Blackberry Woman

Object Details

Artist

Richmond Barthé, born Bay St. Louis, MS 1901-died Pasadena, CA 1989

Exhibition Label

The angular grace of Blackberry Woman speaks of stoicism and constancy. The subject – an African American woman in a simple dress who is balancing a basket on her head – is one Barthé may well have seen on market day as a boy growing up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. But she is more than an echo of an image once observed. She has the frontal, linear form found in West African sculpture, which Barthé first saw in Chicago, in an exhibition during “The Negro in Art Week” in November 1927, when he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, 2012

Luce Center Label

Richmond Barthé took the title Blackberry Woman from Wallace Thurman's 1929 book, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a story of the discrimination against dark-skinned women within the African American community. The woman's bare feet, simple cotton dress, and thatched baskets evoke the extreme poverty of Barthé's youth in rural Mississippi where he often saw black women carrying bundles on their heads. (Vendryes, Expression and Repression of Identity: Race, Religion and Sexuality in the Art of American Sculptor Richmond Barthé, PhD diss., Princeton, 1997)

Luce Object Quote

"When I was crawling on the floor, my mother gave me paper and pencil to play with. It kept me quiet while she did her errands." Richmond Barthé, quoted in Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1972 to the Present, 1993

Credit Line

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

modeled by 1930, cast 1932

Object number

2001.6

Restrictions & Rights

Usage conditions apply

Type

Sculpture

Medium

bronze

Dimensions

35 1/2 x 12 1/4 x 16 1/4 in. (90.1 x 31.1 x 41.3 cm)

See more items in

Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection

Department

Painting and Sculpture

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Topic

African American

Figure female\full length

Occupation\domestic\gathering

Object\other\basket

Record ID

saam_2001.6

Metadata Usage (text)

Not determined

GUID (Link to Original Record)

http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk711bbe986-c9ae-45fb-9449-924b97545dae