28. attend a Chautauqua

My first Chautauqua program was also the first program presented by our speaker, Paxton Williams, who will be portraying George Washington Carver on Saturday night.

The program was "George Washington Carver, Artist." I came up to Pike County in time for this program largely because I didn't know that George Washington Carver was an artist, so the title of the program intrigued me.

Carver was a sickly child, the result of a traumatic Civil War era kidnapping as a baby when he lost his mother. One of his childhood pleasures, then, was drawing and he often drew plants. Carver learned to paint from a neighbor while homesteading after being turned away from the first college he was accepted to when they discovered he was African-American.

Carver also had a beautiful singing voice--high-pitched, likely from the childhood disease of whooping cough. He played several instruments, including the piano. It was his singing ability that first attracted the attention of the couple who were instrumental in getting him into a college that would accept him despite his race.

He first went to Simpson College in Iowa as an art student. An art teacher, Etta Budd, recognized that his paintings of plants indicated a deep understanding of botany that might make him a good agricultural scientist, an easier career for earning a living than artist. As a scientist, Carver also hoped to help the Southern farmer, including the sharecroppers. Carver became the first African-American to attend Iowa State where he eventually served on the faculty.

Carver continued to paint while at Iowa State. When two of his paintings won a local contest, he was invited to a state-wide contest taking place at Cedar Rapids. Lacking money for dress clothes and travel, he resigned himself to missing this opportunity. when his classmates and teachers heard of the problem, they raised the money for him to go. Knowing that he would not want accept it willingly, they "kidnapped" him to a downtown shop to buy the suit and bought the train ticket. The paintings won at Cedar Rapids and went on to win "honorable mention" at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

Booker T. Washington lured Carver away from Iowa State to teach and do his research at the new Tuskegee Institute. Carver continued to paint and play music throughout his life. He devised ways to use Alabama clay for making pigment. He raised money for Tuskegee by performing on the piano--playing classical music and spirituals. Later in life, he developed the art of public speaking, being the first black speaker in the U.S. to draw large white audiences.

Paxton Williams made the case that Carver's art informed his science. "To come up with 300 uses for the peanut, you have to be an artist." Much of Carver's research centered on creating hybrids, often of his favorite flower, the amaryllis. Many of Carver's paintings are of that flower.

Like the prototypical artist, Carver cared little about money. His theory was that his creativity in both art and science came from God. As such, he felt no need to profit from it--giving away his paintings and claiming very few patents.

Where are the paintings now? Since Carver gave them away, many are in private collections--some present-day owners may not even be aware they own a painting by Carver since he rarely signed his work. Tuskegee has some, although many were destroyed in a tragic fire in the 1940s. Here is one of the smoke-damaged paintings.