Loïs Mailou Jones

(United States of America, 03/11/1905 - 09/06/1998)

Street Vendors, Haiti 1978 (1978)

Raised by working-class parents who emphasised the importance of education and hard work, Mailou Jones showed early promise as an artist, receiving a scholarship to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts at just 17, becoming the first African American to graduate, and having her first exhibition the same year.

In 1928, Mailou Jones left her career as a textile designer to found the Palmer Memorial Institute’s art department, although, inspired by the African masks she studied while attending a summer session at Columbia University, she left her teaching post in 1934 to focus on fine arts.

Receiving a fellowship to study at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1937, Mailou Jones began painting en plein air and gained artistic recognition through exhibitions at the Société des Artists Français. At this time, she began introducing African tribal art, a motif enormously popular in Parisian galleries, into her canvases which became crucial to creating a visual imagery for France’s literary Négritude theory.

In 1930, Mailou Jones joined the faculty of Howard University, mentoring Black artists for over four decades while travelling through Harlem at the onset of the Harlem Renaissance as well as Europe, Africa, Haiti and the Carribean where she encountered cultures that continued to inspire her impressionistic portraits and landscapes and cubist depictions of African sculptures throughout her life.

Despite the racial barriers of her time, Mailou Jones achieved international acclaim, and, at the behest of the U.S. Information Agency, became a cultural ambassador to Africa in 1970. She gave lectures, interviewed local artists and visited museums across the continent, further enriching the unique visual language and thematic depth of her work. Her activism was highlighted when the Corcoran Gallery publicly apologised for their past racial discrimination at the opening of their 1994 exhibition dedicated to her work.

Mailou Jones continued making art and remained an advocate for equality until her death in 1998, leaving a vibrant legacy that bridges African American, Caribbean and African visual traditions.

Image: Loïs Mailou Jones, Street Vendors, Haiti 1978 (1978). Acrylic on canvas, 134.6 x 102.2 cm. Studio Museum in Harlem, U.S.A.