Blackberry Woman

The angular grace of Blackberry Woman speaks of stoicism and constancy. The subject---an African American woman in a simple dress who is balancing a basket on her head—is one Barthé may well have seen on market day as a boy growing up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. But she is more than an echo of an image once observed. She has the frontal, linear form found in West African sculpture, which Barthé first saw in Chicago, in an exhibition during The Negro in Art Week in November 1927, when he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.