Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin, February 3-29, 1948

Betsy Graves Reyneau was an American painter, best known for a series of paintings of prominent African Americans for the exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin” that, with those by Laura Wheeler Waring and under the Harmon Foundation, toured the United States from 1944 to 1954. She was born in 1888 in Battle Creek, Michigan and raised in Detroit. As a young woman, Graves broke ties with her family to pursue an art career and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where she studied under Fred Duvesack. She was a suffragette and in 1917 became one of the first women to be arrested and imprisoned for protesting President Woodrow Wilson's stance on women's voting rights. She was later selected by the Circuit Court of Detroit to paint a portrait of her grandfather, Michigan Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Graves. She did not sign the portrait with her full name as the Michigan Artists, with whom she first exhibited it, would not allow the work of women.

Reyneau's first solo exhibition in New York City was in 1922. She also lived in Boston and Washington D.C. From 1926 to 1939, she lived in Europe with her daughter and she took in Jews suffering persecution under the Nazis. During the last years of World War II, she was commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to design a poster to sell war bonds. When she returned to the United States, Reyneau was horrified by the treatment of African Americans, finding it akin to German fascism. She moved South and became active in civil rights causes. Her first portrait of a Black subject was of a young garden worker, Edward Lee, in 1942. That same year she went to the Tuskegee Institute to look for pilots to paint as subjects. Not finding any, she met George Washington Carver there who became her first and most famous subject. Her portrait of him in 1944 entered the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, the first of a Black man in a national American collection.

The Smithsonian connected Reyneau with the Harmon Foundation. Reyneau and Foundation curator Mary Beede Brady headed the traveling exhibition that became “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin,” sponsored by the foundation, enlisting Black artist Laura Wheeler Waring to do some of the portraits and to connect Reyneau to further subjects. Reyneau and Brady saw the show as a deliberately didactic way to change the views of white Americans, with Reyneau calling it a ""visual education project."" As the show traveled during the 1940s, Reyneau added more paintings to the collection so that it totaled 50 by 1954. Though it was an ""intensely popular"" exhibition, African American scholar at Harvard University Steven Nelson noted that the show's call for equality was lost on both the American press and the audience. With the abolishing of legal segregation in 1954, the Harmon Foundation ended the tour. The foundation later donated most of the collection to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in 1967. Reyneau died in 1964 in Moorestown, New Jersey.

Laura Wheeler Waring was an American artist and educator, renowned for her realistic portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and well-known African American portraits she made during the Harlem Renaissance. She spent 30 years teaching art at Cheyney University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was born on May 16, 1887 in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1906, graduated from Hartford Public High School and began teaching art and music part-time in Philadelphia at Cheyney Training School for Teachers. She graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1914 and was the first Black woman to receive the A. William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship to study art at the Louvre in Paris, France. There she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France, and traveled throughout Great Britain. While living in Paris, she frequented the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Louvre Museum. She planned on traveling more, but her trip was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. After staying in Europe for three months, she was required to return to the United States. When she returned from Europe, she continued to work at Cheyney and remained there for more than thirty years. There, she founded the school's art and music departments. In her later years at Cheyney, she was the director of the art programs.

Waring returned to Paris in June 1924. This second trip to Paris became a turning point in her style as well as her career. She lived in France for four months, absorbing French culture and lifestyle. She began to paint many portraits, and in October enrolled to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére, where she studied painting. During this trip, she exhibited her work in Parisian art galleries for the first time. In January 1925, Waring traveled to the South of France where she created illustrations of short travel stories and figurative pen and ink drawings for the Crisis Magazine. She continued her studies at the Chaumière and stayed in the Villa de Villiers in Neuilly-sur-Seine in the spring of 1925, where she documented her artistic progress.

Waring was among the artists displayed in the U.S.’s first exhibition of African-American art, held in 1927 by the William E. Harmon Foundation. She was commissioned by the Harmon Foundation to do portraits of prominent African Americans and chose some associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In 1944, eight of her portraits were included in the Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin traveling exhibition which came to the Legion of Honor in 1948. She died on February 3, 1948 at home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A posthumous exhibition was held at Howard University in 1949.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_Graves_Reyneau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Wheeler_Waring