James Washington, Jr.

born Gloster, Mississippi, 1909; died Seattle, Washington, 2000

BiographyJames Washington Jr. began drawing and painting in his early teens, teaching himself through home-study courses and careful observation of other artists’ work. His first employment as an artist was in Mississippi for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Washington moved to the Northwest and began to exhibit regionally in the mid-1940s. He later studied with the artists Mark Tobey and Yvonne Twining Humber. During the early 1950s he began creating stone and wood sculptures, works that brought him a heightened level of recognition, including an exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1959, a successful international artistic career, and numerous awards and honors. His work has been shown extensively, most notably in retrospective exhibitions at Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 1980, Bellevue Art Museum (now Bellevue Arts Museum) in 1989, and the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma in 2002. In 1990 the City of Seattle’s Historic Landmark and Preservation Board designated Washington’s home and studio a cultural landmark. It is now a cultural center.

[source: https://jameswashingtonculturalcenter.org/]

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