📝 Exhibition Description:

Folksinger is considered a reinterpretation of Charles White's 1957 drawing, Folksinger (Voice of Jericho: Portrait of Harry Belafonte). White first met Harry Belafonte at a Committee for the Negro in the Arts meeting in New York in 1947. Close friends and creative collaborators thereafter, Belafonte commissioned White to create the drawing for his television program, "Tonight With Belafonte." The hour-long special aired on CBS in 1959 and featured Belafonte singing American folk songs. White's drawings, primarily depictions of Black cultural and social life, provided compelling visual interludes between each set.

The commission aligned with White's personal interest in music as an expressive and social art form. He explored the subject extensively throughout the mid-twentieth century, producing paintings and drawings of famous Black musicians in addition to Belafonte, including blues singer Bessie Smith and folk and blues singer Lead Belly.

Both Folksinger and Folksinger (Voice of Jericho: Portrait of Harry Belafonte) were exhibited at Charles White, the artist's solo show at the ACA Gallery in New York in 1958. An established painter, White's graphic output increased after a late-1940s battle with tuberculosis restricted his physical mobility. He later claimed that the transition was formally motivated: a palette of black, white, and sepia was preferable for creating sculptural, simplified forms. Furthermore, the reproducibility of works on paper and their potential for wide distribution more closely reflected his belief in art's social value.

In linocut, White's style is at its most expressive. This edition of Folksinger is notable for its provenance from Stanley Kramer, the American director behind several acclaimed films of the period, including Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Sidney Poitier, the Bahamian-American actor and director who starred in two of Kramer's films, gifted Folksinger to Kramer and his wife, actress Karen Sharpe, for their wedding in 1966.