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was born on 22 March 1926 in Terra Roxa in the state of São Paulo. In 1934 he and his family relocated to the city of São Paulo. After studying painting at the Instituto Profissional Masculino (Men’s Professional Institute), São Paulo, from 1939 to 1943, he joined the Grupo dos 19, a group of nineteen artists linked by their interest in new expression, in 1947. In 1950 he continued his studies in printmaking at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris.

Returning to Brazil in 1951, Araújo moved to Rio de Janeiro and found a position assisting the renowned Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari (1903–1962). In 1959 he won the first prize for printmaking at the Salão Para Todos (Salon for All) in Rio de Janeiro, and was awarded a trip to China. In 1960 he received a scholarship to study at ...

Margaret Burroughs was born in St. Rose, Louisiana, near New Orleans, but was brought at the age of five by her parents, Alexander and Octavia Pierre Taylor, to Chicago where she grew up, was educated, and where her distinctive career has unfolded. She attended the public schools of Chicago, including the Chicago Teacher's College. In 1946, she received a BA in education and in 1948, an MA in education from the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1940 to 1968 she was a teacher in the Chicago public schools and subsequently a professor of humanities at Kennedy-King College in Chicago (1969–1979).

Burroughs has a national reputation as a visual artist and as an arts organizer. Her long exhibition record as a painter and printmaker began in 1949 and included exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad A retrospective of her work was held in Chicago ...

While a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s, Elizabeth Catlett first encountered African sculptural art and the contemporary work of Mexican muralists. These two art traditions inform most of Catlett's oeuvre. Her sculpted figures have the same voluminous, rounded forms of the people portrayed in the murals of Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera. At the same time, the faces of Catlett's sculpted figures have an owl-like, lunar quality that seems to be derived from African mask design. This stylized facial quality can also be observed in some of Catlett's graphic work, especially in her lithographs. In her linocuts, on the other hand, the faces and bodies of figures are rendered in a more realistic manner; these linocuts are stylistically related to the work of printmakers at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City, where Catlett studied from 1946 to 1947 She combined ...

sculptor, printmaker, and teacher, was born Alice Elizabeth Catlett to Mary Carson, a truant officer, and John Catlett, a math teacher and amateur musician who died shortly before Elizabeth's birth. Elizabeth and her two older siblings were raised by their mother and paternal grandmother in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Encouraged by her mother and her teachers at Dunbar High School to pursue a career as an artist, she entered Howard University in 1931, where she studied with the African American artists James Lesesne Wells, Loïs Mailou Jones, and James A. Porter. After graduating cum laude with a BS in Art in 1935, Catlett taught art in the Durham, North Carolina, public schools before beginning graduate training at the University of Iowa in 1938 Under the tutelage of the artist Grant Wood Catlett switched her concentration from painting to sculpture and ...

I don’t have anything against men but, since I am a woman, I know more about women and I know how they feel. Many artists are always doing men. I think that somebody ought to do women. Artists do work with women, with the beauty of their bodies and the refinement of middle-class women, but I think there is a need to express something about the working-class Black woman and that’s what I do.

(Gladstone, p. 33)

As a reputed sculptor and printmaker whose career began in the 1940s, Elizabeth Catlett is a major figure in modern American and Mexican art. Catlett’s work embraces the human condition, revealing a deep passion for dignifying humanity, especially working-class women and, in particular, African American and Mexican women. Titles of her sculpture suggest this interest: Black Woman Speaks (1970), Mother and Child (1940, 1993), Mujer (1964 ...

sculptor and printmaker. Catlett was born six months after her father died of tuberculosis. The Washington, D.C., native was the daughter of two educators. Her father was a teacher at Tuskegee Institute and in the Washington, D.C., public schools, and her mother was trained at the Scotia Seminary in North Carolina as a teacher. Upon Elizabeth's father's death, her mother immediately sought a job, eventually working as a truant officer in the Washington, D.C., public school system. Catlett's mother always strongly emphasized education for her three children. The granddaughter of freed slaves, Catlett credited her resolve in sculpture to her family's commitment to education, noting that her profession has traditionally been reserved for white men.

Catlett identified with four underserved groups women blacks Mexicans and poor people She did not see herself as exceptional rather she saw herself as exceptionally fortunate A precocious student she skipped two grades and ...

Oscar and Annamae Palmer Crite, Allan Rohan Crite's parents, moved to Boston, Massachusetts, before he was a year old. Crite attended Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1929 to 1936, while also painting in the federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA) program. He graduated from Harvard University's Extension School in 1968, where he also worked as a librarian for twenty years. In nearly seven decades of work, Crite has participated in many solo and group exhibitions.

Crite's early paintings are full of action and brilliant color, and filled with light. They depict the rich connections within a small urban black community. Parade on Hammond Street (1935) and School's Out (1936) are outstanding examples of what Crite calls his “reporting” of African American city life. A quieter double portrait, Harriet and Leon (1941 shows a dignified couple on ...

Minnie Jones Evans was raised by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother in Wilmington, North Carolina. She left school after the fifth grade and began working. She was perpetually employed in low-paying jobs. At age sixteen, in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, she married Julius Caesar Evans, with whom she had three sons. Her artistic career began on Good Friday in 1935, when she began drawing in response to visions, voices, and dreams she claimed to have since childhood, whose message, she said, was “Draw or die!”

Working with simple materials crayon graphite ink and oils on paper or board Evans created thousands of mixed media drawings and collages inspired by her visions in which stylized flowers and foliage exotic birds strange creatures angels and royal or divine figures are major motifs Self taught hence an outsider rather than folk artist and a devout Christian who knew the Bible by ...

Dox Thrash was born in Griffin, Georgia. After studying for several years at the Art Institute of Chicago, Thrash settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Once there he painted signs and worked on the Federal Arts Project (FAP) to earn a living. Working with the FAP, in the Graphic Division, he helped invent a new lithographic process, called the carborundum print-process. This created prints with more expressive tones and variation. His carbographs explored the portraits of African Americans, landscapes, and scenes of slum life. My Neighbor (1937) and the landscape Deserted Cabin (1939) are examples of Thrash's carbographs. In the late 1930s and through the 1940s Thrash's work was shown in many prominent places, including a 1942 solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

See also Artists, African American.

Charles White was born in Chicago, Illinois to unmarried parents, Ethel Gary and Charles White, Sr., who separated when he was three years old. He was raised by his mother in Chicago. After winning a national pencil sketch contest in 1937, White attended the Art Institute of Chicago for a year, then worked as an artist in the Works Progress Administration during the late 1930s. In 1941, White traveled through the South on a Rosenwald Fellowship. The following year, he moved to New York, New York and studied at the Art Students League.

In 1944, while serving in the Army, White was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was hospitalized for three years. In 1947 he had his first one man show at the ACA Gallery in New York City after which he went to Mexico where he worked for nearly a year at the printmaking workshop ...