Artist of the day: Artist of the day, March 29, 2021: Charles Henry Alston, an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist, and teacher (#1243)

Charles Henry Alston (1907 –1977) was an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and moved to New York City as a child, where he attended high school and college, earning his MFA at Columbia University. Alston painted during the Harlem Renaissance, experimenting with African motifs as well as depicting the lives of ordinary black Americans.

During the Great Depression, he was one of only a few African American supervisors for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and he taught many young artists, including Jacob Lawrence, at the WPA-sponsored Harlem Community Art Center. Later, Alston helped found Spiral, a group of New York African American artists who met regularly during the 1960s to discuss the relationship of their art to struggles for racial justice.

Claiming the influence of the Civil Rights movement on his work, Alston stated, “the basically important thing is making a good picture … out of what your experience has been, and mine has been the experience of a black man in a fairly racist country.” Alston was one of the first black artists to have work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. His artwork can also be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Detroit Institute of Art, Butler Art Institute, and Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries.

In 1958, Charles Alston created Walking, a vibrant painting that depicts a group of walking women composed of sturdy shapes and outlined by vivid slabs of color. Inspired by the Montgomery bus boycott and the determined actions of the mostly unrecognized women who orchestrated it, Alston employed abstract techniques to evoke the resolute energy that sustained the protest for more than a year in the mid-1950s. By constructing the cluster of women on the left out of broad, vertical bands of color, and by contrasting them with the women on the right, whom he painted with upward turning faces and with angular limbs that suggestion motion, Alston created a striking left-to-right transition that conveys a sense of spontaneous but purposeful movement. Alston recalled, "It was a very definite walk—not going back, no hesitation"— a mood he captured with his bold handling of paint and carefully arranged scene.

From late 1955 through 1956, a successful and hard fought boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, inspired people across the United States and around the world. Though these events brought international fame to two prominent civil rights figures—a young reverend named Martin Luther King Jr. and a seamstress and activist named Rosa Parks—the boycott also represented a triumph of local grassroots activism on a massive scale. Organized by black women’s political groups and facilitated through churches, the boycott mobilized thousands of black workers to avoid using segregated city buses to protest the unequal and demeaning practices of segregation. Years later, the figures of King and Parks loom large, but the boycotters themselves—and their exhausting, and at times humiliating, effort of walking to work day after day—are often overlooked.

By focusing his painting on unidentified women and, at center, two children, Alston presented an inclusive rendition of the figures that formed the backbone of the Civil Rights movement. His use of abstraction universalizes the notion of protest, inviting it any and everywhere. Painted in 1958, before the 1965 civil rights marches in Alabama, this canvas seems prescient. "The idea of a march was growing," Alston recalled. "It was in the air … and this painting just came. I called it Walking on purpose." Reimagining the daily drudgery of traveling by foot as a determined march, Alston at once celebrates the actions of the protesters of segregated Montgomery and elevates the mundane act of walking to something monumental and heroic.

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