American Art Collaborative

"When I was crawling on the floor, my mother gave me paper and pencil to play with. It kept me quiet while she did her errands." Richmond Barthé, quoted in Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1972 to the Present, 1993
Richmond Barthé took the title Blackberry Woman from Wallace Thurman's 1929 book, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a story of the discrimination against dark-skinned women within the African American community. The woman's bare feet, simple cotton dress, and thatched baskets evoke the extreme poverty of Barthé's youth in rural Mississippi where he often saw black women carrying bundles on their heads. (Vendryes, Expression and Repression of Identity: Race, Religion and Sexuality in the Art of American Sculptor Richmond Barthé, PhD diss., Princeton, 1997