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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