Charles Alston

Charles Henry Alston was born on the twenty-eighth of November 1907 in Charlotte, North Carolina, the son of the Reverend Primus Priss Alston — born into slavery and educated for the ministry after emancipation, who founded St. Michael's Episcopal Church for the city's African American faithful — and Anna Elizabeth Miller Alston. His father, who gave him the abiding nickname "Spinky," died when the boy was three. His mother later married Harry Bearden, an uncle of the painter Romare Bearden, and in 1915 the family joined the great migration northward to Harlem, the neighborhood Alston would make his lifelong home.

Educated at Columbia University, where he earned his degree and a further master's from Teachers College, Alston became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and the generations of Black art that followed. In 1935 he was named the first African American supervisor of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, directing the celebrated murals for Harlem Hospital, among them Magic in Medicine and Modern Medicine, works that placed African and African American traditions at the heart of American public art.

Across a long career he moved with rare freedom between painting, sculpture, illustration, and teaching, forging a distinctive modern idiom and mentoring younger artists at his famed studio at 306 West 141st Street. In 1970 he modeled a bronze bust of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; two decades later it became the first likeness of an African American displayed in the White House, and in 2009 President Barack Obama placed it in the Oval Office.

Charles Alston died on the twenty-seventh of April 1977 in New York City. We honor a maker of enduring images, who gave his people a face upon the nation's walls and would not let their dignity go unseen.