Lois Mailou Jones

Education: Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Normal School of Arts, Designers Art School, Howard University

Significance: Lois Mailou Jones was an African American artist of the twentieth century who traveled to foreign countries, such as Haiti, and incorporated her experiences into her work. Jones found it difficult to achieve acclaim in the United States because of her race, but eventually found success and notoriety for her work.

Background

Lois (also Loïs) Mailou Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 3, 1905. Jones's family included her parents, Thomas Vreeland and Carolyn Dorinda Adams Jones, and an older brother. Her father was a superintendent who became a lawyer, and her mother was a cosmetologist.

Jones liked to draw as a child, and her parents encouraged her artistic ability. After grade school, they enrolled her in the High School of Practical Arts in Boston. She attended this school from 1919 to 1923 while also taking night classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she was awarded a scholarship. When she was seventeen years old, Jones had her first art show in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. At the show, she met African American painter and sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who greatly inspired Jones.

Jones received a scholarship to the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts to study design. She studied there from 1923 to 1927 while also attending the Boston Normal Art School to earn a teaching certificate in art.

Jones then earned another scholarship to attend the Designers Art School of Boston, where she studied under designer Ludwig Frank. After this, Jones designed fabrics.

Jones next looked for teaching work but had trouble securing employment in Boston. She was upset that the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts would not hire her. At the suggestion of one of her former teachers, she moved to Sedalia, North Carolina, to accept a position with the Palmer Memorial Institute, a Black college preparatory school. She served as head of the art department and was involved in athletics and other extracurricular activities. One day in 1930, she arranged for Howard University's art chairman, James Vernon Herring, to speak at the school. Afterward, he offered Jones a position at the university, which is in Washington, DC. She accepted the job and began to focus more on painting.

Life's Work

In 1934, while taking classes at Columbia University, Jones became interested in African masks and began incorporating them into her art. She continued to teach at Howard University until 1937, when she took a sabbatical to travel to Paris, France. While there, she was surprised at how accepting and appreciative the country was of her African heritage, something she did not experience in the United States. Jones incorporated African folk art into much of her work, such as Les Fétiches, a 1938 painting featuring five African masks.

She returned to the United States and resumed teaching at Howard University. She continued to paint during this time and hold exhibitions of her work. Jones also entered art competitions. However, as a Black artist, she experienced much racism. She once had an award rescinded when the committee found out that she was African American; the competition was closed to Black people. To get around this, she asked a friend to pose as her and enter her work into several art competitions. When she won, the friend pretended to be Jones and accepted the award. For example, a White French friend, Céline Tabary, delivered Indian Shops, Gay Head, Massachusetts, to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, because African American artists were not permitted to enter the Robert Woods Bliss prize competition. Jones's work won the prestigious award for landscape painting in 1941. Tabary, who had been her interpreter when she studied in France, frequently posed as Jones during this era because she was unable to return home until World War II ended.

In 1945, Jones received a bachelor's degree in art education from Howard University and continued to teach and paint for the next few years. After her marriage to Haitian graphic designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel in 1953, she and her husband traveled to Haiti. Jones fell in love with the culture there and began incorporating bold colors into her art, a trend she would continue throughout her life. Jones and her husband traveled the world, and Jones continued to incorporate the new cultures she experienced into her paintings.

Jones received a grant in 1969 from Howard University to travel to Africa to conduct research on the work of contemporary artists there. Afterward, she continued to conduct this research in the United States and the Caribbean, interviewing and documenting artists and their work. The project was called the Black Visual Artists. This work inspired her to use African and Caribbean elements, such as bright colors, clean lines, and abstraction, in her paintings.

Jones finally began to receive acclaim for her artwork in the 1970s. Several museums, including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Howard University Gallery, held exhibits of her work. Jones continued to teach at Howard and other institutions until 1977, when she officially retired from teaching. She continued to paint, hold exhibits, and lecture into the 1990s. She died on June 9, 1998, in Washington, DC.

Impact

Jones was renowned for her work containing African and Haitian themes. Some of her paintings became permanent fixtures in several prestigious museums, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the 2020s, her work also appeared in exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Jones left behind a legacy not only for her art but also for her teaching. An educator for more than forty years, her students remember her for how tough and critical she was of their work, but understand that she was hard on them to help them grow and reach their full potential as artists. Several of her students became famous artists, including sculptor Martha Jackson Jarvis, painter David C. Driskell, and automobile designer Edward T. Welburn. Illustrator Aleyah Lyon created a biographic comic book about Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones: Behind the Mask. The 2023 comic is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's series Drawn to Art: Tales of Inspiring Women Artists, which is based on women whose art is in the museum's collection.

Personal Life

Jones married Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel in 1953. They traveled to his native country, and the culture there inspired Jones's work. Pierre-Noel died in 1982. Jones received many art awards during her life. President Jimmy Carter recognized Jones for her outstanding achievement in the arts at the 1980 National Conference of Artists.

Bibliography

Cotter, Holland. “Lois Mailou Jones, 92, Painter and Teacher.” The New York Times, 13 June 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/06/13/arts/lois-mailou-jones-92-painter-and-teacher.html?mcubz=1. Accessed 27 May 2026.

“Jones, Lois Mailou 1905–.” Encyclopedia.com, www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/lois-mailou-jones. Accessed 27 May 2026.

“Jones, Lois Mailou (1905–1998).” BlackPast.org, www.blackpast.org/aah/jones-lois-mailou-1905-1998. Accessed 27 May 2026.

Kaplan, Howard. “Drawn to Loïs Mailou Jones.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, 3 Aug. 2023, americanart.si.edu/blog/comic-lois-mailou-jones. Accessed 27 May 2026.

“Loïs Mailou Jones.” National Museum of Women in the Arts, nmwa.org/art/artists/lois-mailou-jones/. Accessed 27 May 2026.

“Loïs Mailou Jones.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, americanart.si.edu/artist/lo%C3%AFs-mailou-jones-5658. Accessed 27 May 2026.

“Loïs Mailou Jones.” Whitney Museum of American Art, whitney.org/artists/20345. Accessed 28 May 2026.

“Out of the Shadows, A Black Painter Finds Her Place in the Sun.” National Gallery of Art, 28 Jan. 2024, www.nga.gov/stories/lois-mailou-jones-place-in-the-sun.html. Accessed 27 May 2026.

Phelps, Rob. “She Made Her Way in the Art World.” Tufts Now, 6 June 2024, now.tufts.edu/2024/06/06/she-made-her-way-art-world. Accessed 27 May 2026.

Trescott, Jacqueline. “For Pioneering African American Painter Lois Mailou Jones, a Retrospective.” The Washington Post, 3 Oct. 2010, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100100181.html. Accessed 27 May 2026.