Charles White

Charles Wilbert White was born in Chicago on the second of April 1918, the son of a domestic-worker mother who supported the family through three failed marriages. He won admission to the Art Institute of Chicago at sixteen on a youth scholarship, completed the four-year program in two and a half years, and was hired by the Illinois Federal Art Project in 1938 — at twenty.

His major early works were the South Side Community Art Center mural Five Great American Negroes (1939) — depicting Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson, four of whom are placed in this archive — and the Hampton University mural The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America (1943, painted on a Rosenwald Fellowship). Both murals remain in public view.

He moved to Mexico in 1946 to study with the Taller de Gráfica Popular — alongside his then-wife Elizabeth Catlett (also placed in this archive). He returned to New York and lived in Manhattan through the 1950s, sustaining himself through commercial illustration (including covers for Mainstream and Masses magazine) while producing his own social-realist drawings and prints.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1956 and joined the Otis Art Institute faculty in 1965, teaching there until his death in 1979. His students included David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, and Richard Mayhew. White was, by Marshall's testimony, the principal teacher of African American painting on the West Coast in the late twentieth century.

He died of complications from emphysema in Los Angeles on the third of October 1979, age sixty-one. A major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018-19 — Charles White: A Retrospective — restored his work to the major American museum circuit.

He is honored here as the social-realist whose drawings and murals shaped two generations of African American visual artists.