James Lesesne Wells
November 2, 1902-January 20, 1993
As a printmaker I’m always looking for inspiration
and I came across the works of James Lesesne Wells. Wells was a graphic artist
and art teacher. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia and later moved to Florida
with his family.
Wells studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
for a year before transferring to Columbia University in New York, where he
majored in art. Wells was not only influenced by African sculpture but he also
studied the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and the German Expressionists — Ernst
Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Muller, and Emile Nolde.
Although Wells saw prints as a major art form, he
also worked in other areas such as painting and clay. So in 1929 he was invited
to join the faculty at Howard University as a crafts teacher. He taught clay
modeling, ceramics, sculpture, metal and block printing. It took him two years
to convince the school that he and linoleum cutting belonged in the College of
Fine Arts.
During the Depression, Wells served as the director
of a summer art workshop in an old Harlem nightclub. His assistants included
such famous artists as Charles Alston, Jacob Lawrence, Palmer Hayden and
Georgette Seabrooke.
Wells retired from Howard University in 1968 but continued
to paint and make prints into his eighties. Color linoleum prints became his
specialty. In 1986, the Washington Project for the Arts assembled a major
exhibition of his work, and in 1973, Fisk University mounted another one man
show. His work Flight into Egypt was exhibited in 1990
in the Harmon’s "Against the Odds" exhibition. Wells died on January
20, 1993 at the age of ninety.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1988/2/88.02.02.x.html
