A graduate of Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Lois’s career began as a textile designer in New York. By 1928, Jones had moved south—to North Carolina where, she founded the art department and taught at Palmer Memorial Institute.

In 1930, Jones joined the art department faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She taught there for over forty-years. During her tenure, Jones trained and mentored several generations of artists who became famous in their own right including David Driskell and Elizabeth Catlett. Jones was persuaded by Meta Warrick Fuller during that time to broaden her artistic exposure by travelling to France. Following the urging of Fuller, Jones took a one-year sabbatical from Howard University to study at Academie Julian in Paris.

In the City of Lights, she was exposed to an international community of Black artists of all genres including Emile Bernard, Josephine Baker, and Céline Tabary. Evidence of their influence can be seen in Jones’ work from this period. She toggled between traditional realism and modernists techniques such as Impressionism. Jones also followed the French tradition of painting outdoors. She created several pastoral landscapes and street scenes. Jones also began incorporating African motifs into her work. Her Les Fétiches, an African-style mask, is one Jones’ most notable works from this period. Throughout her career, however, Jones continued to be a dynamic artist and her work underwent several stylistic evolutions.

In 1953, Jones married Haitian graphic designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël. She began to incorporate bold Caribbean inspired colors and patterns that were influenced by her exposure to Haitian culture.

During the Black political consciousness movements of the 1960s when African-Americans railed against disenfranchisement and fought for their civil rights, Jones’s “own temperament was much more interested in the joy of color and design. She’s [was] not really a protest artist. Her art is about portraying and embracing African-America and its cultural legacy with accuracy and dignity at a time when just portraying African-Americans was radical.”

During the 1970s, Jones visited several African nations. According to historian Barry Gaither, Jones’ work from this period shows the influence of Pop and African imagery. She showed her adeptness at fusing “source material from Africa, with African design and African pattern, and out of this she synthesizes a new body of work,” Arriving at her late mature style, she freely draws from all of them to create something that is a consummate expression of the Diaspora.”

“Lois Mailou Jones, longest-surviving artist of the Harlem Renaissance, died at the age of 98 in Washington, D.C.”