Jones, Lois Mailou

By: Tritobia Hayes Benjamin

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Jones, Lois Mailou

Sex:  Female

Born:  Boston, Massachusetts, United States
3 November 1905

Died:  Washington, District of Columbia, United States
9 June 1998

Activity/Profession:  Painter, Educator, Textile Designer

(b. 3 November 1905; d. 9 June 1998),
artist and teacher.

An active and acclaimed painter for more than six decades, Lois Mailou Jones enjoyed two impressive careers, one as a professor of art and the other as an artist. Her teaching gave her financial security and served as an inspiration and a challenge.

Lois Mailou Jones at work, c. 1936–1937. Jones was both an artist and a professor of art, who taught for nearly half a century at Howard University. Her artworks are represented in many American museums and private collections.

National Harmon Foundation; Joe McCary, Photo Response Studio

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Lois Jones was born in Boston to Caroline Dorinda Adams and Thomas Vreeland Jones. Her father was superintendent of a large office building and attended night classes at Suffolk Law School, where he received his law degree in 1915 at the age of forty. “I think that much of my drive surely comes from my father,” Jones once said, “wanting to be someone, having an ambition.” Her mother was a beautician and Jones's first mentor. She filled the Jones home with color and freshly cut flowers, instilling in her daughter a love of beauty.

With the assistance of four annual tuition scholarships, Jones earned a diploma from the High School of Practical Arts (HSPA). During her high school years, she also attended the Boston Museum Vocational Drawing Class, on a scholarship. While at HSPA, she was apprenticed to Grace Ripley, a well-known costume designer and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. She assisted Ripley in creating costumes for the Ted Shawn School of Dance and a branch of the Bragiotti School in Boston. Working on Saturdays and after school, she designed dance costumes, especially masks. She recalled that “very early I was introduced to Africa through creating the masks with the Ripley studio.”

In 1923 Jones was admitted to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where each year from 1923 to 1927 she won the coveted Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design. Here she studied design concepts, life drawing, and portraiture under such artists as Anson Cross, Phillip Hale, Alice Morse, and Henry Hunt Clark. She graduated from the museum school with honors in 1927. During her last year at the museum school, Jones enrolled in evening classes at the Boston Normal Art School (now the Massachusetts College of Art), receiving a teaching certificate in 1927. That same year she won a scholarship to the Designers Art School of Boston, where she continued graduate study with Ludwig Frank, internationally known designer of textiles. Her studies were extended at Harvard University during the summer of 1928. Jones created a series of designs for cretonne—a strong, unglazed cotton or linen cloth that is used especially for curtains and upholstery—and other fabric and textile patterns.

That year, two eminent educators, Henry Hunt Clark and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, told Jones to “go South” and help her people. Jones had been disappointed by Clark when she applied for a position at the museum school; none was available, and Clark pointed the young designer toward the South and its needs. She balked. Next, she applied to Howard University. She was informed that they had recently hired James A. Porter and had no other positions were available. Then she heard Brown speak in Boston, urging college students to take their talents to the youth of the South. This time she accepted the challenge. Although thought by some to be too young and inexperienced, she was hired by Brown to develop the art department at the Palmer Memorial Institute, one of the nation's first preparatory schools for African Americans, in Sedalia, North Carolina. Jones established the curriculum, served as chairperson of the department, and provided instruction to a small, eager class. In addition to her other duties, Jones also taught dancing, coached a basketball team, and played the piano for Sunday morning worship services.

During the spring of 1930, James Vernon Herring, founder and head of the Department of Art at Howard University, was invited by Jones to lecture at Palmer. He was impressed by the work of her students and recruited her to serve as an instructor of design at Howard. Jones joined the Howard faculty in 1930 and remained there until her retirement in 1977. She, James A. Porter, and James Lesesne Wells constituted the art department and forged a curriculum unique among historically black colleges and universities.

For her first sabbatical, Jones chose the Académie Julian in Paris. During a summer on Martha's Vineyard, she had met the sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller and the composer Harry T. Burleigh. They advised her that, if she wanted to find a niche in the art world, she should travel to Paris for recognition. Also, of course, study in Paris was a tradition for American artists who could manage the expense. With the aid of a General Education Board fellowship, Jones sailed for France on the S.S. Normandie on 1 September 1937. Her sojourn there marked a shift in her career from that of designer, illustrator, and teacher to that of painter. The experience allowed her, as Jones said, “to be shackle free, to create and to be myself.”

