![]() ![]() “We wanted to present a group of people fully equivalent to artists exhibited in large art galleries and museums,” McElroy told the Post.We recommend these online stores who have supported us through the yearsĪn ethical shop serving the pagan community since 1997. There were 18 local artist featured in the exhibition, according to the Post, including Brown, May Howard Jackson, Alma Thomas, Lois Jones, and Elizabeth Catlett. Titled “Black Women Visual Artists in Washington, D.C.,” the 1986 show was presented by the Bethune Museum-Archives in Washington and organized by assistant director Guy McElroy. She was also featured posthumously in an group exhibition dedicated to Black female artists. In “Kindred Spirits,” Driskell says he first saw Brown’s work at the Black-owned Barnett Aden gallery. The late David Driskell (1931-2020) also participated in the discussion. In 2017, Burwell joined fellow artists for a panel discussion about the African American art world in 20th-Century Washington. Her work was recently featured in the exhibition “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo. “From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell” was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. In 1997, Hampton University Museum presented Burwell’s 30-year retrospective. She makes nature-inspired paintings and sculptures. Her practice is dedicated to abstraction. ![]() Today, she lives and works in Highland Beach, Md., the African American community settled by the son of Frederick Douglass. “Hilda Wilkerson Brown was my mother’s older sister, my aunt, my pseudo mom, my other mom, the most influential person in being who I am as an artist.” - Lilian Thomas Burwell She taught from 1967-1980, the last five years at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. After working as a publications and exhibits specialist at the Department of Commerce, she became a master teacher of art in the D.C. “I know that I would not be who I am today if it had not been for her influence and her nurturing,” Burwell says of Brown.īurwell also became an educator like her aunt. She later earned an MFA from Catholic University in Washington. It was her aunt who supported Burwell’s desire to become an artist and convinced her parents to let her pursue it.īurwell attended Pratt in New York City on a partial scholarship and Brown and her husband paid the balance of her fees and expenses. Still struggling to recover from the Depression, her family returned to the nation’s capital and she finished at segregated Dunbar High School. She grew up in Harlem and attended New York’s High School of Music and Art. “HILDA WILKERSON BROWN was my mother’s older sister, my aunt, my pseudo mom, my other mom, the most influential person in being who I am as an artist,” Burwell says in “Kindred Spirits.”īurwell was born in Washington, too, in 1927. In addition to the Smithsonian, she is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. Brown lived in the neighborhood and chose the community and its residents as the subjects for most of her paintings. She taught art at Miner Teachers College in Washington, the principal institution that trained black teachers in the city, during segregation.īrown’s modernist paintings included “Third and Rhode Island,” which depicts LeDroit Park. Additional virtual events, including a screening and a discussion, are planned later this month.īorn 1894 in Washington, D.C., Brown earned an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a master’s from Columbia University. The film’s website describes them both as “accomplished but under-recognized.”Ĭabib’s short documentary, “Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell,” is airing on WHUT, the local PBS station in Washington, on July 7 (today), July 16, and July 19. As a result, what she envisioned might be a documentary about one Black female artist, turned out to focus on two. I became so intrigued by that painting, I started doing some research.” - Filmmaker Cintia CabibĬabib set out to learn more about the late artist, which led her to Burwell. “I became so intrigued by that painting, I started doing some research.” “I thought it was really beautiful,” she told The Washington Post. A few years after Burwell made the gift, Brown’s painting caught the attention of filmmaker Cintia Cabib when she spotted the Washington scene on the cover of a brochure at a Historical Society of Washington conference.
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