The Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse opens its summer season next week with a staged reading of American Artist, about the life and career of Loïs Mailou Jones, an internationally recognized artist and longtime Vineyard summer resident.
A member of the Harlem Renaissance and Oak Bluffs creative community, Ms. Jones work is featured in several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
As a Black painter working in the last century, her career and inclusion in prominent museums was often a struggle.
“I’m hanging, I’m there, but it hasn’t been easy by no means,” Ms. Jones said in a 1993 oral history interview with Linsey Lee of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. “I’ve had to keep a whole lot of my feelings within.”
For example, in 1941, Ms. Jones submitted her painting Indian Shops, Gay Head to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. The piece had to be submitted by a white friend to be considered because the gallery prohibited Black artists at the time. The painting won the Robert Woods Bliss landscape prize that year.
MJ Bruder Munafo, the artistic director at the playhouse and the director of American Artist, said that highlighting Island history and African American stories is important to her.
“There hasn’t been anything written about her in a dramatic fashion,” she said. “I want people to learn about the life of Loïs Mailou Jones, really, to highlight a great artists’ life.”
The staged readings take place on May 15, 16 and 17, opening the season, which continues through September. Six productions will be presented this summer, including the return of Chilmark, which highlights the history of the 19th century deaf community on the Island and premiered at the playhouse in 2018, and Dear Edvard, a musical piece about Edvard Munch’s time in a clinic for nervous disorders and alcoholism.
Dear Edvard also has a local connection. The libretto is written by summer resident Richard Michelson.
Other shows include a workshop of Uncle Chris, a new play by Allison Snyder and Christopher Hemphill and directed by Michael Herwitz, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, which had a sold out, extended run in New York City, and a musical about Pete Seeger.
For the past week the cast and crew of American Artist has been rehearsing at the playhouse, preparing for the staged reading. Workshopping the play before a live audience will help the writer and director fine tune the production.
“It really just means you put together a terrific group of people and you explore different facets of the play,” Ms. Bruder Munafo said. “It’s a fun process and at the end of it, you present it to an audience and elicit audience reactions.”
Elaine Savory, a former summer resident, writer and academic was commissioned by the playhouse to write the play. For research, she spent time at Howard University, where Ms. Jones’ archive resides. Ms. Savory also interviewed people who knew the artist at Howard University or through other contexts.
Ms. Savory also knew Ms. Jones personally, as she was married to Ms. Jones’ nephew.
“I’ve read everything about her.... What draws me to her life story is she was excellent in many kinds of art, but she was frustrated in not being fully recognized,” Ms. Savory said. “It’s called American Artist because the show is about what it is to practice art in a serious manner in America in her time period.”
In high school, Ms. Jones attended Boston Museum drawing classes in the afternoons and on weekends. During summers on the Vineyard, she would tie-dye batik silks with her mother.
Her first art show was held on the Vineyard when she was 17 years old. After graduating from college, she studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts school, and eventually became a professor at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina before moving on to Howard University.
During her time on the Vineyard, she interacted with several local artists, including her neighbor Dorothy West.
Several Black artists on the Island, including Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, a notable sculptor, and Harry Burleigh, a composer known for both concert songs and spiritual adaptations, urged her to go abroad to find success in her career. Ms. Jones took their advice and moved to Paris in 1937 to study at the Académie Julian. She returned to the U.S. in 1939, but for the rest of her life divided her time between the United States, Haiti and France.
In the 1993 oral history with Ms. Lee, Ms. Jones recalled the racism of the American art world.
“I couldn’t really get into the major shows because of my color, so I shipped my work, put them in crates,” Ms. Jones said. “Invariably, they were hung, but they never knew Loïs Jones was Black. I felt the need to do that for a number of years until I made my niche and then I let them know who I was....It was a shock. They just didn’t think that a Black artist could do that type of work. And if you could, they weren’t going to give you a chance anyway.”
On the Island, Ms. Jones helped give other artists a start. She owned a studio gallery in Edgartown in the 1980s and 1990s, and during summers, opened the space for women artists to exhibit their work, while she exhibited pieces at the Granary Gallery.
Ms. Jones died at the age of 92 in Washington in 1998. She is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Oak Bluffs.
Ms. Bruder Munafo said the mission of the playhouse is to tell good stories, but that she looks to make sure different types of subjects and people are represented each season, including strong women.
“I like making sure that in our mix of plays, we always have female playwrights represented. That’s important to me,” she said. “It’s the stories. I just like a good story. It starts out with that.”
For tickets, visit mvplayhouse.org.
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