Audio Stop 209

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In this vertical portrait, an elderly woman with brown skin, wearing a blouse, apron, and skirt is painted with a limited palette of grays, browns, black, and whites. Her head, torso, and lap nearly fill the composition. She is shown straight-backed against a neutral gray background, facing and looking at us with her hands resting in her lap. Her wavy, iron-gray hair is parted in the center and pulled back from her face. Her eyebrows are slightly raised and her face is deeply lined down her cheeks and around her mouth. She wears a heart-shaped brooch with a red stone at its center at her neck and a gold band on her left ring finger. The light coming from our left casts a shadow against the wall to our right. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner: “A.J. MOTLEY. JR. 1922.”

Archibald John Motley Jr.

Portrait of My Grandmother, 1922

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 71

District of Columbia Public Schools social worker Rhoda Matthews explores beauty and persistence in Motley’s intimate portrait of his grandmother.

RHODA MATTHEWS:
I am so thankful to have the opportunity to be able to talk about this portrait because it really resonates with me and my own family experience. My name is Rhoda Matthews. I am a school social worker at Anne Beers Elementary School in Washington, D.C.

NARRATOR:
The painting is by Archibald Motley. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to chronicle African American life in the Jazz Age and beyond. Motley made this tender portrait of his grandmother in 1922.

RHODA MATTHEWS:
Her hands look like they have gone through a lot of hard work, but yet I can imagine that they are probably just as soft as butter. I think he's emphasizing that this is a proud woman. But yet her eyes seem a little somber. Those are eyes with a lot of feelings behind it. A lot of fear, anger, love, compassion. She's been through a lot of hardship, and you can see it all over her face. However, she's not really able to show it, based on the time period, or just simply being an African-American person in America, she can't really display who she is.

NARRATOR:
Born into enslavement in Kentucky, Louisa Sims Motley eventually migrated North with her family to Chicago. On the wall behind her, Motley has painted a shadow, perhaps a reference to the ways her early life as an enslaved person will always remain with her, even decades later.

RHODA MATTHEWS:
I would use this portrait to talk to kids about persistence and resiliency, because despite all that she's gone through, - slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, as well as Jim Crow, she's here in 1922 as an 80-year-old woman, looking so elegant. Just hearing her story, I have so much respect for her and what she's been able to accomplish.

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