Whitfield Lovell

Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his installations that incorporate masterful Conte crayon portraits of anonymous African Americans from between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Using vintage photography as his source, Lovell often pairs his subjects with found objects, evoking personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective American past. In 2007, Lovell was awarded with a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.”

 

History and memory have inspired Lovell’s work for a number of years. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he created large-scale oil stick and charcoal drawings that allegorically examined issues of family, identity, gender, love, death, loss, and the passage of time. Lovell was working mostly from family photographs, juxtaposed with symbols and found images.

 

Works by Whitfield Lovell are featured in major museum collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, DC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; The Yale University Art Gallery; The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Seattle Art Museum, WA, and many others.