… Myself That I Remake

“I a lover of nature. I have to paint from within .... As I used to tell my students, anything I do must be of a caliber that will live after me. That is really my credo, even now,” said Lois Jones when she was in her 80s. During an artistic career that spanned more than 6 decades and continued until the end of her life, she sought excellence and a place in art history. When, in her early efforts, she realized that textile design entailed anonymity, she abandoned it. “As I wanted my name to go down in history, I realized that I would have to be a painter. And so it was that I turned immediately to painting.” A Boston native, Jones received her early education locally, fi rst at the High School of Practical Arts and in museum vocational drawing classes, later at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and the Designers Art School, where she studied textile design and created patterns for such textile manufacturers as F.A. Foster in Boston and Schumacher in New York City. “Practically every summer of my childhood my mother took me and my brother to Martha’s Vineyard .... It was there that I fi rst began to paint.” During these trips to the island Jones met two infl uential fi gures, sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller and composer Harry T. Burleigh. “Lois, you know, if you want to be successful in your career you’re going to have to go abroad,” they advised. Fuller had studied in Paris with Rodin, and Burleigh would regularly go to Switzerland to write his music. “Look what happened to Henry O. Tanner. He couldn’t make it in this country; he had to go abroad. The same thing happened to Hale Woodruff.” Though Jones vowed to go abroad, Paris had to wait. After graduation from the Boston Museum School, she migrated south to North Carolina to teach at the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia. Soon she was invited to Howard University in Washington, DC, where she founded the art department and taught design and watercolor painting for more than 40 years, making her mark and infl uencing hundreds of painters, among them Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Woodsey Thomas, and Malkia Roberts. Jones got her big break in 1937, with a fellowship to study at the Académie Julien during a sabbatical from How-