This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Laura Wheeler Waring.
Born: 16 May 1887, United States
Died: 3 February 1948
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Laura Wheeler
With Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick, and Augusta Savage, Waring is one of the foremost Black American female artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Taking her stylistic lead from the likes of Monet, Manet, Corot and Cézanne, Waring emerged, with Aaron Douglass and Beauford Delaney, as one of the most influential portrait painters associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the influential movement in African American literary, artistic, and cultural history that thrived between 1918 and the late 1930s. Challenging racial stereotypes, she built her reputation on portraits of prominent African Americans which she executed with consummate skill and imagination. Waring is equally respected for her life-long dedication to the advancement of Black culture and history through her role as director of arts education programs at America’s oldest Black teaching institutions.
Childhood
Laura Wheeler Waring was the fourth of six children born to Reverend Robert Foster Wheeler, pastor of Talcott Street Congregational Church (formerly the African Religious Society), the first all-Black church in Connecticut, and Mary (née Freeman) Wheeler, a teacher and amateur artist. Laura’s maternal grandfather, Amos Noë Freeman, was a Presbyterian minister, and her maternal grandmother, Christiana Williams Freeman, was an anti-slavery activist who worked as part of the Underground Railroad (the given name to a secret network of escape routes and safe houses run by abolitionists) in Portland, Maine, and Brooklyn, New York. Waring’s family (she changed her name from Wheeler to Waring after her marriage) was well-educated (her father and mother had graduated respectively from Howard University and Oberlin College) with five generations before her earning college diplomas.
In classes run by her father’s church, Waring and the other children were taught about African history (as-well-as bible classes) and her parents regularly took their children to Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and other local art events. Indeed, such was their love or art, the Wheeler’s would regularly gather around their dining room table to draw together. Art critic Patricia Campbell Carlson writes “[Waring] would even bribe her brothers and sisters with peppermints to get them to pose for her. And although she knew there were no portraits of African Americans in museums yet, she hung her paintings in her room as a ten-year-old so that her sisters and brothers could see pictures of people with all different shades of brown staring back at them”.
Waring herself attended Arsenal Grade School and Hartford High School (the second-oldest public high school in the United States). She was a high-achieving student who graduated from Hartford with honors. The High School also supported her interest in art, encouraging her passion for drawing and painting, especially with watercolors.
In the fall of 1907, a twenty-year-old Waring joined the staff the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), soon to be renamed, Cheyney Training School for Teachers (CTST) (and today known as Cheyney University). It was the beginning of a near forty-year association with one of America’s most impressive Black institutions. Historian Valerie Harris writes, “ICY would turn out African American teachers to educate and advance the next generation beyond the servant and laborer status of most of their parents [and is] the country’s oldest of the historically black colleges and universities”.
Waring’s father was a close friend of the ICY’s president, Hugh M. Browne, and it was through that connection that she took up a part-time teaching position at ICY as an instructor in drawing and decorative arts. Harris writes, “An atmosphere of genteel collegiality and decorum was practiced by the Cheyney faculty, who were expected to present themselves to the students and others as well-mannered, watchful and benevolent role models of the highest order, enlightening and encouraging them by instruction and personality”. Waring subsisted on a monthly salary of about $7, with room and board included. From her salary she would need to pay the train fare to Philadelphia where she would attend classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).
Education and Early Training
Attending PAFA between 1909 and 1915, Waring studied drawing, still life painting, portraiture, and illustration. Waring’s most influential teacher was the modernist illustrator and painter, Henry Bainbridge McCarter who instilled in Waring a love of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. But despite her total commitment to her training, Waring stated that she was still “afraid to trust my livelihood to art alone”. In addition to her teaching classes at Cheyney, Waring earned extra money as a drawing instructor at summer schools at Harvard and Columbia. She graduated from PAFA in 1915, becoming the first African American to receive a prestigious William Emlen Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship.
Waring used her scholarship money to embark on a tour of Europe. In Paris, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and made frequent visits to the Louvre and to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Arts journalist Herb Boyd writes that during her time in the French capital “she deepened her knowledge of impressionism, absorbing the works of Monet, Manet, Corot and Cézanne. ‘I thought again and again,’ she recalled in an interview, ‘how little of the beauty of really great pictures is revealed in the reproductions which we see and how freely and with what ease the great masters paint'”. From France she travelled to England, visiting the museums and historical sites of London. However, her plans to continue on to Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands were scuppered with the outbreak of World War I.
