University Times

The world of Lois Mailou Jones

The Office of Student and Public Affairs will sponsor an exhibit of works by the internationally noted African-American artist Lois Mailou Jones in the Frick Fine Arts Gallery, Sept. 6-Oct. 15. The exhibit includes 50 works dating back as far as the 1920s and covering a spectrum that ranges from the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1930s to Paris on the eve of World War II to Haiti in the early 1990s.

Jones was born in Boston in 1905 and educated at the High School of Practical Arts and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1930, she joined the faculty of Howard University, where she would teach watercolor painting and design for the next 47 years.

While her first love was design, Jones decided early on that the way to ensure that her name would "go down in history" was to become a painter. But she found that being African-American and female in the American art world of the 1930s and 1940s was "a frustrating insecurity, a double handicap." After a prize she won was withdrawn because the sponsors were not aware that she was an African-American, she began having friends deliver her work to shows and seldom appeared to collect prizes she won.

Among the works at Frick Fine Arts are, clockwise starting at the top left, "Les Pommes Vertes," oil on canvas painted in Paris in 1938; "The Japanese Garden," a 1927 pen and ink sketch done in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; "Brown Boy," a 1935 watercolor from her Washington, D.C., period, and the colorful 1963 polymer on wood painting, "Marche, Haiti." Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., and Sunday, 2-5 p.m.