Robert Gwathmey

Robert Gwathmey lived most of his life in New York but chose as his primary subject the South where he was born, particularly the African American community. As a young man he moved to Baltimore to study art at the Maryland Institute, then went on to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and traveled in Europe. After teaching in schools in Pennsylvania and New York he joined the faculty at Cooper Union where he taught for 26 years. In 1944 he lived and worked on a tobacco farm in North Carolina to get firsthand experience of the lives of his subjects.