Pauline Powell Burns
Pauline Powell Burns | |
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Born | Pauline Powell 1872 Oakland, California, U.S. |
Died | 1912 (aged 39–40) |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | artist, musician |
Pauline Powell Burns (1872–1912) was an American painter and pianist. She was the first African-American artist to exhibit paintings in California in 1890.[1][2] Powell was also a pianist who gave recitals around the San Francisco Bay Area.
Family history[]
Pauline Powell was born in 1872 in Oakland, California, to Josephine Turner and her husband, train porter William W. Powell. Her great-grandfather was blacksmith Joseph Fossett, one of Thomas Jefferson's slaves who was freed by the terms of his will in 1826.[3] Her grandmother Isabella Fossett was also a slave and as a child was sold away from Monticello in 1827 as part of a settlement of estate debts, later escaping to Boston.[1] Powell's parents moved to Oakland, where their daughter Pauline was born in 1872, the year her grandmother Isabella died.[1]
On October 11, 1893, she married Edward E. Burns; they had no children.[1][4]
Career[]
Powell showed early musical and artistic talent and studied both piano and painting.[1] Although African-Americans were by then being admitted to the California School of Design, she appears to have been largely self-taught.[5] She gave public piano recitals locally[1] and at least once sang in a quartet in Los Angeles;[6] she was praised by a Bay Area writer as “the bright musical star of her state.”[1]
Powell is believed to have been the first African-American artist to exhibit anywhere in California.[1][7] She apparently began showing her paintings at the age of 14, but her first known public exhibition was at the Mechanics' Institute Fair in San Francisco in 1890.[2][5] Although her paintings at the fair received "great praise," she was then better recognized as a pianist and is listed in a 1919 history of African-Americans in California solely as a piano teacher.[8]
Powell’s artwork is scarce, partly because of when she lived but also because she died at a young age.[2] She died at the age of 40 in 1912, of tuberculosis.[2] She is known to have painted landscapes and still lifes; surviving works include Champagne and Oysters (ca. 1890), Bulldogs, Still Life With Fruit (1890), Violets (oil on card, 1890), and a pair of watercolors, one of nasturtiums and the other of tulips, both of which are in the collection of Dunsmuir House in Oakland, California.[2][9][10][11][12] Violets is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture.[7][13]
Some documents relating to Powell's life are held in the Archives of California Art.[5]
Public collections[]
- National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC[14]
See also[]
References[]
- ^ a b c d e f g h "Pauline Powell Burns" "Getting Word: African-American Families of Monticello," Monticello.org website.
- ^ a b c d e Sonstegard, Viki. "Pauline Powell: Oakland Painter and Pianist". Women Out West: Art on the Edge of America (website), Oct. 12, 2015.
- ^ "Extraordinary California Women Artists Working from 1860 to 1960". Hyperallergic. 2019-02-20. Retrieved 2019-02-27.
- ^ Chandler, Robert J. San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown. Vol. 14. University of Oklahoma Press, 2014, p. 160.
- ^ a b c Trenton, Patricia, ed. Independent Spirits, Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945. University of California Press, 1995, p. 12.
- ^ Smith, Catherine Parsons. Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular. University of California Press, 2007, p. 78.
- ^ a b "Highlights from the National Collections". Smithsonian Institution, Oct. 20, 2014, p. 4.
- ^ Fuller, Diana Burgess, and Daniela Salvioni. Art, Women, California 1950-2000: Parallels and Intersections. University of California Press, 2002, p. 205.
- ^ Weiss, Rebecca. "A Tale of Two Women: Pioneering Californian Artists Pauline Powell Burns and Beulah Woodard". Swann Auction Galleries website, Jan. 16, 2014.
- ^ Alexiadis, Jane. "What's It Worth: Painter Has Unique Place in History." San Jose Mercury News, June 3, 2011.
- ^ "Still Life With Fruit, Pauline Powell Burns". artnet.
- ^ "Bulldogs by Pauline PowellBurns". www.artnet.com.
- ^ Martin, Courtney J. (March 2017). "The Corona Rising". Art in America. 105 (3): 45–50 – via MasterFILE Premier.
- ^ "Collection Search: Violets, Burns, Pauline Powell, American, 1872 - 1912". nmaahc.si.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-22.
- 1872 births
- 1912 deaths
- 19th-century American painters
- 20th-century American painters
- 19th-century American women artists
- 20th-century American women artists
- 19th-century American women pianists
- 20th-century American women pianists
- 20th-century American pianists
- African-American pianists
- African-American women artists
- American women painters
- Painters from California
- Pianists from San Francisco
- Artists from Oakland, California
- African-American painters
- Hemings family
- African-American women musicians
- 20th-century deaths from tuberculosis
- Tuberculosis deaths in California