Microbiologic and Cultural Interchange

Abstract

“...I did develop...a kind of root down in Atlanta,” confided Hale Woodruff during an oral history interview, “You may have heard of it. It was called the ‘Outhouse School’ and, frankly, it was given such a name as this by one of the press writers because we used to paint landscapes in and around Atlanta in our art classes and the hillsides were just dotted with outdoor toilets” (1). The understated and self-effacing Woodruff was referring to the Atlanta School, an alliance he developed among black artists in the 1940s, which flourished into national activities, among them an annual art exhibit. At the inaugural, philosopher Alain Locke, spokesman of the Negro Movement, known in the 1920s and 1930s as Harlem Renaissance, praised the exhibit for encouraging “a healthy and representational art of the people with its roots in its own soil” (2). Painter, muralist, printmaker, experimenter, educator, organizer Woodruff became art director at Atlanta University, where he founded the art department and permanent collection and later painted the Art of the Negro murals. Born in Cairo, Illinois, the only child of a widowed mother, who was “very, very skillful with the pencil and the pen,” he grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and showed early talent as high school newspaper cartoonist and later, during his studies at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, as weekly political cartoonist for the Indianapolis Ledger (1). Later, Woodruff studied at Harvard University and the Art Institute of Chicago (3). He arrived in Atlanta “to paint the red clay of Georgia” by way of Paris, France, where he lived on a shoestring for 4 years, attending the Academie Moderne and Academie Scandinave at the time Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Henry O. Tanner, Palmer Hayden, and other American expatriates made Paris their home. Exposure to cubism in Paris guided his transition from realistic scenes of everyday life in the rural South to bold abstraction and invention. During a summer in Mexico, he studied with Diego Rivera, “I wanted to paint great significant murals in fresco and I went down there to...learn his technique” (1). Rivera’s murals, which mingled culture, history, and folklore with sociopolitical and communal elements, were cre-