Her First Communion

Josephine Crawford was one of the most experimental painters in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1920s, she traveled to Paris to study with the modern French painter André Lohte. Crawford’s paintings of New Orleans marry the stark, geometric forms of modern art with sensitive emotional depictions of the city’s people and diverse culture. While artists like Georgia O’Keeffe are widely recognized for their unique contributions to modern art, regional Southern artists like Crawford are only just being recognized for their important contributions to the development of American modernism. In New Orleans, Crawford’s work was widely praised for capturing the city’s local culture as well as bringing a more international perspective to the city’s art, with The Times Picayune praising Crawford as “a painter not [just] for New Orleans, but the world.”