Hale Woodruff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Woodruff

Hale Aspacio Woodruff (August 26, 1900 - September 6, 1980) was an American artist known for his murals, paintings, and prints.

Early life, family and education

Woodruff was born in Cairo, Illinois, in on August 26, 1900. He grew up in a black family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended the local segregated schools. He studied at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Chicago Institute of Art, and the Harvard Fogg Art Museum.

Woodruff won an award from the Harmon Foundation in 1926, which enabled him to spend four "crucial years studying in Paris from 1927-31." He studied at the Académie Scandinave Maison Watteau [sv] and the Academie Moderne. He learned in the city's museums as well, while getting to know other expatriates, including Henry Ossawa Tanner, the leading African-American artist. Woodruff met leading figures of the French avant-garde and began collecting African art, which was a source of inspiration for many other modernists, including Pablo Picasso.

He returned to the U.S. in 1931 and married Theresa Ada Barker that year. They had one son, Roy.

Art career

Woodruff reluctantly returned to the U.S. due to financial strains from the Great Depression. He worked as an art teacher to support himself. Later he became the art director at Atlanta University, a historically black college. He taught classes at the university's Laboratory High School, as well as for students at Morehouse and Spelman, a related college for black women. He founded the annual competition, Atlanta University Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, and Prints by Negro Artists, which featured many African-American artists. This was conducted from 1942 to 1970.

In 1936 Woodruff went to Mexico to study as an apprentice under the famed muralist Diego Rivera, learning his fresco technique and becoming interested in portrayal of figures. He returned to Atlanta and continued teaching. He began traveling to Talladega College in Alabama to teach and work on a commission for a series of murals.

After his return to the United States in 1936, Woodruff applied his understanding of Post-Impressionism and Cubism to painting and printmaking for social advocacy. Woodruff was inspired by the racism and poverty African Americans in the South faced during the Great Depression.

During the 1950s Woodruff had three solo exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery.

Woodruff's best-known work is the three-panel Amistad Mutiny murals (1938), which he completed for the Savery Library at Talladega College. The murals are entitled: The Revolt, The Court Scene, and Back to Africa, portraying events related to the 1839 Mende slave revolt on the Spanish Amistad ship. This occurred after the United States and Britain had prohibited the Atlantic slave trade, but Spain continued to take slaves from Africa. The murals depict events on the ship when the captive mutinied, the U.S. Supreme Court trial, and the Mende people's later repatriation to Africa.

An image of the ship is embedded in a design in the lobby floor of the library. College tradition prohibits walking "on" the ship, despite its central location. The library has another series of three Woodruff murals exploring events related to the black college's role in African-American history, including freedmen enrolling after the American Civil War and the construction of campus buildings.

Woodruff's two other surviving murals are The Negro in California History (1949), commissioned by the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles. This work was a collaboration with Charles Alston. Woodruff also completed six panels completed around 1951 called Art of the Negro (1951) at the Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries.

In 1942, even with World War II raging, Woodruff initiated the Atlanta University Art Annuals, an exhibit and competition that was conducted until 1970. These 29 national art exhibitions were a key venue for black artists.

In 1946, Woodruff joined the faculty at New York University in Manhattan. He taught there for more than 20 years before retiring in 1968. Malkia Roberts was among his many New York students.

Woodruff died in New York City on September 6, 1980.

Legacy

In 2012 the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia organized an exhibition of Woodruff's murals created for Talladega College. The exhibition of six of the restored murals toured the United States including the African American Museum (Dallas), the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

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Hale Woodruff, a nationally known printmaker, draftsman, and painter, was a member of the Atlanta University faculty for fifteen years. During that time the Paris-trained African American artist developed a distinctive American regionalist style. While teaching at Atlanta University, he was responsible for establishing the university's art program.

Hale Aspacio Woodruff was born on August 26, 1900, in Cairo, Illinois, to Augusta and George Woodruff. He moved with his mother to Nashville, Tennessee, after his father died. After graduating from Nashville's Pearl High School, where he had been the cartoonist for the school newspaper, Woodruff studied at the Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Upon returning home from a four-year sojourn to France in the 1920s, Woodruff joined the faculty of Atlanta University in 1931. It was his initial venture with art instruction and made him one of the first college professors of studio art in the state of Georgia. In the course of a decade, Woodruff developed a "one-man art department," promoted a plethora of visual arts activities, and initiated the Atlanta University Art Annuals (1942-70), twenty-nine national art exhibitions for black artists.

In response to Atlanta University's "Six-Year Plan" for establishing a School of Music and Fine Arts, Woodruff conducted art classes on the Spelman College campus for Atlanta University's Laboratory High School and for Spelman and Morehouse College students. Among some of the major exhibitions Woodruff succeeded in bringing to the Atlanta University Center campus were selections from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and works by fifty-four contemporary black artists sponsored by the Harmon Foundation. The development of Clark Atlanta University's historic collection of African American art, harvested from the Atlanta University Art Annuals, is wholly attributable to Woodruff's vision and effort. "The one thing I think that must be guarded against," he stated in 1968, "is that, in our efforts to create a black image and to assert our quality, our character, our blackness, our beauty, and all that, the art form must remain one of high level."

Woodruff's early work reflects his exposure to cubism while living in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The urban and rural landscapes of Georgia inclined his work and that of his students toward the regionalist style popular during that era. As were several other African American artists, Woodruff was inspired by Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, with whom he studied.

He completed three mural series: The Amistad Mutiny for Talladega College, The Negro in California History for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in California (a collaboration with Charles Alston), and the Art of the Negro at Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries.

Referring to the influence of African art on the development of Western art, Woodruff stated: "This [the Art of the Negro mural] has to do with a kind of interpretive treatment of African art. . . . I've always had a high regard and respect for the African artist and his art. So this mural. . .is for me, a kind of token of my esteem for African art." The six panels convey a synthesis of the art history of non-European worlds. Also apparent are the lessons learned from Rivera, but the impact of the art of Africa is manifest in this series.

In 1946 Woodruff moved to New York, where he taught at New York University until his retirement in 1968. Woodruff died in New York City on September 6, 1980, but his impact as a teacher in the Atlanta University Center is palpable in the work of his students.