Biggers, John Thomas, 1924-2001..African-American painter and printmaker
http://www.getty.edu/artsednet/resources/Biggers/
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Texas Southern University, Houston, is an African American artist widely acclaimed for his complex, symbolic murals based on African American and African cultural themes. Throughout his long career, he continued to work as an artist while serving as the founder and head of the art department at Texas Southern University in Houston. Biggers, who studied under famed art educator Viktor Lowenfeld at Pennsylvania State University, recently was honored by a major retrospective of his work that traveled to seven art museums around the United States.
The Web of Life ; the art of John Biggers
Artist Biography
Dr. John Thomas Biggers is a gifted, narrative artist widely acclaimed for his complex, symbolic murals based on African American and African cultural themes. Throughout his long career, he continued to work as an artist while serving as the founder and head of the art department at Texas Southern University in Houston. Few artists have been both outstanding practicing artists and effective educators, yet Biggers successfully maintained his dual careers until his 1983 retirement from teaching allowed him to turn his full energies to his artwork.
Biggers, who studied under famed art educator Viktor Lowenfeld at Hampton Institute and Pennsylvania State University, recently was honored by a major retrospective of his work that traveled to seven art museums across the United States. (The hosting museums were The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Cincinnati Art Museum; Hampton University Museum; North Carolina Museum of Art; Wadsworth Atheneum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and California Afro-American Museum.) Many art teachers will also be familiar with Biggers's lithograph The Upper Room, one of five reproductions found in the African American MAPS (Multicultural Art Print Series) developed by the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and available through Crystal Productions.
Biggers was born on April 13, 1924, in Gastonia, North Carolina, in a shotgun house built by his father. He was the youngest of seven children born to Paul and Cora Biggers. His father was, at various times, a Baptist preacher, schoolteacher, principal of a three-room school, shoemaker, and farmer. His mother did laundry and cooked for white families. Biggers grew up in a tightly knit family in which the value of education and creative endeavors were paramount. His father, in addition to his other responsibilities, was skilled in carpentry, and his mother excelled at cooking, sewing, and quiltmaking.
Paul Biggers, who had lost a leg in a sawmill accident while working at a plantation at the tender age of six, suffered from diabetes as an adult. He died in 1937 when John Biggers was only thirteen. After her husband died, Cora Biggers took a position as a matron in an orphanage for black children and sent John and his brother Joe to Lincoln Academy, a boarding school that educated black students to be teachers and ministers.
After graduation from Lincoln, Biggers entered Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, a black college in Virginia, planning to study the practical trade of plumbing (he included boiler room drawings with his application). During his first year there, he enrolled in an art class taught by the influential art educator Viktor Lowenfeld. Lowenfeld was a Jewish refugee from Austria who had been forced to leave his country in 1939 because of Nazi persecution. Although he later contributed his theoretical stages of artistic development to art education, his first position in the United States was as a guest lecturer at Harvard University for a year. From Harvard he moved to Hampton Institute, accepting a position as an associate professor of industrial arts. No stranger to racial prejudice, Lowenfeld was concerned with altering his students' perceptions toward their African heritage by investigating the social and religious context of African art.
Lowenfeld encouraged his students to learn about the art and culture of their own heritage and introduced them to African sculpture and works by other African American artists. The Hampton Museum had a significant collection of African art, objects, and artifacts, and the college was one of the first institutions in the country to collect such work. Lowenfeld was familiar with African art as he had been the director of an African art museum in Vienna. He emphasized the cultural context in which the work was created and encouraged his students to include their heritage in their art and to paint from their own experiences. Biggers, who had transferred to the art program by this time, recalls that, at first, he thought the work was "ugly, unlike anything I had seen before."
Over time, Lowenfeld became a mentor and close friend to Biggers. He included Dying Soldier, a mural by Biggers, in Young Negro Art, an exhibition of Hampton student work he organized for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Biggers illustrated the first edition of Lowenfeld's text, Creative and Mental Growth. Lowenfeld also shared with Biggers his feelings about being a Jew and a refugee.
In From Swastika to Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars Teach at Historically Black Colleges, Biggers speaks of an incident in which Lowenfeld received a fateful letter:
This was a terrifying experience, because I had never seen him with this kind of turmoil. He had opened the letter, it came from the State Department, reporting to him the Nazi burning of some of his family members. He looked at me and said, they aren't killing you, they segregate you, they discriminate, but they aren't killing you for being black. So I had to really get some things straight in my head, because up to this point, I thought it was a racial conflict between blacks and whites, but that wasn't it at all.
While at Hampton, Biggers was introduced to the art of the American Regionalists Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, and Harry Sternberg and the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. He also was influenced by figures prominent in the Harlem Renaissance -- writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, and the artists William Artis, Hale Woodruff, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White. While painting a mural on the Hampton campus, The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, White became a mentor to Biggers. A portrait of Biggers appears in the mural.In 1943 Biggers was drafted into a segregated navy. On his discharge in 1945, he returned to Hampton for a semester then followed Lowenfeld to Pennsylvania State University. In 1948 Biggers received B.S. and M.S. degrees and married Hazel Hales. In 1949 he moved to Houston, where he became the founding chairman of the art department at Texas Southern University, then called Texas State University for Negroes. He held that position for thirty-four years.
