This image is the cover for the book Life and Art of Felrath Hines

Life and Art of Felrath Hines

A biography of the artist and first African American man to become a professional conservator for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Felrath Hines was born in 1913 and raised in the segregated Midwest after his parents left the South to find a better life in Indianapolis. While growing up, he was encouraged by his seamstress mother to pursue his early passion for art by taking Saturday classes at Herron Art Institute. In 1937, he moved to Chicago, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago in hopes of making his dreams a reality.

The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light chronicles the life of this exceptional artist who overcame numerous obstacles throughout his career and refused to be pigeonholed because of his race. Rachel Berenson Perry tracks Hines’s determination and success as a contemporary artist on his own terms. She explores his life in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s, where he created a close friendship with jazz musician Billy Strayhorn and participated in the African American Spiral Group of New York and the equal rights movement. Hines’s relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, as her private paintings restorer, and a lifetime of creating increasingly esteemed Modernist artwork, are part of the story of one man’s remarkable journey in twentieth-century America.

Featuring exquisite color photographs, The Life and Art of Felrath Hines explores his life, work, and significance as an artist and as an art conservator.

Rachel Berenson Perry

Floyd Coleman is coauthor of Basic Design: Systems, Elements, Applications (Prentice Hall, 1984) and contributing author to Walls of Heritage Walls of Pride: African American Murals (Pomegranate, 2000). He is also professor emeritus, Department of Art, Howard University, Washington, DC

Jennifer McComas, PhD, is the curator of European and American Art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington. A scholar of modern art, she is the author of the exhibition catalog Pioneers and Exiles: German Expressionism at the Indiana University Art Museum (IU Art Museum, 2012) and a contributor to the anthology Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (Routledge, 2017).

Julie L. McGee is associate professor of black American studies and art history, and associate director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware. She has written and lectured extensively on African American art and contemporary art in South Africa, and has curated exhibitions for the David C. Driskell Center, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and Guga S'Thebe Community Arts Centre in Langa (Cape Town), South Africa. With Vuyile C. Voyiya, McGee coproduced the documentary film The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art. In 2011–12 she held the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis.

Indiana University Press