Hale Woodruff

Hale Aspacio Woodruff was born on the twenty-sixth of August 1900 at Cairo, Illinois, the only son of George Woodruff — a Black saw-mill worker — and Augusta Bell Woodruff, a domestic. He was raised by his widowed mother at Nashville, Tennessee from age four when his father died, and educated at the Nashville Pearl High School — the principal Black high school of the city.

He enrolled in 1920 at the John Herron Art Institute at Indianapolis — the principal Indiana art school of the period — and completed the four-year programme there in 1926. He was the only Black student at the Institute across his six years.

He took the further European study on a Harmon Foundation–Rosenwald Fellowship from 1927 to 1931 at the Académie Scandinave at Paris under the principal French academic painter Othon Friesz, and at the Académie Moderne at Paris and the post-Cubist Parisian studio of Henry Ossawa Tanner (placed in this archive) at the Boulevard Saint-Jacques.

He was hired in 1931 at thirty-one at the Atlanta University at Atlanta, Georgia by the Atlanta University president John Hope as founding chair of the Department of Art. He held the position for fifteen years until 1946, during which he established the Atlanta University Annual Negro Art Exhibitions of 1942–1970 — the principal Black-art national exhibition of the segregation era and the principal training ground of two generations of Black American artists.

He undertook in 1935 a six-month study tour at the Diego Rivera studio at Mexico City — at the height of the Mexican Muralist movement — and absorbed across the period the Mexican fresco programme that would inform the rest of his mural work.

He completed in 1939 the principal mural cycle of his career — the three-panel fresco cycle The Amistad Murals for the Savery Library of the Talladega College at Talladega, Alabama, on the 1839 mutiny of the Spanish slave-trading schooner La Amistad. The three panels — The Mutiny on the Amistad, The Trial of the Captives, and The Return Voyage to Sierra Leone — were unveiled at the Savery Library on the fifth of April 1939 on the centenary of the Cinqué uprising.

He completed additionally the six-panel mural cycle for the Atlanta University Library (1942) and the four-panel cycle The Art of the Negro for the Trevor Arnett Library at the Atlanta University (1950).

He was appointed in 1946 to the New York University Department of Art Education and held the position for twenty-two years until 1968.

He died at New York on the sixth of September 1980 of complications of stroke, at eighty.

He is honored here as the founder of the Atlanta University Annual.