Edward L. Loper Sr. was a self-taught African American artist who primarily painted landscapes. He was born April 7, 1916, in Wilmington, Delaware, and attended the segregated Howard High School, where he played football and basketball. In 1934 he was accepted into Lincoln University—one of the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the US—in Oxford, Pennsylvania, on an athletic scholarship, which he declined so that he could begin working to earn money. Loper was employed by the Works Progress Administration Art Project in Delaware in 1936, and by the end of his tenure, in 1941, he had produced 113 drawings of decorative art, featuring such items as furniture and toys, for the National Gallery of Art’s Index of American Art based in Washington, DC. He went on to work for the Allied Kid leather-tanning factory until 1947.
Loper studied the work of illustrator and author Howard Pyle at the Wilmington Public Library and visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art to develop his own artistic style. In 1937 he became the first African American artist to enter the Annual Delaware Exhibition at the Wilmington Society of Fine Arts (now the Delaware Art Museum). Loper won honorable mention and was awarded first place the following year. He became a full-time artist in 1947 and taught at his private studio in Wilmington as well as the Delaware Art Museum, Lincoln University, and other locations. During the late 1940s, he started visiting Quebec City to escape some of the racism he encountered in the US, and in the 1960s, he began taking his students there to visit during the summer. Loper was invited to study at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 1943 but declined so that he could take care of his family, including his son Edward L. Loper Jr., who also became an artist. He accepted the Barnes’s invitation in 1963 and studied there through 1968 under the instruction of Violette de Mazia. Loper was influenced by the artists Vincent van Gogh, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, El Greco, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock.
Loper died October 11, 2011. In 2018 the 1200 block of North Heald Street in Wilmington, where he was raised, was renamed Edward Loper Way.[1]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
Notes
[1] “Edward L. Loper Sr. is Honored with Ceremonial Street Renaming.”
References
“Edward L. Loper.” 2002. National Gallery of Art. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.7782.html.
“Edward Loper Sr., Artist Born.” African American Registry. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://aaregistry.org/story/edward-loper-sr-artist-born/.
Memenger, Wesley. 2000. “The African American Artist: Edward L. Loper, Sr.” Accessed November 11, 2021. http://www.loperart.com/.
“Edward L. Loper Sr. is Honored with Ceremonial Street Renaming.” 2018. The City of Wilmington, Delaware. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://www.wilmingtonde.gov/Home/Components/News/News/4123/225.
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