John Biggers (American, 1924-2001)
Untitled (Grandmothers III), 1994
Lithograph on cream wove paper, ed. 14/60
15 x 21 in.
Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg College, gift of James G. Sweeny in memory of Martha M. Sweeny, 2020.4.36
Published by Limited Editions Club, New York, NY
Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1924, pioneering muralist, printmaker and educator John Biggers earned a BFA, MFA, and PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Prior to Penn State, he attended Hampton Institute, where he studied under Victor Lowenfeld, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett and was exposed to the Mexican muralists like José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, American regionalists like Grant Wood, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance like Hale Woodruff.
In 1949, Biggers founded what is now the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Texas Southern University, Houston (TSU), where he introduced a successful mural program and taught until 1983. TSU now has 114 murals on campus created by students in their senior year of the art program. Biggers was one of the first Black American artists to visit Africa to study African traditions and culture. Funded by a grant from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), he and his wife traveled for six months in Ghana, Benin (then called Dahomey), Nigeria, and Togo in West Africa. He studied African myths and became interested in creation stories of a matriarchal deistic system, which contrasted with the patriarchal images of European art.
In an interview with The Art Newspaper (September 2020), contemporary artist Sanford Biggers, described his late-cousin John Biggers’ work as Afro-futurism and said, “John’s work often incorporated Euclidean shapes and patterns that he had encountered in Ghana in the 1950s. He was mostly depicting the Jim Crow South and the southern experience of African Americans, but in Ghana he became entranced by these traditional patterns, which got him interested in sacred geometry as a means to chronicle history.”
Untitled (Grandmothers III) was part of a series of illustrations created for Maya Angelou’s poem Our Grandmothers. Published by Limited Editions Club, in New York, in 1994, Angelou requested her favorite artist to create five lithographs that combined the ancient myths of Africa and contemporary reality of Black America.
Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University: Maya Angelou and John T. Biggers
https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2020/08/16/maya-angelou-and-john-t-biggers/