Charles White

Charles Wilbert White, Jr. was born on the second of April 1918 on the South Side of Chicago, the son of Ethelene Gary, a domestic worker who had come north in the Great Migration, and Charles White Sr., a railroad and construction laborer. His mother placed a set of oil paints in his hands when he was a boy, and the gift took hold; drawing became his refuge after his father died in 1926 and his household grew harder.

Though several schools withdrew their offers on learning he was Black, White earned a full scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying there in 1937 and 1938. He came of age within the New Deal art programs, joining the Works Progress Administration, and produced murals that placed the dignity and struggle of African American life at the center of American history — most famously "The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy" at Hampton University.

Master of pencil, brush, and lithographic stone, White rendered ordinary Black men and women with monumental gravity, honoring both their hardship and their strength, tenderness, and resolve. His work entered the great museums, from the Metropolitan to the Whitney, and he was sustained by Rosenwald and Whitney fellowships as one of the foremost social realists of his generation.

From the mid-1960s until his death, he taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, chairing the drawing department and mentoring a rising generation — among them David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall. He died in Los Angeles on the third of October 1979. He drew his people as they deserved to be seen, and taught others to do the same; his hand still guides those who came after.