Many of her works from that year were painted on location. It was during one of her painting exercises on the Seine that Jones met Émile Bernard, the father of French Symbolist painting. He encouraged her and critiqued her work. Albert Smith, an African American artist in Paris, also became a friend during Jones's stay and after her return to the United States.

Jones made such progress that, toward the end of the academic year, her friends and instructors urged her to submit paintings to the annual Salon de Printemps of the Société des Artistes Français, one of the most important exhibits of the year. Although her work of this era reveals a commitment to the organizing principles and preferred palette of the impressionists and postimpressionists, her paintings were clearly personal interpretations. As James Porter, author of Modern Negro Art, observed: “Thus far her painting has been in the tradition, but not in the imitation of Cezanne …. Miss Jones wishes to confirm Cezanne but at the same time to add an original note of her own …. Sensuous color delicately adjusted to the mood indicates the artistic perceptiveness of this young woman.”

Soon after her return to the United States in September 1938, Jones exhibited at the Robert Vose Galleries in Boston. Her work received high praise, and her reputation grew as she exhibited throughout the United States. After her return to Washington, she met Alain Locke, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, and head of the philosophy department at Howard. Telling her of his plans to include one of her Parisian street scenes in his forthcoming book, The Negro in Art (1940), Locke strongly encouraged her to reevaluate her subjects and take her own heritage more seriously. An early advocate of African American consciousness, Locke was perhaps the most influential voice on art in the black community at that time. Jones's response to Locke's challenge produced works focused on the African American. The artist refers to the 1940s as her Locke period. Also during this decade, Jones took classes at Howard, receiving an AB in Art Education and graduating magna cum laude in 1945.

When Lois Jones married the noted Haitian graphic artist and designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel in 1953, both her life and her art were transformed. They took advantage of an invitation from the Haitian government to teach at the Centre d'Art and the Foyer des Arts Plastiques so that they could honeymoon in Haiti. The experience was the beginning of a new way of seeing for Jones, and, from her first visit, she “fell increasingly in love with Haiti and its people.” Her early Haitian paintings explored the picturesque elements of the marketplace and its people. Although the essence of Europe was still, at the beginning, very much apparent, the palette and the formal organization of her paintings gradually evolved into a brilliantly spirited style, fresh, energetically fluid, and highly individual. This new style signaled clearly that Europe did not yield the exuberance so vital to expressing the vigor found in this African-oriented culture.

Jones's work in the 1960s drew more upon her knowledge of design techniques and her passion for color while synthesizing the diverse religious and ritualistic elements of Haitian life and culture. It showed a more expressive, colorful, hard-edged style that fused abstraction with decorative patterns and naturalism. These characteristics asserted themselves even more powerfully in the 1970s.

In 1969 Jones received a grant from Howard University to conduct research on contemporary artists in Africa. Between April and July, she compiled biographical material on African artists, photographing their work, conducting interviews, and visiting museums in eleven African countries. More than one thousand slides were given to the Howard University archives upon completion. Jones said her trip “proved to be a revelation and a rich experience.” During the 1970s and into the 1980s, she maintained an intense interest in Africa. Undoubtedly this was in part due to the African American quest for cultural identity and the fact that the black cultural movement of these years was even more profound and widespread than that which occurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

In the summer of 1989, Jones returned to France. The works that resulted recall an earlier era. Reminiscent of the impressionist/postimpressionist style she had abandoned more than thirty years earlier, the paintings created during that visit illustrate her continued fascination with nature and her desire to capture the fleeting beauty of place. In 1990 a major retrospective, “The World of Lois Mailou Jones,” was sponsored by Meridian House International in Washington, DC. It opened in January and traveled for two years across the United States.

Lois Mailou Jones received numerous awards for her work in competitions, including the National Thayer Prize for excellence in design. She also received honorary degrees from a number of universities, including Howard. In 1954, the government of Haiti awarded her the Diplome and Decoration de l'Ordre Nationale “Honneur et Mérite au Grade de Chevalier.” Her work is represented in museums and private collections across the country and the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston; the National Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the National Portrait Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Palais Nationale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to name a few notable institutions.

It is difficult to estimate the impact of any given artist during his or her lifetime. About Lois Jones, however, certain things are clear. While teaching and communicating a love of art to generations of students, she has created a body of work characterized by technical virtuosity, consummate skill, versatility, elegance, vitality, structure, design, and clarion color. The last link to the visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Jones died in her Washington, DC, home of cardiac arrest in June 1998.

See also Visual Arts.

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