Talking Legacy at NY Art Week

At Less Than Half, Future Fair 2025, NYC

On May 10, 2025, I had the privilege of sharing my re-discovery journey of the artist, Laura Wheeler Waring with an audience of art lovers, gallery owners, and collectors at Future Fair, a major event during New York City’s Art Week. My participation came at the invitation of Hall W. Rockefeller (she/her), founder of Less Than Half, a platform designed to inspire and guide women to support and invest in women artists. Or, as the group says, to encourage us to help sustain women artists with our “Matronage.” Through education, collecting workshops, advocacy, and curated talks, Less Than Half seeks to ensure that the legacies of women artists are as prominent and enduring as their male counterparts.

That’s where I came in. Hall learned of my blog devoted to LWW and thought it an interesting way to bring the life and work of this ground-breaking artist to the forefront. Joining me on the panel was Nicole Shipley, who is producing a documentary on the 17th century Italian painter, Artemisia Gentileschi.

One of several thought-provoking questions put to us was, “Do you feel a particular responsibility to your subject to do her justice?”

My answer? “Absolutely.”

While LWW was a respected painter and illustrator in her own day, she was also dismissed during that time by some of her male cohorts. “New Negro” philosopher, Alain L. Locke, for one, categorized her as too conservative, “old guard,” suggesting that she was a prisoner of her Academy, European-centered training. Others implied that LWW’s work was “white art painted black,” that it did not reflect an authentic African American experience.

Harry Thacker Burleigh, Laura Wheeler Waring c 1946, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation

I maintain that despite her traditional approach, LWW was a trailblazer in black portraiture and figurative art. Waring’s work countered the racialized, cartoonish, demeaning images of African Americans that proliferated in books, mainstream magazines, and movies. Her portraits of family members, friends, and associates indeed reflected Waring’s authentic experience as an educated, middle-class, professional woman—a member of the so-called “talented tenth.” Paintings of her students at Cheyney School for Teachers—darker skinned than her family members and most of her associates—show refined, clear-eyed and level-headed young people, accentuating the aspirational qualities that Waring and the other faculty modeled for them.

Today there is a global renaissance in black portraiture and figurative art. Contemporary artists put their own unique spin on the black body, allowing for multiple interpretations of race, class, and gender.

In my upcoming biography I position Laura Wheeler Waring as the “godmother” of these contemporary figurative painters and portraitists whose works are being acquired by institutions and private collectors at record-breaking prices. Their success is partly responsible for the renewed interest in Waring’s work, evidenced by her prominence in Harlem Renaissance-themed exhibitions and the growing number of dissertations being written about her.

I read recently of the power of portraiture to foster a shift in cultural identity. In painting the rising black middle class and the poise and self-respect of “regular” people during the first half of the 20th century, Laura Wheeler Waring signaled that a change in cultural identity had already occurred among African Americans, and that there was more change to come. In the world of fine art, that shift has come.

Waring warrants an esteemed place in the continuum of black portraiture and figurative art. Her legacy is rooted in her portrayal of an African American identity that had been otherwise ignored. 

© 2023-2026 Valerie Harris. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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