Charles Alston

Charles Henry Alston was born on the twenty-eighth of November 1907 at Charlotte, North Carolina, the third of five children of the Reverend Primus Priss Alston — an Episcopal priest of the African Episcopal Church at Charlotte — and Anna Elizabeth Miller Alston. The Alston household at Charlotte was the principal Black Episcopal household of the city of the period.

His father died in 1910 when Alston was three, and his mother remarried Harry Bearden in 1913 — the union that gave Alston a younger half-cousin, the painter Romare Bearden (placed in this archive), to whom Alston was a lifelong mentor and collaborator.

The family moved to Harlem in 1915 and Alston was placed at the Harlem Public School 179 and the Dewitt Clinton High School at the Bronx. He took the bachelor’s in fine arts at Columbia University in 1929 — among the first Black bachelor’s graduates of the Columbia art department — and the master’s in art education at Columbia Teachers College in 1931.

He was hired in 1929 at the Utopia Children’s House at the Harlem 138th Street Y. M. C. A. as art instructor, and rose by 1934 to artistic director of the Utopia Children’s House. Alston taught from the directorship through the closing years of the 1920s and the 1930s a generation of Harlem Renaissance children including Jacob Lawrence (placed in this archive), Romare Bearden, and the cellist Kermit Moore.

He was named on the fifth of August 1935 the first African American supervisor of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration — assigned the supervision of the mural project at the Harlem Hospital — and supervised across 1936 to 1940 the two-panel fresco cycle Magic in Medicine and Modern Medicine for the Harlem Hospital. The fresco cycle was the first Federal Art Project public commission to a Black supervisor and was the first WPA mural completed at a major American hospital.

He completed in 1970 the bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) — the first sculpture of a Black American installed at the White House. The bust was unveiled at the East Wing of the White House on the second of February 1970 by President Richard Nixon and Coretta Scott King.

He completed additionally the principal abstract and figurative paintings of the post-war period — among them the Family series (1955), the Walking series (1958), and the Negro Family in America series (1972) — and the principal commissioned commercial illustrations of the period for Time, Fortune, The Saturday Evening Post and Mademoiselle.

He taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1950 to 1970 and at the City College of New York from 1969 to 1977.

He died at Manhattan on the twenty-seventh of April 1977 of complications of cancer, at sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the first Black Federal Art Project supervisor.