Laura Wheeler Waring’s father was a prominent church pastor and her mother an artist in her own right. Laura was born on May 16, 1877 in Hartford, Connecticut and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where another major African-American talent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, had received his initial training. Like Tanner, Waring went to Paris for additional studies but unlike Tanner, she did not opt to make Europe her permanent home base.
Waring’s Paris studies introduced her to the Romantic and to some extent Impressionist schools of painting and helped to move her away from purely academic form. As Waring became interested in portrait work, this new focus on feeling and perception as opposed to strict likenesses would make her portraits more vivid and memorable.
Portraits and Legacy
Waring was included in the first United States exhibit of African-American artists, held in 1928 and sponsored by the William E. Harmon Foundation. Additionally, the Harmon Foundation commissioned Waring to create various portraits of successful African-Americans to bring worthy attention to these individuals and their accomplishments, and to contradict common prejudicial stereotypes. The works were part of the Foundation’s 1944 show called Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin, and among the fifty paintings featured, Waring’s depiction of singer Marian Anderson in a long red gown was particularly exceptional. The painting is now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection in Washington, D.C.
Like her friend and fellow Pennsylvania Academy alumnus Henry O. Tanner, Waring chose to deal with racism through pride, dignity and the best possible use of her talents. Married to Lincoln University professor Walter Waring in 1927, Laura Wheeler Waring made African-American education a major priority in her life. She led the Department of Art and Music at Cheyney State Teachers’ College in Pennsylvania until her death in 1948, while she also continued to paint and illustrate and involve herself in the struggle for creative and racial equality.
Rose Piper
Rose Piper (1917-2005) went to New York’s Hunter College and later the Art Students League, studying with Japanese-American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi. With funding from the Rosenwald Foundation, in 1946 Piper ventured through America’s southern states to research local folk customs and the post-war landscape. One of Piper’s best-known works would be produced during this sojourn, inspired by singer Trixie Smith’s Freight Train Blues.
Slow Down Freight Train
The lone figure of Piper’s Slow Down Freight Train is a young African-American man headed north, part of what was known as The Great Migration of circa 1910 through the late 1940s. In order to find better jobs and a certain degree of freedom, many African-Americans found it necessary to leave the still-recalcitrant South for cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York and start fresh. The majority of migrants were initially male, and in their wake they left behind wives and lovers and families who missed them very much.
Trixie Smith’s Freight Train Blues sang out against this enforced separation, along with "the mean ol' train that took my man away from here." Piper’s strongly-hued scene shows such a man riding his train north, but one hand seems to cling hard to the past even though his neck is craning forward. The detail of telephone poles and wires in the top corner of the painting possibly indicate progress and movement away from the rural South.
Among Piper’s creative circle in New York was artist Jacob Lawrence, who also did a well-known, multi-panel series of the northbound trek called The Migration of the Negro.
Piper continued to find success as a painter up until the 1950s, but after that point family finances required that she make a living in the fields of fashion and graphic design instead. She resumed painting around 1980, however, and kept working until she passed away in 2005, a fairly unsung yet surely notable talent.
Sources
- Laura Wheeler Waring -- ExplorePAHistory.com
- Slow Down Freight Train, Rose Piper -- The Ackland Art Museum
- Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century -- Richard J. Powell (Thames and Hudson, 1997)
