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Beale Street Blues by Palmer Hayden, oil on canvas, 1943.
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palmer hayden | bio & collection
about palmer hayden
Palmer C. Hayden was born in Widewater, Virginia, on January 15, 1890, and died on February 18, 1973, at the age of eighty-three. He gained recognition in 1926 when he won the first prize and a gold medal in painting at the first Harmon Foundation exhibition of black artists. An unpretentious yet perceptive observer, he attempted to convey in his paintings the experiences of black men in the United States, while at the same time uncovering the relationships among the events in his own life. The themes and subjects that Hayden gradually evolved into painting were a declaration of the unheroic, ordinary aspects of the black experience. His choice of the mundane—often flavored by nostalgic, archaic memories of his own—connects him directly to the common people admired by Langston Hughes. As a painter of the black American scene, plowing material he knew firsthand, Hayden's work is more thematically and stylistically conservative than that of artists who commented more explicitly on social and economic inequities. About the Palmer Hayden Collection at MAAA »This text was excerpted and adapted from printed
materials developed under guest curator Allan M. Gordon, PhD, for the
1988 exhibit Echoes of Our Past: The Narrative Artistry of Palmer C. Hayden at The Museum of African American Art.
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