May Howard Jackson
American sculptor (1877–1931)
May Howard Jackson (September 7, 1877 – July 12, 1931) was an African American sculptor and artist. Active in the New Negro Movement and prominent in Washington, D.C.'s African American intellectual circle in the period 1910–30, she was known as "one of the first black sculptors to...deliberately use America's racial problems" as the theme of her art. Her dignified portrayals of "mulatto" individuals as well as her own struggles with her multiracial identity continue to call for the interpretation and assessment of her work.
Early life
Education
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).
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This entry incorporates text from “May Howard Jackson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.