"Lois-Mailou-Jones"(November 3,1905-June 9.1998)

Was an artist who painted  and influenced other during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond,during her long teaching and artistic career.Lois

was the only African-American painter of the 1930s & 1940s to achieve fame abroad,and the earliest whose subjects extend beyond the realm of portraiture.She was born in Boston Massachusetts and is buried on Martha's Vineyard in the Oak Bluffs Cemetery.


Her daddy,Thomas Vreeland Jones was a building superintendent who later became a lawyer after becoming the first African American to earn a law degree from Suffolk Law School,her mama Carolyn Jones was cosmetologist.

Some of her art work.

Lois parents encouraged her her to draw and paint as a child in water color.During childhood her mama took her and her brother to Martha's Vineyard where she became lifelong friends with novelist Dorothy West.She attended  The High School of Practical Arts in Boston.Meanwhile she took Boston Museum of Fine Arts evening classes and worked as an apprentice in constume design.


Lois held her first solo exhibition at the age of 17.From 1923-1927 she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston studying design,taking night courses at the Boston Normal Art School.Lois purchased graduate work at the Design Art School and Harvard University.She continued her education even after beginning work,attending classes at Columbia University and receiving her bachelor's degree from Howard University in 1945,graduating magna cum laude.


In 1928 she was hired by Charlotte Hawkins Brown after some initial reservations,and founded the art department at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina.As a prep school teacher Lois coached a basketball team,taught Folk Dancing and played the Piano for church services. Only one later,she was recruited to join the art department at Howard University in Washington D.C.,and remained as professor of design and watercolor painting until her retirement in 1977.While developing her own work as an artist,she was also known as an outstanding mentor.


In 1934 she met Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel,who would become a prominent Haitian artist,while both were graduate students at Columbia University.They corresponded for almost twenty years before marrying in the south France in 1953.Louis & Pierre lived in Washington,D.C. and Haiti.They had no children.Pierre died in 1982.


In the early 1930s Louis exhibited with the William Harmon Foundation and other institutions,produced plays and dramatic presentations and began study of masks from various cultures.In 1937 she received a fellowship to study in Paris at the Academie Julian.During one year's time she produced over 30 watercolors.She returned to Howard Universityand began teaching watercolor painting.Louis said of her time in Paris:




THE French were so inspiring.The people would stand and watch me and say 'mademoiselle,you are so wonderful.'In other words the color of my skin didn't matter in Paris and that was one of the main reasons why I think was encouraged to really think I was talented.


In 1938 Louis produced Les Fetiches (1938) a stunning,African inspired oil which is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum,her Les Fetiches was instrumental in transitioning negritude'-a distincity francophone artistic phenomenon-from the predominantly literary realm into the visual.Lois work provided an important visual link to Negritude authors including Aime Cesaire,Leon Damas,and Leopold Sedar Senghor.It was one of her best known works,and her first piece which combined traditional African forms with Western techniques and materials to create a vibrant and compelling work.She also completed Parisian Beggar Woman with text supplied by Langston Hughes.


Her maine source of inspiration was Celine Marie Tabary,also a painter,whom she worked with for many years.Celine subbited Lois paintings for consideration for jury prizes since works by African-American artists were not always accepted.Lois traveled extensively with Celine,including to the South of France,and they frequently painted each other.They taught art in the 1940s.


In the 1940s and early 1950s Lois exhibited at the Phillips Collection,Seattle Museum of Art,National Academy of Design the Barnet Aden Gallery,Pennsylvania's Lincoln University,Howard University galleries in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.In 1952 Lois Maliou Jones Peintures 1937-1951,a collection of more than 100 reproductions of her French paintings,was published.


In 1954 Lois was a guest professor at Centre D'Art and Foyer des Artes Plastiques in Port-au-Prince,Haiti where the government invited her to paint Haitian people and landscapes.He work became energized by the bright colors.She and her husband returned there during summers for the next several years,in addition to trips to France.There she completed "Pleasant girl,Haiti" and also exhibited her work.In 1955 she unveiled portraits of the Haitian president and his wife commissioned by United States President Dwight David Eisenhower.


Lois numerious oils and watercolors inspired by Haiti are probably her most widely known works.In them her affinity for bright colors,her personal understandings of Cubism's basic principles and search for a distinctly style reached apogee.In many of her pieces one can see see the influence of the Haitian Culture,with its African influences,which reinvigorated the way she looked at the world.These include Ode toKinshasa and Ubi Girl from Tai.Her work became more abstract and hard-edged,after her marriage to Pierre Noel.Her impressionist techniques gave way to a spirited,richly patterned and brilliantly colored style.


In 1962 she initiated Howard University's first art student tour of France,including study at Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and guided several more tours over th years.In the 1960s she exhibited at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts,Boston Cornell University,and galleries in France,New York and Washington D.C.


In 1968 Lois  documented work and and interviews of contemporary Haitian artists for Howard University's "The Black Visual Arts" research grant.And continued the project in 1969 and 1970,traveling to eleven African countries.Her report Contemporary African Art was published in 1970 & 1971 she delivered 1000 slides and other materials to the University as fulfillment of the project.In 1973-74 she she researched "Women artists of the Caribbean and Afro-American Artists.


Her research inspired Lois to synthesize a body of designs and motifs that she combined in large,complex compositions.Lois return to Africa themes in her work of the past several decades coincided with the African American expressionistic movement in the United States during the 1960s.Skillfully integrating aspects of  African masks,figures,and textiles into her vibrant paintings,Lois continued to produce exciting new works at an astonishing rate of speed,even in her late eighties.In her nineties,Lois still painted Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton collected of her island one of island landscapes Breezy Day at Gay Head while they were at the White House.