Charles White

Chicago and public art

Charles White grew up in Chicago and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937–1938. Mexican muralists influenced his public work. As a founder and teacher at the South Side Community Art Center, he worked within a network that included Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor and other Black artists.

WPA work and a mural for the Chicago Public Library were followed by Rosenwald-supported study in New York and a major historical mural at Hampton Institute. He served as an army camouflage artist during the Second World War. With his first wife, Elizabeth Catlett, he later made prints in Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular.

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New settings and persistent subjects

White taught at the George Washington Carver School and held an artist residency at Howard University. After his marriage to Catlett ended, he married Frances Barrett in 1950. He moved to California in the following decade and exhibited through Benjamin Horowitz’s Heritage Gallery. Drawings, paintings and lithographs addressed Black history, economic struggle and human relationships.

The 1968 Nat Turner, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow pairs drybrush and ink with a study in charcoal, oil wash and pencil.

The word study does not make an object an incomplete version of everything that follows. Changing support, proportions and medium can make preparation an active site of invention. His practice repays attention to those decisions as well as to its subjects.

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An influential classroom

White joined Otis in 1965 and taught there until his death in 1979, when he headed drawing. The college’s account emphasises his encouragement across different backgrounds and subjects. Former student Judithe Hernández remembers a teacher whose generosity helped students develop their own visual voices.

He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1972. Exhibitions brought his work to institutions beyond the communities in which he taught.

His legacy includes both made objects and the conditions he helped create for other makers. That second contribution should not turn students into copies of their teacher: its force lies partly in the different practices they were able to pursue.

Sources for this section: [4] · [2]