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Article

Outterbridge, John  

Paul Von Blum

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist and arts administrator, was born in Greenville, North Carolina, the son of John Ivery Outterbridge, a self-employed truck hauler, and Olivia Outterbridge, a homemaker whom her son imaginatively describes as a “poet of family life.” John Outterbridge's decades of artistic accomplishments, including paintings, sculptures, and mixed media assemblages, influenced and inspired younger artists of all backgrounds throughout southern California and the nation. His artwork, reflecting his profound dedication to recapturing the African and African American past, made him a legendary figure in African American art. Throughout his career, moreover, he combined administrative leadership in Los Angeles–area community art programs with a prolific record of studio production.

Each step of his life informed his artistic perspective Discovering his creativity in early childhood he drew and painted with his parents active encouragement He experienced both the slights and insults of the Jim Crow era as well as the ...

Article

Piper, Adrian Margaret Smith  

Sylvie Kandé

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

multimedia artist, philosopher, and educator, was born in Harlem, New York, the only child of Daniel Robert, a lawyer, and Olive Xavier Smith Piper, an administrator. Belonging to a light-skinned African American family, she was confronted early on by challenges that ultimately gave her work some of its unique characteristics, namely the firm assertion of her black identity, her unremitting fleshing out of racial stereotypes, and her commitment to cross-cultural bridge-building. Her involvement with the arts began in childhood: a piano prodigy and ballet dancer, she also took classes at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957. Her political consciousness was first shaped in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which she joined in 1962, and by the events surrounding the March on Washington in 1963, commemorated in her 1983 poster Think about It She graduated from New Lincoln School in ...

Article

Rosário, Arthur Bispo do  

Roberto Conduru

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born in Japaratuba, a city located in the state of Sergipe in northeastern Brazil on either 16 March or 14 May 1911. His parents Adriano Bispo do Rosario and Blandina Francisca de Jesus were descendants of Africans who had been enslaved in the country. In 1925 he joined the Brazilian navy, which he left in 1932. The following year, he began working as a washer for the Viação Excelsior bus company in Rio de Janeiro. After this company fired him in 1937, he worked as a janitor at the residence of Humberto Magalhães Leone, a lawyer.

In 1938 he was taken to the National Hospital for the Insane in Rio de Janeiro where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic The following year he was transferred and admitted to the Colônia Juliano Moreira in the same city an institution that at that time housed people ...

Article

Saar, Betye  

Lisa D. Freiman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist and educator, was born Betye Irene Brown in Pasadena, California, to Beatrice (maiden name unknown), a seamstress who enjoyed quilting, and Jefferson Brown, a salesman who liked to sketch and write. Jefferson Brown died from kidney problems when Saar was six years old, and Betye and her brother and sister lived with her mother's great-aunt and great-uncle until her mother remarried a man named Emmett six years later. After the second marriage, Beatrice had two more children, a boy and a girl. Saar spent summers with her grandmother in Watts, where she saw Simon Rodia'sWatts Towers, a vernacular example of assemblage consisting of eight tall conical spirals. Built from steel rods, covered in concrete, and encrusted with found objects like bottle caps, glass, broken tiles, and shells, the Watts Towers seemed like “fairy-tale castles” (Isenberg, State of the Arts 23 to Saar and ...

Article

Saar, Betye  

Lonnie Graham

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

artist. Born Betye Irene Brown in Los Angeles, California, Betye Saar is a renowned assemblage artist and the mother of three daughters—Lezley, Alison, and Tracye Saar—two of whom, Lezley and Alison, are also well-known artists.

Betye Saar earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1949. She did graduate work at California State University at Long Beach from 1958 to 1962. Later in 1962 she returned to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California to specialize in printmaking; she also continued her studies at California State University at Northridge that year. In 1970 she entered the Pasadena School of Fine Arts to study film.

While residing in Pasadena during the 1950s Betye Brown took a turn from her professional life as a social worker and became active in her early artistic career as ...

Article

Saar, Betye  

Earnestine Jenkins

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Betye Saar’s multidimensional work destroys the distinctions between the traditional art forms of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions throughout the country, and her work is in major collections in museums across the United States.

Betye Saar was born in Los Angeles. As a child she often visited her relatives in nearby Watts, where she actually observed the construction of Watts Towers (1921-1954) by the self-taught artist Simon Rodia. Saar credits the memory of the construction of the towering spirals (from bottle caps, glass, tiles, cement, and steel) with her lifelong interest in putting together or assembling creative works using different art techniques, and from castoff, found materials. Saar graduated with a degree in design from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1949 and pursued graduate work at California State University Long Beach in art education and printmaking ...

Article

Saar, Betye Irene  

Robert Fay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born Betye Brown in Los Angeles, California, Betye Saar (pronounced Say-er) is the daughter of Jefferson and Beatrice Brown. She married artist Richard Saar shortly after earning a B.A. degree in design from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1949. Saar pursued graduate studies at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California, and California State University at Northridge. She has taught at UCLA and at the Parsons-Otis Institute.

Although Saar began as a printmaker and graphic designer, she later made a transition to three-dimensional work. The work that marked this turning point was Black Girl's Window (1969 in which Saar placed a print of an African American girl into a segmented window frame with existing objects She gradually replaced prints in her assemblages with existing objects She has increased the scale of her work to include room sized ...

Article

Scott, Joyce J.  

Anne Kingery

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

an artist active in a variety of mediums, was born to Charles and Elizabeth Talford Scott (a steel worker and a fiber artist/domestic care provider). Joyce Scott is descended from three generations of artists. Elizabeth Talford Scott is renowned for her quilts, which she extensively exhibited during the late twentieth century. From an early age, Scott was encouraged by her parents to make and study art. In 1970 she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, with a bachelor of fine arts degree in Art Education. In 1971 she gained her master of fine arts degree from the Instituto Allende, San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.

From 1974 to 1976 Scott continued her education with a residence at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, where she studied Yoruba weaving techniques with the Nigerian artists Twins Seven Seven and his wife, Nike Seven Seven ...

Article

Sparrow, Simon  

Josepha Sherman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist and preacher, was born to a West African father and a Cherokee mother in Africa, although the exact date was not recorded. After two years the family moved to the United States and settled on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina, where Sparrow s maternal grandfather lived Sparrow later claimed the man was a tribal chief Sparrow grew up in an area that was settled by Cherokees and the descendants of slaves At seven he began preaching to the forest animals then he began speaking in tongues and speaking to his family s Pentecostal church In his youth he drew stick figures in the sand then recorded images on scraps of paper One day he discovered pieces of plywood and began to use them to for his sketches A passing man offered to buy one but Sparrow angrily refused he had not made pictures to sell ...

Article

Tall, Papa Ibra  

Elisabeth Harney

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Senegalese visual artist and teacher, was born in 1931 near Dakar.

In 1947, Tall trained in an early private art studio in Dakar, run by the Frenchman Cosson. He then traveled in 1955 on a government scholarship to Paris to study at the École spéciale d’architecture. In 1959, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the philosopher, poet, and later first president of Senegal, saw some of Tall’s drawings on exhibit in Paris and encouraged him to pursue fine arts. Following this encounter, Senghor promoted the young Tall, supporting his application for a grant to attend the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and to pursue further instruction in Sèvres, where Tall studied painting, serigraphy, tapestry, mosaics, and pedagogy.

Papa Ibra Tall is best known for the key role he played in postindependence Senegal as a teacher in the art school and as director in the national tapestry center Critics would characterize ...