognized through her landscape and documentary portraits of people and landscapes in France and America between the years of 1948–1953.

Over 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.

Alain Locke, a philosophy professor at Howard University and founder of the Harlem Renaissance, encouraged Jones to paint her heritage. Jones painted her striking painting Mob Victim (Meditation) after walking along U St Northwest in the District of Columbia. Jones saw a man walking and asked him to pose in her studio. Jones 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.

In 1973, Jones received the "Women artists of the Caribbean and Afro-American Artists" grant from Howard University. In the same year, Jones was awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Colorado State Christian College. 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 and a contemporary expression of similar themes.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton collected one of her island seascapes, Breezy Day at Gay Head, while they were in the White House.

In 1994, The Corcoran Gallery of Art opened The World of Lois Mailou Jones exhibition publicly apologizing for their past racial discrimination.

In 1998, Jones died with no immediate survivors at the age of 92 at her home in Washington, DC. Jones is buried on Martha's Vineyard in the Oak Bluffs Cemetery.

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 (including the National Museum of Women in the Arts) 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. Jones 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, Martha Jackson Jarvis, and David Driskell.

Awards and honors

  • Robert Woods Bliss Award for Landscape for Indian Shops Gay Head, Massachusetts (1941)
  • 3rd Annual Art Awards, Washington, DC (1983)
  • Negro Youth, 1929, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Brother Brown, 1931, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Les Fétiches, 1938, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Dans un Café à Paris (Leigh Whipper), 1939, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
  • Seated Man in Yellow Overalls, 1939, Smithsonian American art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Cauliflower and Pumpkin, 1938, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
  • Self-Portrait, 1940, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Les Clochards, Montmartre, Paris, 1947, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Coin de la Rue Medard, 1947, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
  • Jardin du Luxembourg, ca. 1948, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Arreau, Hautes-Pyrénées, 1949, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
  • Mme. Feugeront à Cabris, AM, 1950, Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA
  • Jeune Fille Française, 1951, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Eglise Saint Joseph, 1954, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Shapes and Colors, 1958, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Challenge—America, 1964, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
  • Moon Masque, 1971, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Ubi Girl from Tai Region, 1972, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA
  • La Baker, 1977, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA
  • The Green Door, 1981, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • Suriname, 1982, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
  • Glyphs, 1985, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA
  • Untitled (Portrait of Léopold Sédar Senghor), 1996, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN

Selected exhibitions

  • Solo exhibition, 1937, Howard University, Washington, D.C., sponsored by Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
  • Reflective Moments, 1973–1974, MFA, Boston, MA
  • The Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones, 1994, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • Full Spectrum: The Prolific Master within Loïs Mailou Jones, 2014–2015, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in Partnership with the Loïs Mailou Jones Trust, The I Street Gallery, Washington, DC
  • The Life and Work of Lois Mailou Jones, 2015, Martha's Vineyard Museum, Edgartown, MA

References

Further reading

  • Benjamin, Tritobia Hayes. "Jones, Lois Mailou. November 3, 1095-June 9, 1998."
  • Rowell, Charles Henry (2016). "Loïs Mailou Jones." Callaloo, vol. 39 no. 5, 2016, p. 1017-1101. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cal.2016.0142.
  • Seamon, Donna (2017). Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. New York: Bloomsbury USA.
  • Ware, Susan; Braukman, Stacy Lorraine (2004). "Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century". Harvard University Press, 1st edition. .
  • Archive of Official website
  • "An Interview with Lois Mailou Jones", Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo, Vol. 12 No. 2, p. 357–378
  • Baltimore Museum of Art. Contemporary Negro Art: On Exhibition from February 3–19, 1939, the Baltimore Museum of Art. [Baltimore]: [The Baltimore Museum of Art], 1939.
  • Lois Mailou Jones papers, memorabilia, and archives from Howard University
  • Lois Mailou Jones on the African American Visual Artists Database
  • Artist Friendships: Loïs Mailou Jones and Céline Tabary from National Museum of Women in the Arts blog
  • Unsung History Podcast, Lois Mailou Jones, December 6, 2012