Biggers, John T. - Dr. John T. Biggers (1924 - 2001)

Found 7 Works by this Artist

(1924 - 2001)

Houston, Texas

Dr. John T. Biggers (American, Apr. 13, 1924 - Jan. 25, 2001) John Thomas Biggers believed that “self-dignity and racial pride could be consciously approached through art,” especially his Social Realist murals and late-career symbolic paintings. Biggers’s parents were dedicated to educating their seven children, who were born and raised in Gastonia, North Carolina. As a boy, John attended Lincoln Academy, an all-black boarding school nearby Kings Mountain, where pride in students’ African heritage was stressed. In 1941, he matriculated at Hampton Institute (now University) in Hampton, Virginia, a school known for advocating “considerable intellectual freedom in its classrooms.” Having enrolled intending to study plumbing, a first-semester course with the Jewish émigré artist-educator Viktor Lowenfeld shifted the course of the young man’s life. Lowenfeld became a mentor to Biggers and encouraged him to explore themes of racism, as did fellow teachers Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. White, Hampton’s artist-in-residence, engaged Biggers as a studio assistant while White executed The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy. While at Hampton, Biggers met other prominent African Americans, including Hale Woodruff and the writer-philosopher Alain Locke. Lowenfeld included Biggers’ powerful mural, Dying Soldier, in the landmark exhibition Young Negro Art, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

Following two years of service in the United States Navy during World War II, Biggers pursued master’s (1948) and doctoral (1954) degrees at Pennsylvania State University. A technically gifted draughtsman and skilled lithographer, Biggers—working primarily in conté crayon and oil paints—created striking images of unidealized figures coping with poverty and despair. In 1949, Biggers moved to Houston, Texas, where he served as founder and chairman of Texas State (now Texas Southern) University’s art department, a post he held until 1983.

In the 1950s, Biggers' style evolved after a UNESCO fellowship funded his study of West African cultural traditions. African themes and narrative folklore emerged in his work from 1957 on. Published in 1962, Biggers' book Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa featured eighty-nine drawings and text he hoped would “portray what was intrinsically African.” A 1969 Danforth Award funded further travel to Africa. Following his retirement from teaching, Biggers continued to paint murals and increasingly symbolic abstract works grounded in African heritage and black culture; the latter often included everyday objects such as patchwork quilts, cooking pots, gourds, and the shotgun houses so familiar from his Southern childhood. In 1995, he was the subject of a major one-man traveling exhibition, The Art of John Biggers: View from the Upper Room, curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a museum that, in 1950, had not allowed Biggers to attend a reception in honor of his first prize-winning entry at the then-segregated institution.

Biggers’ murals can be seen in public locations in Houston, Hampton University, and Winston-Salem State University. His work is also represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collections, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Mint Museum of Art, and the Gibbes Museum of Art, among others.

https://thejohnsoncollection.org/john-biggers/