FULTON ART FAIR LEGENDS

Welcome to the new Fulton Art Fair Legacy Project where the organization will paying hommage to its founding leaders, member artists, community leaders and supporters.

If you would like to contribute words or images to the project, please contact us at info@fultonartfair.com and put legacy in the subject line.

Ernest Crichlow

(June 19, 1914 – November 10, 2005)

Crichlow was an African American social realist artist known for his role in the Harlem Renaissance. Crichlow was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1914 to Caribbean immigrants.His first exhibition was in 1938 in the Harlem Community Center in Harlem, New York. One of his best known works, the lithograph Lovers III shows a young black woman being harassed in her bedroom by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Crichlow’s work was exhibited in the 1939 New York World’s Fair and in the Library of Congress the following year.

Over the next few decades, his work was regularly shown in leading US art galleries especially in the northeast although he held two exhibitions in Atlanta University in the 1940s. He founded the Cinque Gallery in 1969 with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden as well as teaching art at New York University and the Art Students League.
For more from Wikipedia, please click here 

ONLINE RESOURCES

Harlem Renaissance Painter Ernest Crichlow

All Things Considered, November 14, 2005 · Harlem Renaissance painter Ernest Crichlow died in New York at the age of 91. His work depicted the shifting experiences of African-Americans through much of the 20th century. Allison Keyes has a remembrance.

Adam Engel: An Interview with Ernest Crichlow

from Counterpunch, the online political newsletter

Ernest Crichlow: Artist, Teacher, Brooklyn’s Native Son

from the Skylight Gallery, the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation

A Profile of the Artist

from Avisca Fine Arts, New York

Jacob Lawrence

(September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000)

Lawrence was an African American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as “dynamic cubism”, though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.

Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth century African American painters, a distinction shared with Romare Bearden. Lawrence was only in his twenties when his “Migration Series” made him nationally famous. The series of paintings was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune magazine. The series depicted the epic Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.

For more from Wikipedia, please click here 

Joan Maynard

(August 29, 1928-January 22, 2006)

Maynard was a stalwart champion of historic preservation and education through museum development. We remain forever grateful to her for sharing her vision of Weeksville with others, thus helping to preserve an important part of African American history.

Joan was a founding member in 1968 of the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville & Bedford-Stuyvesant History. She served as its president from 1972 to 1974. In 1974, she became the Society’s first executive director, serving until October 1999. She was director emeritus of the Weeksville Heritage Center (the name the Society adopted in 2005) and ex-officio trustee of the Center’s Board of Trustees until her death.

Joan Maynard was a commercial artist in the 1960s, working as an art director for McGraw-Hill. She also used her artistic talent to present the history of people of African descent. She illustrated and wrote for Golden Legacy Magazine, which presented Black history in comic book format. She also illustrated covers for Crisis Magazine, the official voice of the N.A.A.C.P., and she created The Family of AMA, a 40-panel storyboard painting with text that illustrated the African Diaspora.

For more from the Weeksville Society, please click here

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