African American printmaker Raymond Steth was born in 1917 in Norfolk, Virginia. When he was eight years old, his family moved to Philadelphia, where he attended Central High School for two years before joining the workforce. In 1938 he began employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) art program, which provided an opportunity for Steth to become a professional artist and create art with social commentary focused on the African American experience. Heaven on a Mule (c. 1939) underscores the impoverished reality of an African American family “awaiting deliverance” during the Great Depression, when African American unemployment reached 50 percent. I Am an American (c. 1941) is a commentary on the ways in which the “American dream” of upward mobility is not equally available to African Americans.
While at the WPA, Steth assisted African American artist Dox Thrash in the invention of the carborundum print method, over which he preferred lithography, and shared a studio with African American artist Claude Clark. Steth studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now University of the Arts) (1941–43) and the Barnes Foundation (1942–44). He was a guest curator at the Philadelphia Print Club (1942–43), joined the military, and then co-founded and directed the Philographic School of Art (1948–53), an independent printmaking and graphics workshop. He also attended Fleisher Art Memorial (1948-55), taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), and helped establish a print program at the HBCU Morgan State College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore.
Steth died in 1997.
PMA Collection
PMA Archive
The Art and Politics of Relief: The New Deal in Pennsylvania, 1990–1991
Case Studies: An Exhibition Selected by the Art in City Hall Advisory Council, 1994
References
Messinger, Lisa Mintz, Lisa Gail Collins, and Rachel Mustalish. 2003. African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Scarborough, Klare, et al. 2014. American Scenes: WPA-Era Prints from the 1930s and 1940s: Featuring Artwork from the Collections of La Salle University Art Museum and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: La Salle University Art Museum.
Tomlinson, Glenn C., and Rolando Corpus. 1995. “A Selection of Works by African American Artists in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 90, no. 382/383 (Winter): 4–47.
Williams, Reba, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Dave Williams. 1992. Alone in a Crowd: Prints of the 1930s–40s by African-American Artists; from the Collection of Reba and Dave Williams. Newark, NJ: Newark Museum.
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