Children’s Paintings from Memphis

Joseph Percy Atkins Jr.

The sun bursts onto a valley, its golden light spilling onto houses, fields, and roads. Joseph Percy Atkins Jr. was 11 years old when he painted this exuberant landscape in 1938. During Joseph’s early childhood, the Atkins family lived in a house that they owned in a newly developed Memphis neighborhood. But his father—a World War I veteran and postal worker—was not in good health. In 1937, the family decided to rent out their own home to make money and move into a shotgun house in a less prosperous neighborhood. This new house, which perhaps appears in Joseph’s second painting, was located just a few blocks from the LeMoyne Federal Art Center.

Joseph proceeded to lead a life of purpose and service. At age 18, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Wilberforce University and, later, a doctorate in education from the University of Tennessee. From 1952 to 1970, he taught in Memphis public schools. For the next two decades, he led the Louisville, Kentucky, public school system as assistant superintendent. A former colleague remembered that “his strongest attribute was that he put kids first,” especially as he oversaw plans for desegregating the school district.

Scott Bell Jr.

Scott Bell Jr. painted two scenes related to his lived experiences. In the first, a young man, accompanied by a black-and-white dog, proudly displays fish that he has caught. Scott excelled at the specific and sensitive depiction of facial features in what could be a self-portrait. In the second painting, a mule-drawn wagon loaded with cotton has backed up to a building labeled “Miss. Cotton Gin.” Pipes snake around the building, transporting unprocessed cotton inside, while the finished bales of cotton are stacked nearby. Scott undoubtedly drew this scene from his memories. Three generations of his father’s family had lived in Lexington and Yazoo County, Mississippi, where they worked in the cotton industry, first as enslaved laborers and then as sharecroppers.

Scott’s father had started to move north in the 1920s, settling first in Tunica, Mississippi, before moving to Memphis by at least 1935. His family’s home was located about three miles away from the LeMoyne Federal Art Center. By 1942, when Scott registered for the draft, he had moved to Chicago with his younger sister. He served in the US Army from 1943 until November 1945. Following his discharge, he returned to Chicago and worked as a laborer at an automobile manufacturer. He passed away in Los Angeles in 1984.

Iona Ruby Farley

Brilliantly colored clouds float in a line above a row of buildings. They join together into a single, solid mass, linked by the repetition of their salmon-hued roofs. Some are large structures that lean into one another, while others are smaller and more discrete units, standing on their own. It’s tempting to speculate that Iona Farley, the artist of this scene, lived in one of these buildings or, at the least, that they were familiar sights in her Memphis neighborhood. In 1938, she lived on Louisa Street with her parents and siblings. But no such structures from the 1930s on her block, or streets nearby, have survived. In the early 1920s, her mother, Molly J. Williams, married her father, James Arthur Farley. They probably met in Memphis; she came from a smaller town to the north, and he came from Sardis, Mississippi, an hour to the south. He worked as a porter at William R. Moore Dry Goods, a prominent Memphis wholesale business, a job which he would hold for the next 30 years. By 1950, Iona had married Joe Taylor and moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Mary Frances Gathings

In 1938, seven-year-old Mary Frances Gathings joined her older brother Richard in classes at the LeMoyne Federal Art Center. The two paintings she created there have possible autobiographical connections. In one, she painted a woman wearing a pink and orange dress, gold earrings, a blue-gray head wrap, and pink nail polish. She sits at a table, shelling peas or snapping beans, in front a vibrant purple background. Could this be Mary and Richard’s mother, Frances Shields Gathings (1902–1942)? Around this time, she worked as a domestic servant; very sadly, she passed away just a few years later from tuberculosis.

In the second painting, two children play in the yard of a substantial house. If the little girl on the left is Stella, Mary’s sister, younger by five years and the youngest child in their family, then the girl dressed in yellow at the right is probably a self-portrait. The two sisters remained close for their entire lives. When Stella was around age 20, she married Fred Usher and moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Mary lived in Memphis for the next 50 years, but she moved to Ohio to join her sister near the end of her life.

