John Thomas Biggers was born on April 13, 1924, in Gastonia, North Carolina, the
youngest of seven children. He studied art first at Hampton Institute in Virginia
in
1941, and then was drafted into the Navy in 1943. After his discharge in 1945,
Biggers
followed his mentor Viktor Lowenfeld to Pennsylvania State University. There he
received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1948, and his doctorate in 1954.
In 1949, he accepted an offer to establish the art department at the newly created
Texas State University for Negroes in Houston (now Texas Southern University).
He
would remain at the University for thirty-four years, until his retirement in
1983.
While there, he established a mural program whereby each senior art student had
to
complete a mural on campus. One hundred and fourteen of these murals remain at
Texas
Southern University. His own legacy there is a fifty-foot mural at the student
center, entitled Family Unity. Biggers' lithograph
The Upper Room, from the Multicultural Art Print
Series, is a detail from that mural.
John Biggers is best known for his murals, many of which are in Houston, including
his well-known 1953 depiction of African-American women in American life at the
Blue Triangle
branch of the YWCA, which served as an inspiration for his drawings of Dicy. He
produced the illustrations for Aunt Dicy Tales in
1955-1956 for his friend, author J. Mason Brewer, just a year before the artist’s
life-altering trip to West Africa. This trip inspired, among other things, Biggers'
book Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa (University of
Texas Press, 1962). Once Biggers had experienced his African roots by traveling
to
Ghana and Nigeria on a UNESCO grant in 1957, his art changed forever. The drawings
of Dicy were the last commission in his early style. Biggers recognized these
images
as some of the strongest works he had ever done, spurred by his intent, expressed
to
Brewer, to bring illustration to a higher level of art.
In 1990 John Biggers was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Hampton
University. He died in January 2001, survived by his wife and sister.
Sources:
Cotter, Holland. "John Biggers, Painter Who Explored African Life, Dies at 76".
New York Times, January 30, 2001.
The Web of Life: The Art of John Biggers. Getty Arts
EdNet. 2001. http://www.getty.edu/artsednet/resources/Biggers/ (accessed 25 March
2001).
Scope and Contents
The John Biggers Collection includes the illustration drawings for John Mason
Brewer's Aunt Dicy Tales (1956), a crayon drawing,
and a poster. The Aunt Dicy Tales series consists of
fifteen drawings, arranged in the order in which they appear in the book; their
titles are also taken from the book.
Related Material
The Ransom Center's Art Collection also has in its Limited Editions Club Collection
a
portfolio of Biggers' lithographs for Maya Angelou's Our
Grandmothers (1994). There are also John Biggers materials in the Ransom
Center's Library.
