Burford Elonzo Evans  (1931-2023)

was born in Golinda, Texas, a small town just south of Waco.  He was interested in art as a small child but his parents felt that passion was not practical and encouraged him to pursue an education in the sciences.  He graduated from high school in 1949 and joined the Air Force and served in Paris from 1950-1955.  There he was able to study informally at the Universite de Paris a la Sorbonne and the Ecoles des Beaux-Arts.

Evans moved to Houston in 1955, and although he was initially denied membership in a local art group because of his race, he continued to paint and studied with a Houston artist named Ralph Dickerson.  It is recorded that he earned a BS from Texas Southern University (Houston).  He exhibited regularly at Adept Gallery in Houston and he exhibited at Bishop College, Dallas.  He eventually gained membership to the Art League of Houston and the Texas Fine Arts Association.

Chester Commodore (1914-2004)

Commodore was born in Racine, Wisconsin, a descendant of a former slave and first African American elected official in the state of Wisconsin, Peter D. Thomas.  Chester moved to Chicago in 1927 and worked odd jobs.  He developed an interest in drawing, especially cartoons, and he was always sketching in his free time and posting his work on bulletin boards.  James Rice, a lawyer and comics writer saw Commodore’s work and was impressed and recommended him for a job at the Minneapolis Star in 1938.  Sadly, the job offer was rescinded when he arrived and they discovered he was Black.

A printer’s strike in 1948 led to a job opportunity at The Chicago Defender.  He started doing printing and layout but eventually took over the strip Bungleton Green when the original artist died in 1954.  Throughout his career, Commodore won many national awards for his cartoons.

Gelsy Verna (1961-2008)

Verna was born in Haiti, and as a child also lived in Zaire and Montreal.  She attended university at the Art Institute of Chicago, earning her BA and MFA.  She participated in numerous exhibitions and eventually landed a job as a professor at the University of Iowa and University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Verna describes her process:

My images develop through sifting, moving things around. Layering indicates adjustments of my consciousness through time. What I seek is a balance between what I am describing, the process of discovering the elements that organize the picture, and the meaning which results. I would like to think that it is possible to say that the painting paints itself. That the meaning in a painting not only comes from the juxtaposition of the elements painted, but also through the means by which the paint is applied. I am interested in simplicity of means.

Verna died unexpectedly in her sleep at the age of 46.

Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976)

Jenkins was born in 1976 in Pensacola, Florida, and lives and works in Boston. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2019, Jenkins was awarded the James and Audrey Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

From Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles:  Lavaughan Jenkins is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor who investigates the palpable qualities of paint through exuberant impasto, an ingenious sense of color, and abstracted figuration. He thoroughly revels in the materiality of paint—he creates diverse mark-making by adding, scraping, and repeating luxuriant quantities of paint with a variety of tools including his hands, brushes, palette knives, Q-tips, and syringes—working and reworking the surfaces. Forms and figures emerge, and frequently spill over the edge of the canvas, pushing into the viewer’s world. Jenkins references a vocabulary from across art history, including Francisco Goya and Philip Guston’s use of paint to convey emotion, depth, and symbol.

Jenkins often centers images of Black women as icons of resilience and beauty. These women are complemented by backgrounds of patterned ivory or other gridded color arrangements. Referencing specific people in Jenkins’s life, the women–dressed in colorful attire–are accompanied by Jenkins’s talismanic figures of protection which sit in the lower corners of the canvas. These “watchers,” as he refers to them, surface and protect the memories that each canvas suggests. Most recently, Jenkins has been inspired by specific texts by James Baldwin and Nikita Gill in his Love Portal series. Like his female figure paintings, the Love Portals act as a record of moments and reminders of lost loves and past relationships.

George Rogers (1930-2002)

Sculptor, printmaker, and clay modeler George Rogers fabricated a printmaking process he called "sculpturegraphs." Inspired by his sculptural and clay molding practices, they take shape as biomorphic figures in different colored inks. As a variation of relief printmaking, Rogers used found materials, hand-cut sinuous shapes, then printed in a single color. In many of them, overlays were applied to produce gradations of colors and enhanced images. George Rogers was born in Alabama and was active in the Detroit area. Rogers attended the Columbus School of Art, 1952-53, the Cleveland Institute of Art 1955-59, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1959-61. He was the first Black clay modeler for the Ford Motor Company and designed the Mustang 2. His sculptures are installed around the Detroit area and included in the collection of the Renaissance Center. He was also a co-founder of Gallery Seven in Detroit which represented, Black abstract artists and developed a summer program for children.

Basil Barrington Watson (1931-2016)

Watson was known first as a footballer for Kingston College in Jamaica, but chose to pursue his artistic endeavors, studying at the Royal College of Art (London), Academie de la Grande Chaumiere (Paris) and the Rijksacademie (Amsterdam).  He traveled and exhibited widely, and then returned to Jamaica to become the first Director of Studies at the Jamaica School of Art and co-founded the Contemporary Jamaican Artists’ Association (1964-1974).  He was a visiting professor at Spelman College in Atlanta.  He was well-known for his figure drawings and sculpture.

Betty Murchison (20th century)

Murchison grew up in Chicago and always loved art, museums, and books. As a child, she didn’t know any artists or anything about art, but she loved to draw and she never thought someday she’d be in a studio painting. Her journey as a painter began when she enrolled in classes offered at Lipmann’s Art Store which was located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Working in a small studio above the store she began developing her painting skills and working with live models.

Over the years, she continued taking art classes and in 1975 she earned a B.S. at D.C. Teacher’s College and in 1978 she completed a graduate arts program at Trinity College.  Joining the D.C. Arts Association was the beginning of her quest to establish an art career. There she met Lois Mailou Jones and Delilah Pierce; and she began finding exhibition opportunities.  Her artistic breakthrough happened at the Foundry Gallery in 1989 when all her pieces sold in her second solo show and she was written up in the Washington Post. This exhibition really boosted her confidence and she began feeling her work was being accepted.  Murchison favors female subjects, because she feels like she relates to women better.  She paints in a dark, expressionist style centered on atmosphere and emotion rather than realistic depiction.

Jonathan Pinkett (b. 1949)

was born in Philadelphia and studied at Pennsylvania State University (1970-1973), Philadelphia College of Art (1974-1976) and Grand Central Atelier (2015-2017).  Primarily a figure painter and printmaker, Pinkett’s style is heavily influenced by the Dutch Old Masters, such as Frans Hals.

Arthur Roland (1935-2019)

Roland was born in Detroit, but grew up in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s and 40s, and later served in the Korean War. Roland studied art at Wayne State University and the Meinzinger School of the Art in Detroit. In 1974, he was listed in the directory of the Chicago Union of Black Artists, and by 1979, he was one of their elected officers. He later taught art at Wayne State Community College in Detroit. His artwork is found in the collections of the Arbor City Hall, the Archdiocese of Detroit, the Carnegie Institute, Howard University, the University of Southern Alabama, the Wayne County Comissioner's Office and many private collections.

Roland was represented by the Smith-Mason Gallery, in Washington, DC.  His work was included in the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago.

Leon Lank Leonard, Sr. (b. 1922)

Leonard was born in Waco, Texas and studied at Texas College and the University of Denver School of Art.  Leonard exhibited extensively from the 1950s-70s across the country including these venues: University of Iowa, Atlanta University, Bell Telephone, International Black Artists, Carnegie Institute, and Witte Museum.  His work was included in the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago and the collection of Camille and Bill Cosby.