About this Item
A spectacular oil on board painting by acclaimed deceased African American artist William McBride, Jr. (1912 - 2000) measuring approximately 25 1/8 x 16 3/4 inches. Details and Biography below. Thanks for looking at this fantastic African American vintage painting. Oil on Board 25 1/8 x 16 3/4 inches Signed McBride lower right Excellent as pictured. From a southside Chicago Chatham neighborhood collector William McBride, Jr., (1912 - 2000) artist, art teacher, photographer, cultural and political activist, and mainstay of the South Side Community Art Center, was born in 1912 in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. He was the second of three children of William and Mary McBride, vaudeville performers whose troupe, Billy and Mary Mack ??s Merrymakers, included future Louis Armstrong sideman Johnny Dodds. When William McBride, Jr. was around 10 years old, the McBrides joined the great migration of African Americans, and specifically of New Orleans-based African American musicians, from the South to Northern cities. Arriving in Chicago ??s burgeoning Bronzeville in the 1920s, the younger William McBride attended St. Elizabeth grammar school and Wendell Phillips High School. As a young man, McBride was interested in the visual arts and took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1930s. He joined the small coterie of young black artists led by George Neal, who formed the Art Crafts Guild, a precursor to the South Side Community Art Center. But lacking institutional support during the Great Depression, the Art Crafts Guild remained a small collective. During this time, McBride worked for the New Deal ??s Civilian Conservation Corps. With the creation of the Federal Art Project of the New Deal ??s Works Progress Administration in 1935, McBride finally found steady work as an artist. His work for the Illinois Art Project included designing posters advertising various cultural events. In 1938, McBride designed books and sketched costumes for the Federal Theater Project ??s adaptation of Helen Bannerman ??s 1899 children ??s book, Little Black Sambo, directed by Shirley Graham, later the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois. William McBride was an early participant in the effort to establish the South Side Community Art Center. Initially this movement consisted of a dialogue between younger artists such as McBride and Margaret Taylor Goss (later Margaret Burroughs) and black middle-class arts supporters such as Irene McCoy Gaines and Pauline Kigh Reid. The initial organization was brought together at the South Side Settlement House by George Thorpe, director of the Illinois Art Project, and Peter Pollack, owner of the Chicago Artists Group Gallery on Michigan Avenue, one of the few places black artists were allowed to exhibit their work. The mission of the South Side Community Art Center, proclaimed by Margaret Taylor Goss as the ??defense of culture, ? was broad enough to incorporate the politics of respectability and the social activism of the Popular Front. One of many inner-city community art centers established by the Federal Art Project/Works Progress Administration, the center moved into an old mansion at 3831 S. Michigan Avenue in 1940. Although the first exhibition was held in late 1940, the center was formally dedicated by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at a ceremony chaired by Alain Locke in 1941. The Federal Art Project withdrew funding in mid-1942, but the South Side Community Art Center thrived, and today remains the only surviving community art center created under the WPA. The South Side Community Art Center proved an immediate success: In its first four months it drew 7,874 attendees to classes and its first four exhibitions. It provided a space for young artists honing their skills ??such as William McBride, Margaret Burroughs, Charles White, Eldzier Cortor and Charles Sebree ??to interact with established black Chicago masters such as Archibald Motley, Jr. and William Edouard Scott. The center also or.
Seller Inventory # 63907-2754
Contact seller
Report this item
