Selected Black Women Artists in Paris, Past And Present
Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, Lois Mailou Jones, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Edmonia Lewis, and Faith Ringgold featured in Les Cafe des Artistes: The French Collection Part II, #11 (close up), Faith Ringgold, mixed media painting on quilt, 1998. Credit: Janyce Denise Glasper at Musée Picasso. In her 1970 paper, “The Unglamorous But Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” Alice Walker said, “much lip service has been given the role of the revolutionary Black writer but now the words must be turned into work” (Walker 132). The quote can be applied to the treatment of past and present Black visual artists as well, especially Black women artists continuously overshadowed by both race and gender. Thus, while revisiting Paris—a city on the cusp of progress for Black women artists— I reflect on womanism— a term coined by Alice Walker, two Harlem Renaissance artists that briefly lived abroad— Augusta Savage (1892-1962) and Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998), and the timely exhi
