"Untitled" by Charles White

In the middle of the 20th century, Charles White’s dignified, humanistic portraits of Black Americans countered the country’s racist ideas and inspired a generation of artists including Kerry James Marshall and David Hammons. White’s social realist style spanned painting, printmaking, and drawing. While the artist incorporated aspects of popular mid-century abstraction, he remained committed to depicting the human form. White was born in Chicago and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York, sojourning in Mexico City, and finally settling in Southern California, where his skills as a printmaker and draftsman blossomed. He taught at Los Angeles’s Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design), extending his generous style into the classroom. White exhibited widely in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.