John Thomas Biggers

The plaque says Jim Crow sometimes kept Biggers from his own honors, and two prizes show how. In 1950 his drawing The Cradle won a contest at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which admitted Black visitors only on Thursdays and kept him from the reception in his honor. In 1952 his Sleeping Boy took the Neiman Marcus prize at the Dallas Museum of Art; his reception was canceled, and a museum representative handed him the check on arrival. His 1962 book Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa grew from the 1957 trip.

What the plaque says

John Thomas Biggers (April 13, 1924 – January 25, 2001) John Thomas Biggers was born to Paul and Cora Biggers in Gastonia, North Carolina. His artistic creativity emerged at a young age when he and his brother, Joe, crawled under their home and used clay to model the entire town of Gastonia. In 1941, Biggers enrolled at Hampton Institute (later Hampton University) in Virginia, intending to become a heating engineer. Instead he came under the artistic instruction of Viktor Lowenfeld, an Austrian Jew, and Biggers changed his major to art. His education was interrupted by service in the Navy, 1943-1945. The next year, he followed his teacher and mentor, Lowenfeld, to Pennsylvania State University, where Biggers earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees. In 1949, Biggers and his wife, Hazel Hales Biggers, moved to Houston when he became head of a new art department at Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University). Biggers nurtured his students' artistic talents and required them to create murals on the walls of Hannah Hall. In 1957, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) gave him a grant to study and travel in Africa, an award that inspired future artistic works such as his renowned Web of Life mural. Throughout his career, Biggers won numerous awards for his own art, which portrayed "the spirit and style of the negro people." However, Jim Crow laws excluding African Americans from many institutions sometimes kept Biggers from receiving his own accolades. Ultimately, the artist was the subject of a major national retrospective and his art is included in major museum collections. Although Biggers passed away in 2001, his legacy lives on through his art and his students' murals. (2012)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 0.8 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.2 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 1.6 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.2 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• The Murals of Hannah Hall — steps away
• Dr. Thomas F. Freeman — 0.2 mi
• Houston Negro Chamber of Commerce — 0.2 mi
• Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ — 0.3 mi