Charles Henry Alston | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Charles Henry Alston (1907-1977)

One of the most influential African American artists of the twentieth-century, Charles Alston made groundbreaking contributions as a teacher and as a painter. Throughout his career, Alston did not adhere to one artistic style, committed to the belief “ it is what you say rather than how you say it” that defines painting. (1) Working both figuratively and abstractly, his relentless experimentation resulted in a rich oeuvre alive with many themes from African American history, urban and rural life, and family experience. Complementing these, Alston’s Abstract Expressionist works, drawing upon features of both gesture and color field painting, exhibit a nuanced mastery of material and color. As a teacher, Alston encouraged the same kind of experimentation among his students. An exponent of the teaching philosophies of John Dewey, he encouraged his students’ experience to guide creative development. He taught first at the New Deal supported WPA Harlem Workshop, where his students included Jacob Lawrence and Alston’s cousin Romare Bearden, and in 1950 became the first African American teacher at the Art Student’s League.

The influence of the art and music of the Harlem Renaissance on Alston began early in the artist’s career. Born in North Carolina in 1907, Alston’s family moved to Harlem in 1915 as part of the Great Migration. Part of the historic movement of African Americans from the rural south toward industrial and urban jobs in northern cities, Alston’s parents were in a broad sense participants in the developments that brought about a cultural flowering and a vibrant, politically active community in Harlem. His father, Reverend Primus Alston, was a well-known minister and before his early death in 1910 had provided a model of education and leadership. In New York, Alston attended De Witt Clinton High School and on the weekends studied art at the National Academy of Art. Although he received a scholarship to Yale University School of Fine Art, Alston attended Columbia University, earning a masters degree in Library Science.

Alston quickly became an important art teacher. Appointed director of the Library School at the Carnegie Art Workshop, he taught alongside Augusta Savage, Gwendolyn Bennet, and Aaron Douglas. After losing it’s funding, the school was supported by the WPA and relocated to West 141st Street. With Alston’s guidance the school became a leading center for artistic study, stressing creativity and experimentation and offering classes to both adults and children. In addition to teaching, during the thirties Alston was the first African American appointed supervisor on the WPA, where he oversaw the creation of murals for the Harlem Hospital, Magic and Medicine and Modern Medicine. In the late thirties, Alston traveled to the Black Belt, revisiting his own Southern roots and observing and absorbing African American rural experience. Traveling alongside a New Deal Farm Security Inspector, Alston created straightforward, carefully considered portraits of Southern black farmers with attention both to expression and abstract forms.

Throughout the forties, Alston continued his mural painting. Along with Hale Woodruff he worked on a large commission for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company. In The Negro in California History: Exploration and Colonization, Caucasian, Native American, and African Americans play a cooperative part in the settlement and development of California. At the same time, throughout the thirties and early forties, he worked as an illustrator for Collier’s, The New Yorker, and Mademoiselle, with a focus on New York urban life. In 1944 Alston married a surgeon, Myra Adala Logan, and in the second part of the decade he began to work more abstractly, giving up commercial illustration entirely in 1946.

Throughout the 1950s, an era that saw the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Alston was consistently breaking down barriers faced by African American artists. In 1950 Alston began teaching, as the first African American instructor, at the Art Student’s League. In 1956 he was appointed first African American art teacher at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1958 he was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In this period, and the decade that followed, Alston continued to dissolve the boundaries American art critics such as Clement Greenberg drew between Abstract Expressionist and figurative or realist painting. At the same time, he remained deeply politically involved. During the sixties, Alston formed the group Spiral along with other African American artists in New York including Woodruff and Romare Bearden. Their meetings sought answers to serious and complex issues, such as the role of African American artists in the nation during a time of segregation and racial tension. In 1968 Alston began teaching at City College of New York where he became full professor in 1973. He continued teaching there until his death on April 27, 1977.

Alston did not receive his first major retrospective until the 1990 exhibition at the Kenkeleba Gallery in New York “ Charles Alston, Artist and Teacher.” His works are currently in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Harmon and Harriet Kelly Foundation for the Arts, among others. In 2005 the Harlem Hospital pledged to restore Alston’s murals.

1) Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 109.