Cornelia Massey

A child and dog look up in surprise as an airplane roars overhead. Aircraft were increasingly present in Cornelia Massey’s life in late summer 1938. Earlier that year, the Memphis Airport had built its first modern terminal to meet the demands for increased commercial passenger service, and Cornelia’s home lay along its flight path. Perhaps that home, located on Louisa Street, was one of the buildings that appear in Cornelia’s three paintings. She lived there with her six siblings, mother, and father, who worked as a laborer for the City WPA project in 1940 and for the Army Depot at the time of his death in 1957. In a wonderful bit of recordkeeping, Cornelia noted her age as 11 on the first two drawings and 12 on the third, suggesting that she might have painted them before and after her birthday on September 8.

In 1961, Cornelia married Joe Bland in Galveston, Texas. Originally from Mississippi, Joe had served in the US Army from 1943 to 1945 and worked as a carpenter. The rest of their lives were spent in Memphis. Cornelia (also known as Sue) passed away recently, at age 91, survived by a daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter.

Harold Lloyd Neal

In an interview with the Detroit Free Press at age 65, Harold Neal connected his lifelong artistic practice to his experiences making art as a young boy: “When I drew as a small child, I received compliments which were reinforced by adults. You keep doing what gets you compliments from adults.” One can imagine the praise that the 13-year-old artist received for his sensitive depiction of a woman washing clothes or his bold, experimental color study of trees. Harold pursued a career as a professional artist in Detroit, where he had moved in 1947 following his US Army service. After studying painting and art education at the College for Creative Studies and Wayne State University, he took a job with the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. But he continued to paint, exhibit, and participate in the city’s art scene. In 1958, he cofounded the Contemporary Studio, one of the first Black-owned galleries in the Midwest. By the 1970s, Harold had become a professor of fine arts at the Wayne County Community College. Throughout his career, he painted works that spoke directly to African American experiences. In 1994, he explained to a reporter: “My work is a journal, an ongoing process, evolving as my experiences dictate. My struggle is black history.”

Walter Ellis Ragsdale Jr.

Walter Ellis Ragsdale Jr. was the older brother of Byron Ragsdale. The siblings took art classes together at LeMoyne, where they both painted views of a neighborhood dotted with compact buildings, large trees, a tidy fence, and a wide expanse of lawn bisected by a path or road. The strong similarities between their paintings suggest that this piece of land was an actual location rather than an imagined arrangement. But the buildings don’t resemble the Ragsdales’ home in a Memphis neighborhood, and the brown building at the end of the road looks like a barn, with large double doors. The brothers’ grandfathers and great-grandfathers had worked as farmers in Mississippi and Louisiana before moving to Memphis in the 1910s. Did they travel back to these locations to visit relatives? Or might this place be closer to Memphis and connected in some way to Walter’s painting of a truck piled high with melons, set off against a gray-blue road and flaming orange sky?

In 1942, when Walter registered for the World War II draft, he was unemployed. Nearly 10 years later, when he married Lillie Williams, he was working as a porter for First National Bank. Alongside their three children, eight grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren, Walter and Lillie celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary shortly before his death in 2011.

Earnest Yarbrough

Earnest Yarbrough’s childhood had been marked by frequent moves. His parents were originally from Arkansas but had lived in Tunica, Mississippi in the 1910s, where his father worked as a farmer. By the time of Earnest’s birth in 1923, they had settled in Buffalo, New York, where his father worked as a building laborer. By 1930, the family had moved to Gary, Indiana, perhaps in order for his father to take a job as a laborer at a steel mill. By 1937, Earnest’s family had moved to Memphis and by 1940, his father had passed away.

Between 1937 and 1942, Earnest and his mother lived near the LeMoyne Federal Art Center. Around this same time, he also participated in another New Deal program sponsored by the WPA, working as a porter for the National Youth Administration—an agency designed to provide work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 25. In February 1942, Earnest followed his family’s tradition of military service by enlisting in the US Navy. His father had served in the 816th Pioneer Infantry of the US Army, which was posted to France from October 1918 to August 1919. Earnest first served from 1942 to 1945 and then re-enlisted from 1948 to 1964. In 1980, he passed away in Pineland, South Carolina.