Back in the US, Waring returned to teaching at Cheyney, playing a pivotal role in founding the school’s new art and music departments. During her thirty years as the department’s art director and Chair, she conducted the Cheyney Choir (from 1921 to 1934) training them in high-toned spirituals and classical music. Harris writes, “The college, like the [local] Thornbury African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, slowly evolved into a community center for the black residents of Cheyney. They rallied to the school to watch football and baseball games, hear esteemed speakers, and attend concerts performed by the Cheyney Singers, which Wheeler conducted. She took the students to sing at Thornbury AME and would present joint concerts with the two choirs during the holidays and on other special occasions”. It was through her involvement with the AME that Waring became acquainted with Annie Washington Derry, destined to become the subject of her most famous portrait.
While on sabbatical between 1924-25, Waring returned to Europe for a second time, accompanied this time by African-American novelist and poet, Jessie Redmond Fauset. She signed-up for classes in Expressionism and the Romanticism run by French artist and designer Bernard Boutet de Monvel, and the American painter Robert Henri. Boyd writes, “One of the benefits of this second tour was to resume her study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where she was more intensively devoted to style and application. It was there that she began to cultivate her lifelong interest in portraits, particularly her choice in displaying a more realistic and vibrant method than ordinarily prevailed at the Academie. Her painting ‘Houses at Semur, France’ (1925) is indicative of this shift in her style, her usage of vivid colors to convey a bright, brilliant atmosphere. This approach would dominate her style no matter what painting genre was demanded”.
Having spent roughly four months in Paris – Waring later referred to this time as her “only period of uninterrupted life as an artist with an environment and associates that were a constant stimulus and inspiration” – she and Fauset visited London, Dublin and Rome, before heading on to Algiers (North Africa). Along with her paintings, Waring pursued her love for writing short stories, one of which, “Dark Algiers and White”, was published in The Crisis (although there remains some confusion as to whether it was a free-standing short story by Waring, or a co-authored two-part article written with Fauset).
Waring produced many artworks during the tour but most of these are believed to have never been exhibited, and their whereabouts today remain unknown. However, during her time in France she produced two important landscapes, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and Houses at Semur, France, that signaled her general shift towards a more expansive color palette. These pieces contributed to her growing reputation. In 1926 she had works exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. her standing was such that she curated the Negro Art section at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, also in 1926, and at the Texas Centennial Exposition the following year. In 1927, she also Madeline Weisburg won a gold medal in the annual Harmon Foundation Salon in New York.
Mature Period
In New York, Waring met a number of important artists, writers, and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Movement as it was sometimes called). The painter Henry Ossawa Tanner introduced her to fellow artists Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Hale Woodruff, poet, Langston Hughes, and composer, Roland Hayes. In fact, Waring was, with sculptors, Savage and Edmonia Lewis, and the painter and poet Meta Vaux Warrick, one of the four female artists linked to the movement to be regarded equally with their male counterparts. Waring was also a long-standing member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP is a US civil rights organization set up in 1909 to oppose racial segregation and discrimination by nonviolent means), and was a regular contributor to the organization’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, and its children’s publication, the Brownies’ Book.
Historian Madeline Weisburg writes, “Waring frequently contributed illustrations to the magazine The Crisis – a literary and political publication of vital significance to intellectual life throughout the Harlem Renaissance, aimed to strengthen solidarity between members of the African diaspora. Under W.E.B. Du Bois’ editorship, Waring provided graceful line drawings of women and children, which appeared on the cover and inside the magazine at least twenty times between 1917 and 1932, including many covers for the annual Christmas issue”. Weisberg adds that her April 1923 and September 1924 cover illustrations introduced Waring’s “signature delicate Art Deco and Arts and Crafts-inspired decorative style [that expressed] a coming together of the contemporary moment and an imagined African continental history, which was frequently envisioned by Pan-Africanists through idealised visions of Ancient Egypt”.
