Charles Alston’s extensive artistic career revolved around painting, sculpture, and murals where he created work that beautifully went in unpredictable directions. That was deliberate, and it’s what makes his work and career so fascinating. In a 1968 interview, Alston critiques, quite presciently, the art world’s tendency to place artists in familiar, predictable boxes:
“[O]ne of the favorite phrases in reviewing is, ‘this artist hasn’t quite reached a stage of consistency.’ Which to me is bunk. I mean this is the dullest thing in the world to me, this kind of consistency…I don’t care about being pigeonholed or having this great business of consistency. I think for any painter who paints honestly, if you look at a body of his work and you are perceptive, you can see his signature.” (Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, 1968 October 19. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)
His paintings have a clear cubist influence, one that figuratively evokes Modigliani in some works, while others embody the modernist aesthetic of Henry Moore. Alston was originally from Charlotte North Carolina and moved to Harlem in the early 1900s after his mother remarried into Romare Bearden’s family (the two are cousins). Bearden and Alston’s close relationship led to their joint work in Spiral in the 1960s, but decades before that his unique collaboration with Hale Woodruff would bring his work West to Los Angeles where the two collaborated on the Golden State Mutual’s mural which was installed in the insurance company’s headquarters in 1949.
The piece blended both of their distinct styles in a two panel historical narrative of California, colonization and migration.
Alston was the first black supervisor for the WPA’s Federal Art Project and he also founded the Harlem Arts Guild in 1935. He also had an extensive teaching career and a commercial art practice. His bronze bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of 5 sculptures the artist cast in 1970; the piece was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1974, and has been on loan to the White House since 2000 where it became the first image of an African-American publicly displayed in the White House. A second bust of MLK is also at the NMAAHC.
*Correction: This post originally published with a copy of Hale Woodruff’s Settlement and Development, 1949 in error. The image has been corrected. To see Hale Woodruff’s contribution to the Golden State Mural, please see the Artist a Day post for 2/4/19.
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