This collection showcases the rich legacies of HBCUs through artistic expression. Featured works include paintings, sculptures, murals, mixed media, prints, drawings, and fine art photography.
Hale Aspacio Woodruff was an artist and art educator known for his murals, paintings, and prints from Cairo, IL. The Yellow Bird is a cubist depiction of a yellow bird perched on a Black girl’s hand. The girl wears a blue dress with multicolored ribbons hanging from her hair.
Estella W. Johnson was an artist from New York, NY. The Way of the Flesh is a cultic depiction of a cloaked figure ascending a stairwell. The figure cloaked in white has another black cloaked figure attached to it as they pass a line of cloaked figures with bowed heads.
Donald H. Roberts was a painter, photographer, architecture professor, and U.S. Army Vet from Washington, D.C. The Uninvited depicts a technofuture centering a humanoid machine. The humanoid machine is looking toward a keyhole with refracted images surrounded by a dark void.
In the center of this drawing, a mother, wearing her child on her back, floats on the back of a tortoise, flanked by a female and male carving. Lilypads float alongside them, while fish swim throughout the pond. In the sky, a lily covers the full moon, while a turtle flies into the night, representing the connection between the terrestrial and celestial. While living in Houston, Dr. Biggers often walked along Buffalo Bayou in the morning, watching fish swim as the sun slowly replaced the moon in the sky.
Eva Booker was an artist from Atlanta, GA. The Road we Trod depicts Black American experiences with white supremacy during the Civil Rights Movement. The peace critiques the KKK, lynching, lunch counter discrimination, education inequality, job orientation, religious hypocrisy and Black people's long march toward freedom in spite of.
Harold Lloyd Neal was an artist from Detroit, MI. The Red Robe is a portrait of a woman with a red robe hanging off her shoulders. The subject's breasts are visible as she poses, legs crossed, looking away from the viewer.
In this mural, Mother Nature is attacked by oil derricks, pollution, and industrialization. Jones painted this work as a response to the rapid expansion of oil drilling throughout Texas. Jones still engages with nature, now creating wood carvings from fallen timber after Galveston storms.
Moe’s drawing shows three elderly women working together to craft a quilt. Quilting is a traditional craft of Southern Black women, and also an important community activity. Moe’s composition is set against black paper and drawn all in white, with the exception of the vibrant colors of the quilt. This shows the richness of the communities and lives embodied in the quilt.
William Artis was a sculptor from Washington, NC. The Quiet One is a limestone sculpture depicting an introverted person. The figure has their head resting on their knees as their hands hold their knees to their chest, displaying a posture of solitude and isolation.
William Artis was a sculptor from Washington, NC. The Pugilist is a limestone sculpture of a Black boxer. Artis chiseled immense detail into the sculpture, capturing the intensity of his expression and hair texture.
A political cartoon of a courtroom scene with the caption “The Black Panther Party Always Remembers Its Enemies.” The jury, judge, secretary, and bailiff are all depicted as pigs, while the lawyer and defendant are depicted as people. Numbers 8 and 9 from the Black Panther Party Ten Point Program are printed at the bottom of the page.
Frederick C. Flemister was an artist from Jackson, GA. The Mourners is an expressionist painting that portrays a group of Black people mourning a lynching victim. It emulates the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion, showing two veiled women holding the victim while three others mourn separately. There is a cut noose hanging from a tree in the background.
Sifuentes' print depicts the exterior of an old church. An adult and small child are seen entering the church, which lies at the end of a winding path. Chickens are seen pecking at the ground, lending a sense of place to this rural scene. Churches and other religious imagery appear frequently in the artwork of Texas Southern students. Sifuentes later went on to become an art professor at Texas Southern.
Charoennimuang’s Hannah Hall mural draws inspiration from her birth country, Thailand. In her own words, it “is a Thai style mural-painting that expresses the love of two human beings…surrounded by the beauty of nature…. The man and woman are dressed up in Thai-style like the old days…neatly weaved and knitted in a Thai pattern…made of Thai silk.” The study for this mural included a dragon in the upper right corner that was cut from the final design.
