Hale Woodruff
1900 — 1980 · Painter of the Amistad murals; builder of Atlanta's art annuals; teacher of a generation from Talladega to NYU
Hale Aspacio Woodruff was born on the twenty-sixth of August 1900 at Cairo, Illinois, and raised at Nashville by his widowed mother Augusta, a domestic worker who drew, and taught her son to. He drew cartoons for the Pearl High School paper, studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis through the early 1920s, and in 1926 took the Harmon Foundation's bronze award — the prize that carried him to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Scandinave and Académie Moderne from 1927 to 1931 and sought out Henry Ossawa Tanner in France.
In 1931 John Hope called him to Atlanta University as its first art professor, and for fifteen years he built the program — teaching at Spelman and Morehouse besides — and in 1942 founded the Atlanta University Annuals, the national exhibitions that gave Black artists a juried stage for twenty-nine years, until 1970. A Columbia fellowship sent him to Mexico in the summer of 1936 to study mural craft with Diego Rivera, and the lesson bore its great fruit at Talladega College: the Amistad murals of the Savery Library, commissioned in 1938 and dedicated in 1939, the mutiny's centennial year — the revolt, the trial, the return home, painted in oil on canvas — with three further panels following by 1942.
With Charles Alston he painted The Negro in California History at Los Angeles in 1949, and in 1950 and 1951 came his other monument: The Art of the Negro, six twelve-foot panels for Atlanta University's Trevor Arnett Library, unveiled in 1952 — the whole lineage of Black art, from its African sources, painted onto the walls of a Black university.
From 1946 he professed at New York University, teaching until his 1968 retirement, and on the fifth of July 1963 he co-founded Spiral with Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis — the collective that asked what Black artists owed the freedom movement. He died at New York on the sixth of September 1980, at eighty. Honored be Hale Woodruff, who painted the revolt on the library wall and opened the gallery doors behind him.
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