Symbols d'Afrique

Loïs Mailou Jones was born and raised in Boston, studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She worked briefly as a textile designer in New York and then as an instructor and founder of the art department at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina in 1928. From 1930–1977 Jones taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., mentoring notable African American artists, including David Driskell and Elizabeth Catlett.

Jones won the Corcoran Gallery’s Robert Woods Bliss prize for landscape painting in 1941, however she had to conceal her race and ask a friend to drop off the work for consideration, since the institution would not allow African American artists to enter the competition. Jones’s first of many trips to Paris was in 1937, where she spent a sabbatical year studying at the Académie Julian. In contrast to the racism she encountered in the U.S., Jones remarked that, “France gave me my stability, and it gave me the assurance that I was talented and that I should have a successful career.” This is when Jones began incorporating references to West African art into her paintings. In 1953 Jones married the Haitian graphic designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël, with whom she traveled to Haiti annually. After the United States Information Agency asked her to serve as a cultural ambassador to Africa in 1970, she would travel regularly to Africa, visiting artists and museums, and lecturing in eleven countries.

The impact of her travels throughout Africa and the Caribbean are apparent in work of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the Allen’s acrylic, Symbols d'Afrique. It was likely made in preparation for a larger painting, other examples of which are also based on a gridded structure, such as Mère du Senegal (1985) and Initiation Liberia (1983) in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. In Symbols d'Afrique, a central column shows three figures involved in everyday chores, perhaps churning some liquid, grinding grain, and carrying vessels. The blue leaf in the lower left corner may be a nod to the cutouts of Henri Matisse, while the rooster on the right side references an important element of Haitian visual culture, in which roosters are revered and play a prominent role in vodou ceremony.