Lois Mailou Jones

LOIS MAILOU JONES (American, 1905 - 1998)

Loïs Mailou Jones was an American artist and educator. Born in Boston, Massachussets in 1905, Jones' parents encouraged her to draw and paint. Her parents owned a house on Martha's Vineyard, where she met many artistic and cultural figures, including sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and received a graduate degree in design from the Design Art School of Boston before deciding to pursue a BA in art education from Howard University, graduating in 1945. By this point, she transitioned to painting instead of design. She traveled extensively, and while living in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, she was well-known as an artist. In the 1950s, she was a guest professor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and later helped Howard University research and document contemporary Haitian art. In the late 1960s, she traveled to 11 African countries and interviewed contemporary African artists. Her extensive travels influenced her work, and it was notable that she defied norms that were expected of mid-century African American painters and painted a wide variety of subjects. In the 1990s, well into her 80s, she continued to produce work. In 1990, an exhibition of her work toured the United States and finally brought her work to national attention. She passed away in Washington, DC in 1998 at the age of 92. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Palace in Haiti.