Biggers was joined at Texas Southern University by the artists Joseph Mack and Carroll Simms. The three continued the philosophic approach of Hampton, urging students to explore their African American heritage and to draw the themes of their art from their own experience. Biggers initiated a mural program for art majors in which every senior student was expected to complete a mural on campus: there are now 114 such murals on the Texas Southern campus.
In 1957 Biggers made his first trip to Africa, one of the first American black artists to do so, to study African traditions and culture. With the help of a grant from UNESCO, Biggers and his wife traveled for six months in Ghana, Benin (then called Dahomey), Nigeria, and Togo in West Africa. During his travels he tried to photograph and sketch all that he saw: men and women in the markets, the shrines, fishermen, boys and girls -- people involved in activities of everyday life.
The experience transformed his life and work. On his return, Biggers created a visual diary of his travels, Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa. The book, published by the University of Texas Press in 1962, included eighty-nine drawings and accompanying text. In Black Art, Ancestral Legacy, Alvia Wardlaw wrote about Biggers's resulting works such as Three Kings and Jubilee: "That such glorious celebrations of the beauty and power of African culture were executed in the heart of segregated Texas is testimony to the enormous impact Africa had on this talented artist."
Before his retirement in 1983, Biggers left his own legacy for Texas Southern University in the form of a fifty-foot mural in the student center. Titled Family Unity, the mural depicts the progression of birth, death, and the continuity of heritage. A detail of the mural became the focus of a later lithograph, The Upper Room. Since his retirement, Biggers has devoted all his time to his art.
Artist Chronology
1924 Born on April 13 in Gastonia, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children.
1937 Father, Paul Andrew Biggers, dies.
1941 Enters Hampton Institute, Virginia; studies with Viktor Lowenfeld.
1943-45 In U.S. Navy.
1946 Returns to Hampton Institute for one semester, then transfers to Pennsylvania State University to follow Lowenfeld.
1948 Receives B.S. and M.S. in art education; marries Hazel Hales.
1949 Accepts position as associate professor and department head at Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas State University) in Houston; establishes art department.
1952 Receives Neiman Marcus Company Prize for Drawing, Dallas Museum of Art.
1954 Receives Ed.D. in art education, Pennsylvania State University.
1957 Receives UNESCO fellowship; travels to Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey, also Rome, Paris, and London.
1962 Publishes Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa.
1975 Mother, Cora Finger Biggers, dies.
1983 Retires from teaching.
1995 The Art of John Biggers: View From the Upper Room, retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
JOHN T. BIGGERS
Muralist (1924-2001)The astounding world of John T. Biggers began 76 years ago near Crowders Mountain in the town of Gastonia, North Carolina. His prolific career as a visual artist is nothing less than spectacular. John Biggers wanted, as an artist, to experience it all. He became a muralist, draftsman, sculptor, lithographer, and a painter using an array of different mediums. Added to this, he became a philosopher and teacher of the arts. His interpretation of the African-American experience is said "to possess an uncommon intensity of the soul." While a student at Hampton Institute (Virginia) in 1941, Biggers took a drawing class with Prof. Viktor Lowenfeld, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi Germany. Prof. Lowenfeld also taught Biggers about racial prejudice and oppression during his course. This helped Biggers in his decision toward becoming a future artist and teacher by emphasizing his known African heritage. Prof. Lowenfeld also brought to Hampton Institute two inspirational and talented black artists named CHARLES WHITE, painter, and ELIZABETH CATLETT, sculptor. These role models set the pace for Bigger's motivation and career as an artist. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Biggers went on to earn a B.A. and M.A. at Penn State. The education of John Biggers by Charles White and Prof. Lowenfeld convinced him to become a muralist. He took on "the Mexican concept of the mural as an educational tool to inform an impoverished people of their history and to build their self-esteem." John Biggers began to take on art as an expressive subject dealing with beauty, dignity, and value in the world of African American people. Biggers went on to make art real by teaching it to future artists. In 1949, he established one of the few existing and exclusive art departments for African-American students at Texas Southern University in Houston. Biggers saw to it that his works and those of his students reflected the everyday life of people living and connecting to the world around them. As a tribute to the spirit of John Biggers, his THE ART OF JOHN BIGGERS: VIEW FROM THE UPPER ROOM toured five museums, ending in Boston, Mass. in April of 1997. He died in 2001 at the age of 76.
Some of his notable works include:
WASHER WOMAN, pencil drawing, 1945
THE TIME OF EDE, conti crayon, 1964
GHANAIAN WASHER WOMAN, mixed media, 1960
SHOTGUN THIRD WARD, #1, 1966 at the National Museum of American Art
Like an African griot, or teacher, John Biggers is a storyteller. Using a visual language inspired by ancient astronomy and African symbolic imagery, he creates murals, drawings, paintings, and sculpture that derive their power from a deeply felt commitment to the human community.
Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1924, John Biggers has used his gifts as a teacher and artist to shape the image of black people, whether Southern or African, as humane, universal spirits. Using the powerful language of murals, and his interest in sacred geometry, Biggers has synthesized influences from American regionalism, African-American figurative tradition, African and Native American sources into uniquely intriguing aesthetic and iconographic works. His drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures establish him as an important and original American artist, especially in the field of murals.
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/online/biggers/biggers5.html
Aunt Dicy Tales: Snuff Dipping Tales of The Texas Negro by J. Mason Brewer,
foreword by Roy Bedichek (limited edition),1956.
© 1999 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
ISBN 0-87959-140-4
from ArtCyclopedia
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