Background

John Thomas Biggers was born on April 13, 1924, Gastonia, North Carolina. He was the youngest of seven children of Paul and Cora Biggers.

Education

John T. Biggers attended Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia and started taking art classes under the tutelage of Viktor Lowenfeld, but was drafted into the United States Navy in 1943 and served until December 1945.

Biggers returned to Hampton in 1946 for one semester, and when Lowenfeld moved to Pennsylvania State University (State College, Pennsylvania) in mid-1946, Biggers followed him to study in the art department there, receiving a Bachelor of Science in January 1948 and a Master of Science in September 1948.

Biggers received a doctoral degree in 1954 from Pennsylvania State University with a thesis entitled The Negro Woman in American Life and Education.

Career

Biggers commenced a teaching career soon after obtaining his master’s degree. In 1949, Biggers accepted a position as an instructor at Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery, but moved to Houston, Texas, in August to establish and serve as department head of the Art Department at Texas State University for Negroes (later Texas Southern University), where he spent over thirty years of his career. Biggers published a book entitled Black Art in Houston in 1978 with Carroll Simms and Edward Weems. He retired from teaching in 1983.

Biggers' first major works were the egg tempera paintings Dying Soldier (1942), Community Preacher (1943), and U.S. Navy Mural (1945). The current locations of the first two works are unknown, and U. S. Navy Mural is currently disassembled. Biggers followed these works in the late 1940s with the murals, Burial, Sharecroppers, Baptism, Day of the Harvest, and Night of the Poor. The next phase in Biggers' career came with his move to Houston. In the 1950s Biggers produced Harvesters and Gleaners (1952), Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education (1953), History of Education in Morris County, Texas (1955), and History of the International Longshoremen's Local 872 (1957).

In 1957 Biggers was invited to participate in the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) tour. On that tour, he became one of the first African American artists to travel to newly independent Ghana. He also travelled to Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey. His experiences there shaped his subsequent work. After a United Nations-funded trip to Africa, Biggers began to incorporate more abstract and symbolic images and patterns in his work, starting with the transitional works Web of Life (1960), Red Barn Farm (1960), and Birth from the Sea (1966). He returned to Africa again in 1969, 1984 and 1987.

In 1980, Biggers visited Haiti along with other Texas Southern faculty and also visited Amsterdam and Kenya in 1987, and attended the National Conference of Artists meetings in Dakar, Senegal (1984) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1988).

Biggers undertook a number of major mural projects throughout his career and in his later works, increased the scale of abstract iconography and began to incorporate quilted patterns in his murals. He produced a number of murals in Houston buildings, including Family Unity (1974-1978), Quilting Party (1980-1981), Song of the Drinking Gourds (1987), East Texas Patchwork (1987), and a mural honoring Christia V. Adair, one of Houston's most important civil rights leaders. Biggers returned to Gastonia in 1990 and was commissioned to complete two major mural projects. He completed Ascension and Origins at the Winston-Salem State University library in North Carolina in 1991, and painted House of the Turtle and Tree House at Hampton University that same year. In 1994, he drew the illustrations for Maya Angelou's poem "Our Grandmothers," but suffered from declining health in the late 1990s.

Achievements

• Biggers was the founder of the Art Department at Texas Southern University, where he taught from 1949 to 1983. A muralist who portrayed the life and culture of black America, he gained recognition first in 1943 with his mural titled “Dying Soldier.” In 1950, he earned first prize in the exhibition at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts with his Cradle.
  
  Biggers wrote two books in his career; Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa appeared in 1962, and Black Art in Houston followed in 1978. Biggers authored several articles for such publications as Design Magazine and the Art Gallery Magazine. He also earned the 1994 Margaret Hawkins Art Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers 2010
  • A Life on Paper: The Drawings and Lithographs of John Thomas Biggers 2006
  • The Art of John Biggers: View From The Upper Room 1995
  • Black Art in Houston 1978

• painting

  • Slice Of Cotton Harvest

    1995

  • Study for The History of Negro Education

    1955

  • Victim of the City Streets #2

    1946

  • Freedom March

    1952

  • Return II

    2000

  • Old Spanish Trail Market

    1970

  • Our Grandmothers

    1994

  • Star Gazer

    1994

  • Homage to Gelede

    1994

  • At Risk

    1996

  • Old Man

    1952

  • Death and Resurrection

    1996

  • Birmingham... Children of the Morning

    1964

  • Mother and Three Children

    1947

  • Prempeh II (Ashanti Royalty)

    1957

Views

Biggers’ early work was infused with examples of social realism. He traveled to Africa several times after his UNESCO tour, and his work increasingly embodied the social and cultural themes he experienced while on the continent.

In the 1960s, Biggers was one of the first black artists of the era to embrace the integration of African and African American influences in his work. By the 1980s and 1990s, he began incorporating themes of birth and rebirth as he became more concentrated on the feminine in his work.

Interests

• Writers

  W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke

• Artists

  William Artis, Hale Woodruf

Connections

On December 27, 1948, Biggers married Hazel Hales, whom he had met at Hampton in 1942.

Father:

Paul Biggers

Mother:

Cora Biggers

Wife:

Hazel Hales

mentor:

Charles White

mentor:

Elizabeth Catlett

April 15, 1915 – April 2, 2012

Elizabeth Catlett was an American and Mexican graphic artist and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience.

References

• A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present A landmark work of art history: lavishly illustrated and extraordinary for its thoroughness, A History of African-American Artists - conceived, researched, and written by the great American artist Romare Bearden with journalist Harry Henderson, who completed the work after Bearden's death in 1988 - gives a conspectus of African-American art from the late eighteenth century to the present.
  1993
• Black Art in Houston Foreword by Donald Weisman. "Presenting the art of Biggers, Simms and their students."
  1978
• The Art of John Biggers View From The Upper Room
  1995