Viewing page 48 of 79

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

41

floor of the Rankin Chapel. Acknowledged by the New York Times as the "only gallery in the world directed by Negroes,"14 the Gallery fostered an appreciation of art through exhibitions of Old Masters, contemporary art, and the work of talented Afro-American artists. In the early 1940s, Herring and his colleague
Alonzo Aden, with the help and support of Thomas, founded the
first black-owned and operated commercial art gallery in
America-- the Barnett Aden Gallery. Years later, several generations of black artists and art scholars acknowledged their debt to Herring and the Howard Art Department when they paid tribute to the late Professor in the exhibition catalog for the Barnett Aden Collection. Alma Thomas wrote movingly:

He was a great humanitarian who not only encouraged his gifted students, but also took a personal interest in their struggles to raise themselves
above their handicaps.15

Besides her class with Herring, Thomas studied modeling and sculpture with May Howard Jackson, who was a member of
Howard's faculty in 1923 and 1924.16 Jackson is one of that
renowned triumverate of black women sculptors who worked or
were educated during the nineteenth century. The other two
were Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller. Born in Philadelphia, Jackson studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, receiving her certificate in 1899. She never developed a truly personal style, but she was a competent technician in the
academic tradition, best known for her fine portrait busts in
plaster and bronze of such notables as Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Francis Grimke, and Kelly Miller.17 Soon after the turn of