School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Lois Mailou Jones: The Early Works: Paintings and Patterns 1927-1937
September 15 through October 14, 2006
Grossman Gallery, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 230 The Fenway
Working for more than seven decades and in a wide variety of styles, Lois Mailou Jones enjoyed an extraordinary career that drew inspiration from France, Haiti, and Africa, as well as her native New England. As an African-American woman artist, she met and surmounted great challenges and earned many national and international honors. A great interest in design and color permeated her versatile and prolific career and informed her teaching at Howard University (1930-l977), where she taught painting and design for 47 years. In her lifetime, she produced a design oeuvre ranging from textile design to book illustration. Lois Mailou Jones: The Early Works: Paintings and Patterns 1927-1937 focuses on the textile designs and studies created at the outset of her career, immediately following her 1927 graduation from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Image at top right): Lois Mailou Jones, Design for Cretonne Drapery Fabric #8, c. 1932. Watercolor on paper, 30 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the Lois Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust) For more information on the exhibition, visit www.smfa.edu.