My time spent aimlessly wandering the galleries of the National Portrait Gallery created a familiarity with the work of Laura Wheeler Waring. However, I cannot say that I was familiar with her story, until recently.
Two of her portraits that grace the walls of NPG are featured in this post. I snapped these pics with my #canon while wandering. Her figures are of prominent African Americans, whom I associate with the late Harlem Renaissance up to the post WW2. They are posed in stately manners that project a very dignified personage of an individual who has had significant life experiences. Once I began to dig into the background of these portraits, I learned why this actually was a pretty good assessment, if I must pat myself on the back.
Laura Wheeler Waring was an African American woman born to an upper middle class, educated family during Gilded Age America in New England. This was a time when, post reconstruction, America was experiencing a surge in its own cultural, economic and industrial growth. Many Americans were seeing the economic benefits of education and industrialization. This led to an increase in Americans developing, exploring and experiencing more cultural pursuits, such as indulgences in the arts.
While to a lesser degree than white Americans, factions of African Americans were apart of this Gilded Age affluent period in society. Wheeler-Waring grew up in this environment. Her background places her within the category that W.E.B. DuBois termed “The Talented Tenth” (although his essay of this same title, referenced men as the group of “negros” who would save the “negro” race). She graduated with honors from high school in her native Hartford, CT. Very few African American women graduated from high school at this time. Having recognized their daughter’s artistic sensibilities early in life, her parents encouraged her and sent her to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Upon graduating, she founded the art and music departments at Cheyney University, one of the two HBCUs (Historically Black College and University) in PA outside of Philadelphia, where she worked for 30 years. Additionally, she married Walter Waring, a professor at Lincoln University in Philadelphia, the other Pennsylvania HBCU, in the early 1920s.
The details of Laura wheeler Waring’s personal life are not well known. She shied away from publicity and public appearances. However, her years at Cheyney were not just teaching years. They were painting years. Her oeuvre included landscapes, still life paintings, as well as portraiture. Many of her works were shown in museums across the country including the Smithsonian Institute and The Chicago Institute of Art. However, most notably she was commissioned by the Harmon Foundation of NYC to contribute to the series “Portraits of Outstanding American Citizens of Negro Origin”.
For this commission, she produced several portraits, some of which have been noted as her best work. Her painting style is graceful, with elegant brush strokes that provide vivid swaths of color dancing across the canvas. Her techniques of blending and highlighting serve her subjects well. Her figures exude confidence and dignity born of a lifetime of experiences and this shows up in her work. This is where her presence as a civil rights activist also showed through.
While it appears that she was never an outright civil rights activist leader, she used her portraits and the quiet dignity of the sitters as a strategy to redefine the narrative of negative stereotypes of African Americans at that time. Her paintings of prominent African Americans within the arts, as well as other fields served as a record of the accomplishments of African Americans at that time as well as in the past. This was her way of fighting the machine of American racism. However, she did this in her own way: with dignity and with grace.
My admiration for Laura Wheeler Waring is great. In my constant striving to evolve towards being a better global citizen, a seeker of knowledge and and an art historian, I strive to represent myself, women and African Americans with a measure of dignity and grace.
These are on my list of #goals.
For more info on Laura Wheeler Waring, check out these sources across the world wide web.
https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/arts-humanities/laura-wheeler-waring/#.W_9LjJNKhMU
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/559191
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Laura-Wheeler-Waring
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