John Biggers papers

John Thomas Biggers (1924-2001), African American artist, author, and educator, was born on April 13, 1924 to Paul and Cora Biggers in Gastonia, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children. He 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 US Navy in 1943 and served until December 1945. Also in 1943, Biggers was featured in the exhibit Young Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 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. On December 27, 1948, Biggers married Hazel Hales, whom he had met at Hampton in 1942. Biggers received a doctoral degree in 1954 from Pennsylvania State University with a thesis entitled The Negro Woman in American Life and Education.

Biggers commenced a teaching career soon after obtaining his masters 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 developing his artistic projects, Biggers traveled extensively to learn about the African cultural experience. In 1957, John and Hazel spent six months on a United Nations fellowship traveling in Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey. He published Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa, a book based on these travels, in 1962. A Danforth award in 1969 allowed John and Hazel to spend six months in Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana. 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). 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).

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. John Biggers died in 2001.