Haywood Bill Rivers
The Drape Maker
1947
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Haywood Bill Rivers
The Drape Maker
1947
Physical Qualities
Oil on canvas, Framed: 29 3/16 × 25 3/16 in. (74.1 × 64 cm.)
Unframed: 22 3/16 × 18 3/16 in. (56.4 × 46.2 cm.)
Credit Line
Gift of the Waters Catering Company, Inc.
Object Number
1948.110
A lone woman toils with a heavy foot at the pedal of her sewing machine. Haywood Bill Rivers' late 1940s work drew on scenes from his childhood depicting Black life in the South. His style was influenced both by European modernism and by American Southern craft. In his youth, he participated in quilt-making, recalling, "we would be working with blocks of color from scraps of rags and clothes." Rivers' evident love for patterning is visible here in the woman's blouse, the drape she sews, the floorboards, and the curtains.
Rivers left his family as a teenager and moved to Baltimore to study at the present-day Maryland Institute College of Art, but he was rejected from enrollment because of his race. He attended the Arts Students League of New York from 1946-1949 and finished his training at the Ecole du Musee du Louvre in Paris, where he later opened a gallery.
Baltimore Museum of Art by gift, 1948; Waters Catering Company, Inc.
African American Art and The Julius Rosenwald Fund
AMW Reinstallation 2014
Loved, Lost and Loose: Foreign Artists in Paris, 1944-1968
American Modernism Reinstallation
American Wing Rotations 2023
American Wing Rotations 2024
American Wing Rotations 2025
Harlem Renaissance. Le Renouveau noir 1925-1950
'A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund," Chicago: Spertus Museum, 2009, pl. 61, pp. 140-141, ill.
Benjamin Genocchio, "Works That Testify to the Nurturing of Black Artists,"
"New York Times," February 12, 2010, ill.; review of "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund."
Schulman, Daniel. "African American Art & the Julius Rosenwald Fund." American Art Review XXII, no. 1 (2010): 116-119. illus. p. 116.
Daniel Schulman, ed., "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund," Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2009, pp. 140-141, ill. 61
https://thejohnsoncollection.org/haywood-bill-rivers/
https://thejohnsoncollection.org/haywood-bill-rivers/
Inscribed: Signature, recto: "H RIVERS"
On View at the BMA
