Lois Mailou Jones

Loïs Mailou Jones was born in Boston on the third of November 1905. She took her undergraduate degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1927), her graduate study in design at the Designers Art School in Boston (1928), and further graduate training at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1937-38.

She joined the faculty of the Howard University Art Department in 1930 and remained there for forty-seven years until her retirement in 1977. She taught painting and design at Howard alongside James Porter, James Wells, and James Lesesne Wells, training successive generations of African American visual artists including David Driskell, Sylvia Snowden, and Elizabeth Catlett (also placed in this archive — though Catlett had transferred to Iowa for her graduate degree).

Her painting evolved across her seventy-year career through three distinct modes: French-influenced post-Impressionist landscapes and still lifes of the 1930s and 1940s, the dense African-mask and ritual-figure paintings of her Haitian and Pan-African period from the late 1940s through the 1960s (her marriage to the Haitian graphic designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël in 1953 deepened her engagement with Haitian art), and the Caribbean-and-African textile-pattern compositions of her later decades.

She was the first African American to exhibit at the Société des Artistes Français at the Paris Salon in 1937 (the painting Les Fétiches received favorable critical notices). Her paintings entered the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Schomburg Center.

She died at her home in Washington, D.C., on the ninth of June 1998, age ninety-two.

She is honored here as the painter and Howard professor whose seventy-year career and forty-seven-year tenure trained the African American visual tradition.