Smithsonian Magazine
Smithsonian.com
A century after his birth, an overlooked figure in the Black Renaissance is on the rise again
By
Amy Crawford
June 2018
Born in Chicago in 1918, the artist Charles White
always received inspiration from the struggles and triumphs of black
people—major historical figures like Frederick Douglass as well as
ordinary people like his own mother, who worked as a maid her whole
life. It was White’s mother who bought him his first box of paints, when
he was 7 years old. He would go on to earn a scholarship to the Art
Institute of Chicago, where a major retrospective of his work opens this
month. Among the pieces on display is the 1977 lithograph Love Letter III,
which pairs a Madonna-like figure with a motif White often used to
represent feminine life-giving and creativity: a conch shell. The work
is a tribute to black women and their claim on the universal
values—“love, hope, courage, freedom, dignity”—that White saw running
through all his art. His favorite subjects were women, he said shortly
before his death in 1979: “The positive forces flow most frequently from
the female fountain.”
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