Mask
A student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1930s, McBride went on to play an important role in the city’s art scene. Part of the small group of Black artists around George Neal, he helped found the South Side Community Art Center (the only WPA art center still in existence today) and collected works by other Chicagoans. Like other African American artists, he turned to traditional African art in crafting his particular vision of modernism, here rendering a stylized version of an African mask in vivid blue against a red and yellow ground. The mask’s oval eyes rhyme with the eyelike forms that wend down the side of the composition.
Artwork Details
- Title: Mask
- Artist: William McBride (American, New Orleans, Louisiana 1912–2000 Chicago, Illinois)
- Date: 1941
- Medium: Color screenprint, printed in three colors
- Dimensions: 17 1/16 × 12 13/16 in. (43.4 × 32.5 cm)
- Classification: Prints
- Credit Line: Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 1999
- Object Number: 1999.529.130
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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