"James Lesesne Wells" (November 2,1902-January 20,1993)

Some of his art work.

Was an educator,artist and photographer.From Atlanta,Georgia,his

daddy was a baptist minister and his mama a teacher.The family moved to Florida.James first experience as artist was through his mama,who encouraged him to help out with art instruction in her kindergarten classes.At thirteen,he won his first prize in painting and a second prize in woodworking at the Florida State Fair.James studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania before transferring to Columbia University in New York,where he majored in art.His exposure to an exhibition of African sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum of Art inspired him.He was also greatly influenced by the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and the German Expressionists:Ernst Kircher,Kari Schmidt-Rottiuff,Ott Muller,& Emile Nolde.Unlike most of contemporaries,he saw prints as a major art form.After graduation,James created block prints to illustrate articles & publications such as Willis Richardson's plays and Pageants of Negro Life.In April 1929 his work was included in an exhibition of "international Modernists"at the New Art Circle Gallery.Later that year,he was invited to join the faculty at Howard University as a crafts teacher.James taught clay modeling,ceramics,sculpture,metal &block printing.After two years he convinced the school that he and linoleum cutting belonged in the College of Fine Arts.James was an innovator in the field of printmaking.After World War II,he spent a sabbatical year working in Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17.During the 1950s & 1960s,he taught and won many art prizes.As an activists,James joined his brother-in-law Eugene Davidson,president of the local NAACP,chapter,in protesting segregation  in lunch counters,stores,and the nearly all white police department and as a result, was often harassed.This persecution probably accounted for some of the religious themes in his work.James retired from Howard University in 1968,painting and making prints into his eighties.Color linoleum prints became his specialty.In 1986,the Washington Project for the Arts assembled a major exhibition of his work,and in 1973,Fisk University mounted another one-man show.His work Flight into Egypt was exhibited in 1990 in the Harmon's "Against the Odds"exhibition and still looked as modern as it had when it was created.James was a leading graphic artist and art teacher,whose work reflected the vitality of the Harlem Renaissance.