Loïs Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color

“Mailou Jones’s great gift was transporting the viewer into the daily lives of her subjects… When she did a mask, the eyes moved with you. When she showed an African American girl cleaning fish, the strokes were rhythmic.”

– Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post

“There are seventy paintings in this show. It’s a tour de force—as was she.”

– Kent Boyer, Dallas Art News

Born in Boston in 1905 and trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Loïs Mailou Jones began her career at a time when racial prejudices and gender discrimination were strong in American culture. She achieved early success as a designer of drapery fabric, but when a decorator told her that a “colored girl” could not possibly have produced her sophisticated designs, her response was to quit fabric design and focus instead on the fine arts, so she could sign her name to her work. In 1937 she studied for a year at the Academie Julian in Paris, a city whose cosmopolitan laissez-faire toward race and gender was a revelation for her: she made many friends in the Parisian art world, produced dozens of paintings (many bearing the influence of Cezanne and Cassatt), and was able at last to exhibit under her own name and “purely on merit.” After her return to the United States, and throughout her prolonged travels to Haiti and Africa, she never ceased to innovate, infusing her mastery of American and European painting styles with the exuberance and color of African and Caribbean imagery and motifs—particularly African masks, which were a lifelong muse for her.

This exhibition surveyed the vast sweep of Jones’s seventy-five years as a painter, stretching from late Post-Impressionism to a contemporary mixture of African, Caribbean, American, and African-American iconography, design, and thematic elements. Developed by the Mint Museum of Art and the Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust, this exhibition featured 62 works from both public and private collections, as well as from the artist’s estate.

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