May Howard Jackson

May Howard Jackson studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Employment is recorded with Howard University. Work by May Howard Jackson is recorded in the collections of Smithsonian American Art Museum. Distinctions recorded are William E. Harmon Foundation award for distinguished achievement among Negroes.

• Name — May Howard Jackson • Birth Name — May Howard • Born — 7 September 1877 • Birthplace — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 12 July 1931 • Place of death — New York, New York, U.S. • Resting Place — Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York • Education — Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts • Known for — Sculpture • Spouse — William Sherman Jackson • Awards — Harmon Foundation, 1928 • Works — * Portrait Bust of Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1919) • Portrait Bust of Dean Kelly Miller (1922) • Mulatto Mother and Child (n.d.)

• Illustration — May Howard Jackson, Portrait Bust of an African, 1899. Kinsey African American Art & History Collection,

May Howard was born to a middle class couple, Floarda Howard and Sallie (Durham) Howard, in Philadelphia on September 7, 1877. She attended J. Liberty Tadd's Art School in Philadelphia, where she was trained with "new methods in education." Tadd, the school's founder, was an educational innovator who "emphasized the importance of visual arts training" to strengthen the brain, advocating an ambidextrous teaching model and six years of early-school art education. At Tadd's school May Howard studied "drawing, designing, free-hand drawing, working designs in monochrome, modeling, wood carving, and the use of tools". She continued her art training, with the support of a full scholarship, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1895), as the first African American woman to attend PAFA, studying under various known artists including the renowned American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, Paris-trained academic sculptor Charles Grafly, and John J. Boyle (who had been a student of former PAFA faculty member Thomas Eakins). Her surviving work from this period expresses the Beaux-Arts aesthetic that emphasized naturalism and dynamic treatment of surface and form. Meta Warrick Fuller, Jackson's contemporary at Tadd's and PAFA (like Howard, b. 1877), offered Jackson the opportunity to accompany her and study abroad in France during this time (Fuller herself had enrolled in classes at the École des Beaux Arts). Jackson declined. She would later declare she thought it unnecessary to travel to Europe to further her art. After four years of study at PAFA, Howard met and "married well" a mathematics teacher and future high school principal, William Sherman Jackson.

• Illustration — Jackson working on a bust of W. E. B. Du Bois After Jackson's move to Washington, "she had expected to continue her studies at the art school connected with the Corcoran Art Gallery but was refused admission because of her color," a rejection that, for a time, discouraged her from pursuing public work in her field. She would later maintain that "It was chiefly through Dr. Du Bois's influence and urging that she again took up her work with the determination to make the most of her gifts for the encouragement it would be to her people." Du Bois not only personally encouraged her, but used her images to illustrate The Crisis, his newly established journal and, from 1910, the official magazine of the NAACP. With this support, Jackson became "the first to break away from academic cosmopolitanism to frank and deliberate racialism" in her artwork. This determination is evident from her best known surviving pieces: the dignified portrait busts she created of the period's black leaders "decent portraits of decent men", and her intimate family groupings of mothers—mixed race themselves—caressing children—their own children—of mixed racial heritage. For the next two decades, these works would be the headliners of her exhibited work. Jackson arranged for Dr. Du Bois to sit for her in 1907. Although the in-person sessions were discontinued before her portrait bust was finished, Du Bois arranged for photographs to be sent from New York so she could bring the piece to successful completion. Last, and perhaps most helpfully, Du Bois published news of her exhibitions and work in the pages of The Crisis, through to 1931 and the artist's early death.

In 1912, her portrait bust of Du Bois, among other works, was exhibited at the Veerhoff Gallery in Washington. She received a positive review from The Washington Star commending the work's structure: "the expression is vital and good, the turn of surface, the intimation of mobility are well rendered." The Star, reviewing her bust of Assistant Attorney General WIlliam H. Lewis, later that same fall, took the compliment further, "A portrait to deserve the name must be more than a likeness; it must interpret character; it must have personality. Of this bust as much can truly be said." Exhibiting a broader collection of sculptures at the Veerhoff in 1916, her Star review was again effusive: Jackson's "work has always shown promise, but these pieces now on exhibit indicate exceptional gift, for they are not merely well modeled, but individual and significant". As a woman defined by the color of her skin, finding public venues to display her work was a constant challenge. "It is not at all customary for Washington art stores to exhibit the works of colored artists," a contemporary reviewer observed, "particularly if the subjects are too colored, and the fact that Mrs. Jackson's work has been displayed, is evidence of her talent." In 1917, Jackson exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, from whose art school, she had been rejected, on a racial basis, on her arrival in DC fifteen years before. The event was written up in a brief newspaper piece ("First Recognition for the Race") that ran in papers across the United States as widespread as Omaha and Salt Lake City. "What is said to be the first recognition of colored talent by that institution is the exhibition in Corcoran Art Gallery, at Washington, D.C. of a child's head modeled by Mrs. May Howard Jackson." And then—the National Academy of Design, New York (1919))

• Illustration — New Dunbar High School Building, 1917. "The Greatest Negro High School in the World" Artists like Jackson responded to the lack of gallery support by pressing alternative public spaces into service, such as the "War Service and Recreation Center" of the Washington Y.M.C.A., where, in May 1919, a solo "exhibition of 25 sculptures of May Howard Johnson" was held. The M Street High School moved to new buildings and was renamed Dunbar School in 1916 for the noted African-American intellectual and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (d. 1906) (Jackson would complete a portrait in his honor, a casting of which, in bronze, would become the property of the school). The school's expansion brought new ambitions. Dunbar formed the Tanner Art League in 1919, and an attempt was made to institute an annual show for colored artists. The first show displayed the work of artists from fifteen states and included pieces from Laura Wheeler, Julian Abele, Meta Warrick Fuller, and recent work from Jackson ("a bust and statuette"). The Dunbar's 1922 show included works by William Edouard Scott and William McKnight Farrow, as well as the inaugural D.C. showing of Jackson's sculpture, The Brotherhood, which had "had a prominent place in a recent exhibition of the Society of Independent Sculptors at the Waldorf Astoria," along with others of her work.

