Grade Levels:

9-adult

Length:

60 minutes

Taping Rights:

Unlimited

MARC Record:

Downloadable

Web Site:

KET Online

Teaching Materials:

See Below

This KET production tells the story of a little-known African-American artist who, in both his life and his art, paved the way for others to come.

Born in 1899 in Mayfield, Ellis Wilson had to leave Kentucky to study art, because the segregated black colleges of the time offered only industrial and agricultural studies. After completing his studies at the famous School of the Art Institute in Chicago, he moved on to New York, where he would live and work for the next 40 years.

Wilson was part of several important periods in the history of American art. His early years in New York were during the time now called the Harlem Renaissance, and he worked for the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. During the World War II years, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to travel throughout the South and paint scenes from the daily lives of ordinary African-American workers. It is these paintings, along with later works inspired by trips to Haiti, that brought him several prizes and some recognition during the 1940s and ’50s.

But making a living from art was practically impossible for African Americans at the time, and Wilson worked menial jobs all his life in order to pay the rent and keep painting. Eventually, he fell back into obscurity and died poverty-stricken in 1977. It wasn’t until one of his paintings was featured on an episode of The Cosby Show in 1985 that interest in his work was revived.

The documentary puts Ellis Wilson and his work into both historical and artistic contexts. A pioneer in his choice of subject matter, Wilson was also a stylistic innovator who used bold geometric shapes and bright colors to celebrate the dignity and the hopes of ordinary people. His story also offers insights into the creative impulse and will spark discussion on the purposes, subjects, and impacts of works of art.