John T. Biggers; Artist, Educator Chronicled the Black Experience

John T. Biggers, an artist and educator who chronicled the African American experience in paintings, murals and illustrations, has died.

Biggers died Thursday in Houston at the age of 76. No cause of death was given, but he was known to have been in failing health for several years.

A prominent educator and an artist, Biggers founded the art department at Texas Southern University in 1949, one of the first such departments at a predominantly African American institution. He taught there for more than 30 years until his retirement in 1983.

As an artist, he began his career as a figurative painter combining the forthright realism of Grant Wood with African American symbolism. He created a series of narrative paintings that reflected the often harsh realities of Southern life. One painting, “Crucifixion,” is a forceful commentary on lynching. Another work, “Garbage Man,” reflects the monotony found in the often dreary lives of the rural poor in the South.

His murals--presenting art as public narratives--drew inspiration from the great Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco.

Born in Gastonia, N.C., Biggers attended what is now Hampton University in Virginia with the idea of becoming a plumber after completing his education. But Biggers was interested in drawing, a skill he had taught himself as a child by copying illustrations in his father’s Bible. So he began taking non-credit drawing courses at night from Viktor Lowenfeld, an Austrian immigrant who had fled Nazism.

At Lowenfeld’s urging, Biggers switched his major to art after his junior year, studying with the African American muralist Charles White.

Biggers credited Lowenfeld, who became his lifelong friend and mentor, with introducing him to African art, which Lowenfeld had been collecting before he fled Vienna. And Lowenfeld encouraged his students to learn about their own culture and artistic heritage. “He told us, ‘You don’t want to draw like a European; you want to speak out of your heart,’ ” Biggers later said.

In 1943, Biggers’ work was included in a show called “Young Negro Art” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But by then World War II was on and the artist was drafted into the Navy.

After the war, he continued his education at Penn State University, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art education and, years later, a PhD. Biggers taught briefly at Penn State and Alabama State before he was asked to start the art department at Texas Southern.

In the mid-1950s, he traveled to West Africa and the visit changed his life.

“I was like any other American, totally ignorant of Africa,” he recalled years later. “But I understood early on that . . . these people were part of a great civilization. And they possessed a great wisdom.”

The trip also had an expansive impact on Biggers’ artistic palette. His early subdued work became much more vibrant and alive with color. And he seemed to evolve beyond realism into metaphor.

“He was one of the first African Americans to bring back images of African culture that were positive and personal--and accurate,” said Alvia J. Wardlaw, who curated a retrospective exhibition of Biggers’ work.

“And I think that is probably his greatest gift to American culture,” Wardlaw said.

The exhibition, “The Art of John Biggers: View From the Upper Room,” was organized by Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1995 and traveled to several cities in North America. It was perhaps fitting that the Houston museum should so honor Biggers: 45 years earlier segregation laws had prevented the artist from walking into that same museum to accept an art prize.

Biggers’ work has been collected by many museums and private collectors, including the poet Maya Angelou, who called Biggers “one of America’s most important artists.”

“[He] leads us through his expressions into the discovery of ourselves at our most intimate level,” Angelou wrote in “The Art of John Biggers,” a catalog for the 1995 exhibition.

Biggers is survived by his wife, Hazel.