With legal racial segregation in force across the South since the turn of the century, topics such as racial mixing were taboo in general. Laws against miscegenation had been proposed in both federal and state legislatures as far North as Massachusetts after Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected as president in 1912. Her work was recognized with a Harmon Foundation Award in 1928. Five works were exhibited in the subsequent Harmon show, two featuring as illustration in the exhibition catalogue ("Bust of Dean Kelly Miller" and "Head of a Negro Child"). Leslie King-Hammond, an art historian, later praised Jackson's "efforts to address...without compromise and without sentimentality, the issues of race and class, especially as they affected mulattos". Despite this recognition, Jackson was dissatisfied with her progress. 1929 she wrote, "I felt no satisfaction! Only deep sense of injustice, something that has followed me and my efforts all my life."

• Illustration — May Howard Jackson, Portrait of Mother and Child Jackson could "pass" for Caucasian, but the racial politics of the early 20th century created an environment that pushed her in a different direction. She cooperated with pioneering African American anthropologist Caroline Bond Day, providing details (including photos) regarding the Howard family's racial background that would later be published in Day's 1932 Harvard University Master's thesis, ""A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States" (the year following Jackson's death) Her personal experiences of racism were ongoing through her life and sour: whether her initial rejection from Corcoran Gallery or her experience with the National Academy of Design. After showings in 1916 and 1918, the academy sent a representative to Jackson's home to ask if she was of "Negro blood"—and, on receiving an affirmative response, subsequently excluded her work from future exhibits. Jackson expressed a fascination with the wide variety of phenotypes among African Americans. This was expressed in "Shell-Baby in Bronze" (1914), "Head of a Negro Child" (1916), and "Mulatto Mother and Child" (1929) - the last piece in particular also an address of her own racial identity and "near Whiteness". These three pieces define her most original surviving work. • Illustration — May Howard Jackson, Portrait of Paul Laurence Dunbar, bronze (1918) Her style was provocative for its time because it explored the features of America's multiracial society. As a result of not traveling in Europe, Jackson was somewhat isolated from her peers and was able to create her own vision that infused her work with a unique style. This style was ignored at first because it was so different from the popular style of the time. Though she had developed her own unique style, this style still adhered to academic tradition. Many galleries were not interested in her subject matter, as she dedicated most of her work to objective portraits of children, family members, and influential African Americans. It was not until the inauguration of the Harmon Foundation Awards, in 1926, for "Distinguished Negro Contributions," that there was even a National prize for Black Artists. Jackson's racial identity was questioned after her death. While many may have questioned her racial identity it definitely became clear as she was listed as one of the colored women in the March 13, 1913 woman's suffrage parade.

The Harmon Foundation exhibits, intended to showcase the works of Black female artists in America, virtually coincided with events of the Great Depression. The period's dream of the "New Negro Woman," lost its focus, and Jackson's death, in 1931, brought a period of obscurity during which crucial early cataloguing of her work was neglected. Her "sensitive and humanistic approach to the portrayal of Black Folk types," was in some ways anathema to certain "Black art critics and historians," uncomfortable with its portrayal of racial ambiguity in a period when the "near-white" were granted privilege unavailable to the darker-skinned.

• The Veerhoff Gallery, Washington D.C. (1912, 1916) • The New York Emancipation Exhibition (1913) • The Corcoran Art Gallery (1915) • The National Academy of Design (1916) • May Howard Jackson: 25 Sculptures. War Service and Recreation Center, Y.M.C.A., Washington, D.C. (May 1919) • Exhibit of Fine Arts by American Negro Artists, The Harmon Foundation, International House, New York (1929) • An Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Negro Artists at the National Gallery of Art (1929)

• 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox (1996) Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia

• Illustration — May Howard Jackson, Bust of Kelly Miller, Dean, Howard University, College of Arts & Sciences, bronze (~1912) • Slave boy / Portrait Bust of an African (1899) bronze, Kinsey Family Collection • Portrait Bust of Paul Lawrence Dunbar (Dunbar High School, Washington D.C.). • Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar (1906) • Portrait Bust of W. E. B. Du Bois (1912) • Assistant Attorney General WIlliam H. Lewis (1912) • Morris Heights, New York City (1912) oil on linen, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts • Portrait Bust of Dean Kelly Miller (1914) bronze, Howard University) • Shell-baby, bronze (1915, exhibited 1929) • Head of a Negro Child (1916). • William H. Lewis (bef 1919) • William Stanley Braitewait (bef 1919) • Portrait Bust of Reverend Francis J. Grimke (1922) • Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me (n.d.) • Bust of a Young Woman (n.d., plaster, held by Howard University) • Mulatto Mother and her Child / Mother and Child, plaster ((exhibited 1918) • William Tecumsah Sherman Jackson (exhibited 1929) • Negro Dancing Girl (exhibited 1929) • Resurrection, exhibited 1929)

May Howard Jackson is recorded with the occupation sculptor. Established in Library of Congress under nr94026405. Recorded as sculptor, artist and teacher. Established in FAST under 1518136.