Charles White

On a lifelong mission to chronicle Black experiences in 20th-century America, Charles White produced a powerful body of work that tackled social and political injustices with strength and resolution. ‘The more I learn of the history of my people and country, the more I experience of the stirring events of our time, the more are there subjects which clamour for realisation,’ he said in 1955 — the same year the Montgomery bus boycott would spark the United States’ civil rights movement.

Deeply committed to figuration whilst abstraction became a dominant force, White shifted his style during the 1950s from muted oils and public murals to charcoal, ink and lithograph portraits, which combined potent realism with a sense of the Baroque.

Born in 1918 on Chicago’s South Side, White sheltered from the poverty and abuse of his childhood in the city’s libraries and art galleries. After being denied entry from two art schools on account of his race, he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938, quickly establishing himself as an important figure in the Chicago Black Renaissance. White married the artist Elizabeth Catlett in 1941 and the pair briefly moved to New Orleans to teach at Dillard University — there they experienced first-hand the violence and humiliation of the Jim Crow-era South. ‘Paint is the only weapon I have to fight what I resent,’ he said, deciding to dedicate himself entirely to making art combatting this oppression.

By 1942 White was in New York City, being taught printmaking at the Art Students League by the socialist artist Harry Stenberg. The following year he created his defining mural, The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy at Hampton University, which depicts notable African Americans including Peter Salem, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman and Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter. In 1946 White travelled to Mexico City, joining the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an anti-fascist print-making collective.

In 1956, in search of climates that would aid his recovery from tuberculosis, White relocated to Los Angeles. He continued his work as draughtsman and printmaker whilst also teaching at the Otis Art Institute, where his pupils included Alonzo Davis, David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall. He died in 1979, aged 61.