James W. Washington Jr.
*James Washington was born on November 10, 1908. He was a Black painter and sculptor.
James W. Washington Jr. was born and raised in Gloster, Mississippi, a rural mill town. He was one of six children of Baptist minister James Washington and his wife, Lizzie. While he was still a child, his father fled the Jim Crow South due to threats of violence, and they never met again. He began to draw at the age of 12. He apprenticed at 14 to become a shoemaker and worked a series of odd jobs (including working with a banana messenger, which allowed him to travel regularly to bigger towns). By the time he was 17, he had obtained his first Civil Service job.
In 1938, with the Federal Works Progress Administration, he was an assistant art instructor at the Baptist Academy in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Excluded in the South from shows featuring whites, he created a WPA-sponsored exhibition of Black artists, the first such in Mississippi. In 1941, Washington moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother lived repairing shoes at Camp Robinson. This Civil Service job soon took him to the Pacific Northwest, where he and his future wife, Janie Miller, in 1944. It was their home for the rest of their lives.
Washington did electrical wiring for warships at the Bremerton, Washington Naval Base before transferring to Fort Lawton in Seattle, where he set up and operated a shoe shop. Washington became part of Seattle's then-small art community. He showed at the Frederick and Nelson Department Store Gallery with Leo Kenney and, from 1948 to 1961, curated a series of art shows at Seattle's Mount Zion Baptist Church. He also took University of Washington extension classes with painter Yvonne Twining Humber and printmaker Glen Alps.
Washington traveled to Mexico in 1951, where he met muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros and encountered the soft volcanic stone that would soon drive his work in the direction of sculpture; what little sculpture he had done was in wood. His first stone sculpture, Young Boy of Athens, was done with a stone he picked up at Teotihuacán on the path between the Pyramid of the Sun and the Moon. Once Washington established himself as a sculptor, his preferred sculptural material was granite.
Scholars have compared his early sculptural work to prehistoric Mediterranean pieces, but its simplicity and power also fit within the tradition of reductive modern sculpture. Washington and his wife lived in Seattle's Central District, near the Madison Valley; he maintained a studio in his home. From 1950, he was a member of Artists Equity Seattle; he served as its secretary (1950–1960) and later president (1960–1962). Since 1992, Washington's house and studio at 1816 26th Avenue have been officially a Seattle city landmark. James Washington Jr. died on June 7, 2000.