Ernest Hardman was a painter from Detroit, MI. The Last Supper #2 is an abstract depiction of Jesus and His disciples sitting around a table. Unlike The Last Supper, Hardman decenters Jesus and creates a euphony of shape and color that resembles men debating around a table.
James Dallas Parks, born in St. Louis, Missouri, was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and art historian. The Knockout depicts the iconic photograph of the Muhammed Ali versus Sonny Liston boxing match. Ali stands in a victor’s stance above Liston as he struggles to rise.
Cecil D Nelson Jr. was a 20th-century painter born in Champaign, IL. The Kitemakers shows two children sitting in a field before a log. A white boy on the left wearing a red shirt holds the kite while looking at a young Black boy on the right wearing a blue shirt. An orange kite flies in the background near two gas tanks and a grain bin.
Clarence Laudric Shivers was an artist and career military man who participated in the Tuskegee Program from St. Louis, MO. The House by the Side of the Road depicts a rural home behind a picket fence. This piece conveys rural life as a man lounges on a tree while clothes dry on the line.
Washington’s mural is a timeline of Black education. On the left, he depicts slavery and lynching above enslaved people secretly reading. In the center, students write “Emancipation Proclamation” and Booker T. Washington delivers his "Atlanta Compromise" speech. The right depicts emerging Black professionals.
This work, by Oliver Parson, is a calm and dreamlike scene of a child sitting in a prairie, as an angel and a person both race towards him. Both figures may represent salvation; the person aims to rescue him from death, while the angel tries to save him from Earth. A faint glow emanates from the child.
Eva Booker was an artist from Atlanta, GA. The Girls is an abstract depiction of a group of girls with blonde hair, red bikini tops, and low-waisted skirts.
Howard E. Lewis was an Art professor and Korean War veteran from Columbus, OH. The Family is a freestanding Plaster sculpture of a family in an embrace. The father towers over his wife and child, looking down at them as his wife leans into his chest and their son into hers.
Sampson’s print shows a large, colorful dog drinking from a pail of water. The setting appears rural, with a wooden fence and a large tree in the background. Sampson’s artwork in TSU’s permanent collection often depicts nature and rural homes. More broadly, animals and the natural world are frequent subjects of the artwork of TSU students.
Frederick D. Jones, Jr. was a mid-twentieth-century artist from South Carolina. The Daughter of Eve depicts a woman wearing a ripped blue top, red lipstick, a snake bracelet, a red scarf, and a white magnolia in her hair. She holds a red apple and a green leaf and stares toward the viewer. Behind her is a white horse, a yellow tent, and a man dancing.
Parson's print shows a face with closed eyes and a solemn expression on its face. In the background, three crosses stand ominously, alluding to the crosses where Jesus, Dismus, and Gestas were crucified. Dark, crosshatched swirls fill the entire composition. Parson and other TSU students learned the crosshatching technique from Dr. Biggers and used it to create smooth, detailed shapes.
Parson’s painting shows a young girl shielding her face. To the left, a crow holds a coin and a dollar bill is on a fishing line; to the right Jesus is crucified, below a perched crow. The crows may allude to Jim Crow, which made racism law from after the Civil War until the 1960s; crows are also a symbol of death. The dollar bill as bait perhaps suggests the corrupting nature of money.
Marjorie W. Brown, born in North Carolina, was an artist who studied art at Spelman College. The City Is A Pattern is a watercolor artwork that shows the linear perspective of a city. Brown uses repeating lines and geometric shapes for buildings, windows, signs, and sidewalks to show a consistent landscape pattern.
A commentary on the conflict between technology and progress, history and culture, Davis painted this mural in response to the destruction of several Hannah Hall murals to create windows into a new computer lab. Davis’ own mural was later damaged by subsequent construction, as foreseen in its design.
Maurice Strider was an artist and art educator from Lexington, KY. The Carnival shows a carnival landscape with crowds of abstracted human figures walking around and riding a Ferris wheel. The hue composition of blue, pink, and gray is similar to Cubism.
William E. Rice was an artist from Tallahassee, FL. The Capitol is a perspective painting of a residential area beside a Capitol building. In the foreground are several houses with multi-colored trees between them; in the background are larger buildings, including the Capitol, under a cloudy blue sky.
