A Salute to Lois Mailou Jones

Born on this date in 1905, Jones championed the international artistic achievement of African American art.

In a career that spanned eight decades, Lois Mailou Jones treated an extraordinary range of subjects—from French, Haitian, and New England landscapes to the sources and issues of African American culture. The scope of her rigorous training in Boston, New York, Paris, Italy, and Africa is equally evident in her costumes, textile designs, watercolors, paintings, and collages.

In Les Fetiches, an ensemble of African figurative fetishes and masks hovers in space—divorced from any sense of ceremony, display, or storage. The masks have assumed a life of their own, capturing the electrifying magic associated with ritualistic objects. Although often created to conceal identity, masks are equally effective projections or revelations of values, whether personal or cultural.

In the 1920s Jones studied masks from diverse non-Western civilizations, and in African masks and fetishes she found powerful keys to infusing art with her ancestry's spirit and meaning.

Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure, National Museum of American Art).

Pictured: Lois Mailou Jones, 1905–98, Les Fetiches, 1938, oil on linen, 21 x 25 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by Mrs. N. H. Green, Dr. R. Harlan, and Francis Musgrave.