I first discovered Laura Wheeler Waring thanks to her portrait of Alice Dunbar Nelson, which I shared in my November 2024 D.D. blogpost. Then the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism introduced me to more of her work. Intrigued, I decided to create a post on the artist whom W.E.B. DuBois considered a “missionary of culture.”

Laura was born on May 26, 1887, in Hartford, Connecticut and came from a prominent African American family. Her father was the Reverend Robert Foster Wheeler, pastor of Talcott Street Congregational Church, the first all-black church in Connecticut. Her mother was Mary Freeman Wheeler, a teacher and amateur artist.

She greatly admired the painting of African American artist Henry O. Tanner. While attending Hartford Public High School, her own talent in painting was recognized. She graduated with honors from Hartford in 1906 and began teaching part-time at Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Pennsylvania. She matriculated into the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), making her the sixth generation of her family to attend college. Although her heart belonged to painting, she studied illustration with Henry McCarter which along with teaching enabled her to support herself as she pursued a career in painting.

She provided many illustrations for the NACCP’s Crisis magazine. Her first Crisis cover appeared in 1913. In 1914, she was the first African American woman to receive PAFA’s A. William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship to study art at the Louvre in Paris. In 1920, thanks to her NAACP connections, she became the first African American to illustrate for a major mainstream publisher.

When World War I interrupted her studies in Paris, she returned to teaching at Cheney and continued there for thirty years. She took sabbaticals to return to Europe and continue perfecting her craft. She became known for murals and landscapes. During this second trip, she exhibited her work in Parisian art galleries for the first time.

In 1927, her paintings won the William E. Harmon Foundation Award in Fine Arts with a special mention for the portrait done of Anna Washington Derry, a laundress at Cheney. During Laura’s lifetime the Corcoran Gallery,  in Washington, DC, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art displayed her work. In 1944, eight portraits were commissioned and shown by the Harmon Foundation in their exhibit Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin. These are now part of the Harmon Collection in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

While her work was dismissed as derivative by New Negro/Harlem Renaissance esthete Alain Locke, others appreciated the dignity she gave African Americans of all classes in her portraits and illustrations.

Laura married Walter Waring in 1927 but had no children. She died in Philadelphia in 1948. Grateful Cheney graduates succeeded in having a Philadelphia public school named for her. The Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her in 1997. You can learn more about her from PAFA’s presentation on youtube: https://youtu.be/6ltK486TaGY?si=dWfCHwt67lAqBkHV

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