Item Overview
Description: JAMES A. PORTER (1905 - 1970)
Rural scene.

Oil on artist board.
Painting size: 16 x 20 inches. Frame size: 20 x 24 inches.
Signed in oil, lower right recto. Inscribed "J. A. Porter, 63".

Provenance: Maryland, private collection.

Biography from the Archives of askART

Biography photo for James Amos Porter
The following was submitted by Coni Porter Uzelac, daughter of the artist.

JAMES AMOS PORTER: THE DEAN OF AFRO-AMERICAN ART HISTORY was born in Baltimore, Maryland, December 22, 1905. He was the youngest of seven children of John, a Methodist minister and Lydia Peck Porter. He received his early education in Maryland, and entered the public schools of the District of Columbia in 1918, graduating with honors in 1923 from Armstrong High School. Program notes from "Class Night Exercises, Class of 1923" list Porter as Class Treasurer, and report that he gave the Salutatory address.

He entered Howard University's School of Applied Sciences on an art scholarship in the fall of 1923, pursuing courses in painting, drawing and the history of art under the tutelage of James V. Herring, who founded and chaired the newly organized Howard University, organized in 1927. He graduated with academic honors in 1927 receiving a Bachelors degree in art.

He was at once employed as an Instructor in Art. During the summers of 1927 and 1928, he attended Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, pursuing courses in art education, jewelry and ceramics. In 1929, he studied at the Art Students League of New York under Dimitri Romanovsky and George Bridgman, the well known figure drawing expert. From Bridgman's instruction, he learned the mastery of figure drawing.

Porter entered the Harmon Foundation Exhibitions which were held in New York City, and his artworks also were included in several of the Harmon Traveling exhibitions. In 1929, Porter was awarded the Harmon Foundation Honorable Mention for Sarah, later destroyed. He was awarded the Arthur Schomberg Portrait Prize for the painting Woman Holding A Jug in 1933 in the Harmon Foundation Exhibition of Negro artists.

While on Sabbatical leave from Howard during the summer of 1935 and the winter months of that year, he studied Medieval Archaeology at the Institut d'Art et d'Archaeologie, at the Sorbonne in Paris on a scholarship provided by the Carnegie Foundation's Institute of International Education. This experience further aroused his interests in architecture and archeology. In the fall of the same year, he traveled in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Italy as a stipendiary of the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation Travel Grant to study European painting and several collections of African art, including crafts then housed in important museums of ethnography in these countries.

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