In 1925 the Harmon Foundation, established four years earlier by the real-estate developer and philanthropist, William E. Harmon, began presenting cash awards to African Americans for achievements in the fields of: fine arts, literature, music, race relations, education, business, religious service, and science. The Smithsonian Library writes that the foundation would become “best known for its impact on African American art of the Harlem Renaissance. Only a few years after the first awards were presented, the annual program was receiving such large numbers of high-quality art works that the Harmon Foundation began organizing a corresponding exhibition to provide an opportunity for the candidates to show and sell their work. These awards exhibitions gained even more national attention when they were toured to art museums, colleges, public libraries, and even YMCAs all around the country”.
In the autumn of 1926, Waring served as a juror in the selection of the inaugural William E. Harmon Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes competition in the fine arts category. One year later, Waring was herself honored with the gold award in that same category for her portrait, Anna Washington Derry (1925). (The Smithsonian adds, however, that in by the mid-1930s the Foundation was attracting criticism for “perpetuating racial segregation in its all-black exhibitions and for patriarchal practices, in particular, using mostly white juries. [The Foundation] did later shift its focus from the awards to different avenues of support for black artists. But during its existence, the purpose of the awards was to stimulate creative achievement among and to bring attention to the work being accomplished by African Americans, and it became almost synonymous with Negro visual art”.)
In 1926 Waring was married to the Philadelphian, Walter Waring, a public school teacher (ten years her junior) who was then working as a professor at the all-Black Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Montana. As money was tight, the newlyweds had to put off their honeymoon until 1929, when they travelled to France for two months.
In 1944, Mary Beattie Brady organized an exhibit of fifty Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin. Brady, a director of the Harmon Foundation, toured the exhibition throughout the United States over a total period of some ten years. It featured forty-two portraits by the white artist, Betsy Graves Rayneau, and eight by Waring. Waring’s works included portraits of Du Bois, Johnson, the suffragist, and journalist, Mary White Ovington, the contralto (classical female singer) Marian Anderson, and her prize-winning portrait of Derry. Commenting on the exhibition’s revival in 1997, Curators David D. Driskell and Tuliza Fleming write: “Blacks were believed to be less capable, unintelligent, violent, sex-starved, immoral, and unpredictable. The exhibition counteracted these myths through the calm, friendly, and dignified portrayal of their subjects”.
Late Period and Death
Towards the end of her life, Waring’s status as an academically-trained artist, and her niche of painting portraits of affluent Black individuals, saw her fall out of favor. The arts patron Alain LeRoy Locke called her “derivative” and “falsely sophisticated” with other critics dismissing her as a mere “society painter”. She preferred to keep her personal life private and she and her husband remained together throughout their lives (though they remained childless). Waring passed away after a long illness, in her home in Philadelphia, on February 3, 1948. One year later, a posthumous exhibition of her work was held in her honor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The Legacy of Laura Wheeler Waring
Waring was, with sculptor Augusta Savage, one of the two most prominent female artists linked with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. The expressive portraits for which she remains most revered, saw her included in the first all-Black exhibition in America held in 1928 by the Harmon Foundation. Author and critic Nancy Churnin states that Waring’s greatest legacy “[was her] desire to see representation and inclusion on museum walls. At the time she was painting, America was segregated, and it was unusual to see African American faces as subjects in portraits. She felt that if people saw inclusion in art, it would open hearts and minds to the importance of inclusion in all aspects of life”. In addition to her achievements in art making, Waring devoted her entire adult life to the education and cultural advancement of Black students through her four-decade tenure at Cheyney’s, America’s oldest historically Black college/university. A Philadelphia middle school is named in Waring’s honor.
Waring paved the way for Black women artists and illustrators to pursue careers in the visual arts. In addition to her portraiture, Waring’s illustrations were the most frequently featured female artist in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Her influence can also be seen in the later portraiture of African-American painters Barkley Hendricks and Kehinde Wiley. Wiley’s dignified portraits of “regular” African-Americans, with their boldly colored patterned backgrounds strongly evoke the works of Waring, particularly her Little Black Girl (Christine). She is also an acknowledged inspiration on her great niece, Madeline Murphy Rabb, the prominent collector and art dealer who has curated numerous important African American art collections and loaned work from her extensive African American art collection to national and international museums.