Hello, my name is Julie Aronson, and I am the Curator of American Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. I am also the curator overseeing the Cincinnati presentation of this exhibition. Today, I will be reading The Early Work section panel for David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History along with label text and audio descriptions for three highlighted works.

The paintings and drawings from the early 1950s exhibit Driskell’s formative studies at Howard University in Washington, DC, and his 1953 summer residency at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, Maine. They reveal a skilled technician and an artist poised between narrative and symbolic modes. At Howard, Driskell received studio art instruction from James A. Porter, Loïs Mailou Jones, James L. Wells, and Morris Louis. His immediate influences at Skowhegan included Jack Levine, an American Social Realist painter known for his thick impasto and expressionist figures, and artist and paint manufacturer Leonard Bocour. Skowhegan introduced modernist painting techniques to Driskell and encouraged him to become experimental, to explore flatness, abstraction, and action painting. These inclinations and influences reveal themselves in his early paintings Self-Portrait (1953), Boy with Birds, City Quartet, and Within the City.

Driskell began teaching at Talladega College in Alabama almost as soon as he completed his undergraduate studies. He was twenty-four, married to Thelma Deloatch, and had two daughters, Daviryne and Daphne. The Driskell family moved to Alabama in 1955, the year the Montgomery bus boycott began. Here Driskell finely tuned his inclinations for flat, representational painting and developed some of his earliest iconic works.