Almanac of Story Tellers: John Thomas Biggers

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of April 13th

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    It is the 103rd day of the year, leaving 262 days remaining in 2022.

   
    On this day in 1924, the artist John Thomas Biggers was born in Gastonia, N.C.

Photo by the Charlotte Observer

John Biggers at an exhibition in his hometown in 1999

    Biggers told his stories of racial and economic injustice through his art. He was best known for creating murals that celebrate African-American and African culture.

Victim of the City Streets #2
(1946)

    He was an arts educator who helped create and spent 34 years running the arts program at Texas Southern University in Houston, a historically Black college. He earned a doctorate from Pennsylvania State Univerity. 

    He is widely acclaimed for the complex murals he designed and painted across the United States, particularly in the south, but also in northern cities such as Minneapolis. During his time as dean of the arts department at TSU, Biggers started a mural program that required students to paint a mural. Some 114 murals now dot the campus.

    He believed that self-dignity and racial pride could be achieved through art. He created striking images of unidealized figures coping with poverty and despair. He would celebrate and draw the lives of  African-Americans with the everyday items that are important in southern Black culture -- shotgun houses, gourds, and patchwork quilts.

Shotgun, Third War #1
(1966)

        After visting western and Central Africa during a UNESCO-funded study, he began using African themes in his work. A visual diary of his travels was published in book form in 1962.  Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa contained 89 drawings and commentary that he hoped to show was intrinsically African.

    Biggers worked primarily in conté crayons and oil paints. His style was influenced by American realism and European modernism. His murals came from the Mexican school. 

    His later work was influenced by his travels in Africa, particularly by the matricachal diestic systems he saw there. His work became more stylized and symbolical; his drawings more allegorical.

    Biggers died in 2001 in Houston.