Morris Atkinson Blackburn (1902-1979) was a

printmaker Printmaking is the process of creating work of art, artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand proce ...

, muralist, and teacher. He is considered to be a pioneer of silkscreen printing. Blackburn's work is in the collections of the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

, the

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...

, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

. His papers are held by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Early life and education

Blackburn was born in Philadelphia in 1902. He studied architectural drawing at the Philadelphia Trade School in 1918 after which he worked at the Hog Island shipbuilding yard. Blackburn studied art at the Graphic Sketch Club, now the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, in 1922. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1925 to 1929. While at PAFA, he studied sketching under

Arthur Carles Arthur Beecher Carles (March 9, 1882 – 1952) was an American Modernist painter. Biography Carles was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1900 and 1907. He studied with Thomas Pol ...

, painting under

Henry McCarter Henry Bainbridge McCarter (1864-1942) was an American illustrator and painter known for his influence on the modernism, modernistic art movements. McCarter worked as an illustrator in New York before becoming an instructor at the Pennsylvania Ac ...

, and drawing under Daniel Garber.

Career

Artistic career

Blackburn was a painter and graphic designer. Much of his work featured scenes of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Taos, New Mexico. He was an early adopter of the silkscreen process and often used it in his work. Blackburn created two murals for the Works Progress Administration's Public Works Art Project in the mid-1930s. The murals were located at Mastbaum Vocational School and Haverford High School.

Teaching career

Blackburn began teaching at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts, in 1932. He taught at various art schools, including the

Tyler School of Art The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...

, from 1948 to 1952 and joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1952.

Collections

Works by Blackburn are kept in several museum collections: * Smithsonian American Art Museum * National Gallery of Art * Metropolitan Museum of Art * British Museum * Philadelphia Museum of Art

References

External links

Image via Temple University Libraries: Humbert Howard with Morris Blackburn, Lois Mailou Jones, and Jacob Lawrence at a Pyramid Club Art Exhibition, 1957.

Morris Blackburn Papers
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Archives {{DEFAULTSORT:Blackburn, Morris African-American printmakers 20th-century American male artists