The Hewitt Collection of African - American Art

John and Vivian Hewitt met in Atlanta in 1949. John began teaching at Morehouse College in 1948 and Atlanta University hired Vivian to work in the library in 1949. The Hewitts bought their first original work from Vivian's cousin, J. Eugene Grigsby. While Grigsby was in graduate school at New York University, completing a doctorate in art education under Hale Woodruff, he introduced the Hewitts to the black cultural elite in New York City. Through Grigsby, they met Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis. Adele Glasgow, John's sister, also introduced her brother and sister-in-law to the black cultural elite. Through Glasgow the couple met Elizabeth Catlett, Ernest Crichlow, Earl Hill, Hughie Lee-Smith, and Margaret Burroughs. By 1978 the Hewitts were firmly entrenched in the art world of black New York.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Alston's family moved to New York City during World War I. In Woman Washing Clothes, the posture of the figure obscures her face. 

Best known as the guiding force behind the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago, Illinois, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs received international recognition as an artist, an educator, a poet, and a social activist. Warsaw numbers among the images she made of the Polish and Moscovite church architecture which she saw on her journey through Eastern Europe. 

Primarily a figurative painter, Crichlow has concentrated on those who live in his Brooklyn neighborhood: "I try to show all of the emotions rather than just the conflict. I'm interested in clarity." One emotion, however, that stands out is entrapment. Barred by barbed wire, banisters, or railings, or impeded by narrow windows, Crichlow's figures express the limitations that many cannot overcome.

The Hewitt Collection includes four of Denmark's work which, besides demonstrating the artist's ease with a variety of media, the pieces typify his ability to render complex volumes and relationships with only a few expressive lines, as well as his sophisticated use of intense color. 

Painter and print-maker Jonathan Green was born in 1955 in Gardens Corner, South Carolina, the second of Ruth and Melvin Green's seven children. His unique vision manifested early. As the artist told journalist Rick Compton, some of his earliest interest in design and form could be traced to his childhood chore of raking the front yard: "I started becoming interested in designs I could make with the rake. After awhile, the neighbors began commenting and asking if I could do some drawings for them."

J. Eugene Grigsby's art incorporates numerous media, styles, and subjects. Primarily a painter and print-maker, he uses sources from African, Caribbean, Native American, and European art. As an internationally recognized and award-winning art educator for almost fifty years, Grigsby influenced hundreds, if not thousands, of students. His roles as both artist and educator are inseparable. 

Hill was born in New York in 1927, but spent much of his youth in Bells Mills, a town in rural Virginia. In both his teaching and his art, he attempted to foster an understanding of the humanity of the black community. 

His West Indian parents instilled a strong work ethic that when combined with his prodigious energy has resulted in his engagement with media ranging from collage to television to poetry. Nevertheless, painting and printmaking most often convey his subjects including biblical themes, women, the city, and the role of the African-American artist. 

Ronald Joseph was born in 1910 in St. Kitts in the British West Indies. His mother, a charwoman, gave the infant to Theophilus and Henrietta Joseph, with whom he moved to New York City around 1920. Joseph described his artistic project as an effort to express himself "in terms of elementals. I wanted to find out to what extent I could paint a painting from the inside-the inside of me." His work evinces a broad familiarity with modes of abstraction.

Painter Jacob Lawrence is a master storyteller as well as a master of compositional design whose complicated method of figurative abstraction challenges art aficionados without alienating laymen. Lawrence has made a career of communicating black experiences through his visual narratives based on African-American history and culture. 

Virginia Evans Smit continually expands the expectations and definations of printmaking through her innovative techniques and vision. She is also an eloquent spokesperson and teacher of art. Harlem Games is her first color woodcut. 

The most celebrated turn-of-the-century African-American artist was Henry Ossawa Tanner. He spent much of his adult life in Paris where the Pittsburgh native found a level of personal and professional acceptance that had eluded him in the United States. Today Tanner and his work have reached a new pinnacle of popularity owing to the complexity of his persona as a cosmopolitan expatriate painter and his enduring legacy as an inspirational figure for African-American artists. 

Wilson avoided racially provocative themes instead choosing to depict blacks in the spirit of modern realism-wherever and however he observed them. This was true of his paintings of the South as well as those completed between the early 1950s and his death in 1977. But the form of these later works shifted toward more colorful stylizations as a result of four trips to Haiti. 

Born in 1900 in Cairo, Illinois, Hale Woodruff, an only child, began drawing to entertain himself while his mother was at work. A talented muralist, Woodruff also excelled as a water-colorist and graphic artist. A lifelong educator, the Hewitt Collection also includes work by one of Woodruff's early students, J. Eugene Grigsby.