On View
Not on viewObject number2021.37
French Still Life
Artist
Lois Mailou Jones
Dateca. 1950
Mediumoil on board
Dimensionsframe: 27 3/4 × 23 3/4 × 1 in. (70.5 × 60.3 × 2.5 cm)
board: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
board: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Credit LineJim Bridenstine Acquisition Fund
Exhibition History"Art, Music & Feminism in the 1950s," KIA Galleries 3 & 4 (January 21 - May 7, 2023).
"American Realism: Visions of America 1900-1950," Muskegon Museum of Art (May 11 - August 27, 2023); Flint Institute of Arts (September 9 - December 30, 2023); KIA (January 21 - April 14, 2024).Label TextLois Mailou Jones was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She spent years studying art and design, first at Boston’s High School of Practical Arts and then at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, where she was the only Black student. A few years after graduating, she was recruited to teach at Howard University, where she remained for nearly fifty years and taught artists like Elizabeth Catlett and Alma Thomas.
During her first sabbatical, she traveled to Paris and the time there was transformative. She was finding her own artistic style among the influences of European artists like Cézanne. Without the racial biases found in Boston, Jones for the first time felt empowered as an artist. She recalled, “I was shackle-free and I forgot I was a person of color. I was accepted as an artist.” In Paris, she also made a lasting friendship with Céline Tabary. Together Jones and Tabary—a White woman—would circumvent systemic racial biases present in the art world by Tabary submitting Jones’s work as her own, resulting in Jones’s work winning many awards and accolades.
While Jones always maintained an admiration for the European greats, influences of the African and African American experience are prevalent in her art. In the 1940s, Jones spent time traveling to New York and befriending many icons from the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1950s, she married Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël, a Haitian artist, and began traveling to Haiti annually and incorporating a brighter color palette and Haitian symbolism into her work. [Label for "Art, Music & Feminism in the 1950s”, 2023]
