Charles Wilbert White Jr. (April 2, 1918 – October 3, 1979) was a prominent American Social Realist in the visual arts who emerged from Chicago’s Black Renaissance of the 1930s. He worked in painting, drawing, lithography, and murals to chronicle the African American experience, including its struggles and triumphs, through representational art. His lifelong commitment to using his art to defend Black dignity, humanity, and freedom solidified his place as one of the most well-known artists in African American art history. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1972.
Following his death in 1979, White's work has been included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Newark Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. White's best known work is The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, a mural at Hampton University. In 2018, the centenary year of his birth, the first major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art.
Early life and education
Charles Wilbert White was born on April 2, 1918, to Ethelene Gary, a domestic worker, and Charles White Sr., a railroad and construction worker, on the South Side of Chicago. Ethelene was born in Mississippi and came north in the Great Migration. She raised Charles, and as she had no child care, she would often leave him at the public library. There, White developed an affinity for art and reading. White's mother bought him a set of oil paints when he was seven years old, which hooked White on painting. White also played music as a child, studied modern dance, and was part of theater groups; however, he stated that art was his true passion.
White's mother also took him to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he would read and look at paintings, developing a particular interest in the works of Winslow Homer and George Inness. Since White had little money growing up, he often painted on whatever surfaces he could find including shirts, cardboard, and window blinds. During the Great Depression, White tried to conceal his passion out of embarrassment; however, this ended when White got a job painting signs at the age of fourteen. White learned how to mix paints by sitting in every day for a week in an Art Institute-sponsored painting class that was taking place at a park near his home. His mother remarried when White's father died in 1926. She married a steel mill worker who would become an abusive alcoholic, especially toward White. This experience led him to escape into art. White had few opportunities for pursuing his natural talent at that time both because of the abuse and because there was little money for it. His mother began sending him to Mississippi twice a year to his aunts, Hasty and Harriet Baines, where he would learn about his heritage and African-American Southern folklore. He drew upon his own experiences, curiosity, and feelings about the neglected history of African Americans to help shape his work. An early activist, as a teenager he volunteered his talents and became the house artist at the National Negro Congress in Chicago. Later, in a union with fellow black artists, White was arrested while picketing.
White won a grant during the seventh grade to attend Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. After reading Alain Locke's book The New Negro: An Interpretation White's social views changed. He learned about important African American figures in American history and began asking his teachers why they were not taught in school, causing him to be labeled a "rebel problematic child." White did not graduate from high school, having lost a year due to his refusal to attend class after being disillusioned with the system. While he was encouraged by his art teachers to submit his artworks and won various scholarships, each award would later be declared an "error," taken away from him, and given to a white person instead. He was admitted to two art schools, but each one then pulled his acceptance because of his race.
White ultimately received a full scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he studied from 1937 to 1938. While there, White identified Mitchell Siporin, Francis Chapin, and Aaron Bohrod as his influences. He was an excellent draftsman, completing five drawing courses and earning final A grades. To pay the costs of art supplies, White became a cook, using his mother's instruction and recipes. White later became an art teacher at St. Elizabeth Catholic High School."Oral history interview with Charles W. White, 1965 March 9", Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.
Artistic practice Charles White's art chronicled the African American experience through paintings, drawings, and prints that elevated both legendary historical leaders and ordinary working-class Black people into majestic figures. Although rooted in the Black community, White considered himself a humanist. He operated from the core premise that humanity is fundamentally good, and he designed his work to bridge divides and heal the wounds of injustice and ethnic exclusion, bringing all people together. Deeply committed to a representational, figurative style at a time when the mainstream art world heavily favored abstraction. He used clear, graphic images to illuminate contemporary injustices and those of the past, and famously depicted legendary freedom fighters and leaders such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. White believed artists had a duty to actively participate in social justice and that their art must ally itself with the forces of liberation; it could not simply mirror society, but had to shape it actively, stating, "Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent." After graduating from SAIC in 1938, the 21-year-old White had his first solo show at Paragon Studios in Chicago, Illinois. That same year, he also created his first major work, which would set the future direction of his art career, when the Illinois Art Project, a state affiliate of the Works Progress Administration hired him to paint a mural for the George Cleveland Branch of the Chicago Public Library. White composed a 60-inch by 155-inch oil painting on canvas titled Five Great American Negroes, it celebrates Black history, resilience, and achievement by honoring five pivotal African American pioneers: Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson. The following year, he received a commission from the Associated Negro Press (ANP) to create another mural for the 1940 Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro at the Chicago Coliseum, part of the American Negro Exposition commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery. White created a 20-by-19-foot oil on canvas titled A History of the Negro Press. White was also included in the Exposition’s art show, Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro, 1851 to 1940, which showed selection of his works on paper, including his award-winning drawing, There Were No Crops. During this time, White was recognized as an important figure in the Chicago Black Renaissance cultural movement and taught art classes at the Southside Community Art Center.
In 1941, White moved to New Orleans to teach at Dillard University. That same year, he married sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, who also taught at Dillard. In 1942, White received the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, and it was possible for him and Catlett to move to New York City where he joined other influential African American artists and intellectuals, such as Jacob Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and W. E. B. DuBois. He also began studies at the Arts Student League, where he learned lithography and etching techniques, taking direction from renowned artist Harry Sternberg, who encouraged him to move beyond “stylization to individuation in his figures.” There, White honed his technical skills and developed a deeper vision of Black society.
While in New York, White and Catlett met Viktor Lowenfeld, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who taught at the then-Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia and invited the couple to join the faculty.Paul Von Blum, J. D. "Charles White: An Artist for Humanity’s Sake." In 1943, White and Catlett began teaching at the Hampton Institute, a historically Black college. During his tenure at Hampton, White selected an interior wall of Wainwright Auditorium as the location for his mural, The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy. He executed the work in egg tempera, measuring 12 by 17 feet, and it depicts several iconic and influential African Americans, including Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Peter Salem, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Marian Anderson. In a 1965 interview with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, White articulated his intentions: “The object was to take the contributions (of African Americans) both through physical revolt of fighting for the abolition of slavery, and also the contributions that had been made in the sciences as well as in the arts, and politics. So, to cover the contributions (of African Americans) to the many facets of American life was the key to this whole struggle.”
In 1943, White returned to New York and began teaching at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem. His teaching was interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a corporal in the all-Black 132nd Engineering Regiment. After contracting tuberculosis while assisting in abate flooding on the Mississippi River, which compromised his health for the rest of his life and limited his ability to work in oil paint, he was honorably discharged.
In 1946, Catlett received a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, enabling her and White to study in Mexico City, where they joined the influential print shop collective Taller de Gráfica Popular, known for using art to promote revolutionary social causes. During their stay, they resided with David Alfaro Siqueiros and were introduced to Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Pablo O'Higgins. Shortly after returning to New York from Mexico in 1947, the couple divorced.