Gemini, 1970s, G. Caliman Coxe
*G. Caliman Coxe was born on May 7,1907. He was a Black artist and educator.
Gloucester Caliman Coxe was a native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and moved to Louisville, KY. in 1924. In his 40s, he entered the University of Louisville to study art. He was the first African American to receive a Hite art scholarship to the university and the first Black fine arts graduate.
Coxe founded art organizations, mentored young artists, and was a daringly experimental abstract painter, earning a living as an illustrator. He worked for local theaters and, for 20 years, at the Training Support Center at the Fort Knox Army base outside Louisville. In the 1970s, Coxe exhibited at the ground-breaking Smith-Mason Gallery in Washington, D.C., and was honored with a Governor’s Award in the Arts from the Kentucky Arts Council.
Louisville writer Madeline Covi, in her essay for the upcoming book “Art Center: Modern Art in Louisville,” writes of Coxe “brooding over” all the promising young Black artists, an “older figure … who would come, in the later afternoon, to the (university) art library, after his work at Fort Knox, perhaps to get books, perhaps to take a night class, and who was given before his death a triumphant and vital retrospective show at the university” in 1995.
G. Caliman Coxe, the dean of African American artists in Louisville, Kentucky, an art scene in the 1950s and ‘60s, died on July 24, 1999.
