Barbara Bullock

Barbara J. Bullock (Nov 24, 1938) is an African American painter, collagist, printmaker, soft sculptor and arts instructor. Her works capture African motifs, African and African American culture, spirits, dancing and jazz in abstract and figural forms. She creates three-dimensional collages, portraits, altars and masks in vibrant colors, patterns and shapes. Bullock produces artworks in series with a common theme and style.

Early life and education Bullock was born in Philadelphia on Nov 24, 1938, after her father James Bullock moved his family from North Carolina to Philadelphia in the 1930s. They were part of the Great Migration of Black people to the North in search of better opportunities. Her mother Janie McFarland Bullock looked for work at the local armory and her father was a truck driver. The couple separated and Bullock's mother died when she was 12 years old. She, her brother Jack and sister Delores moved in with her father and stepmother Gertrude, who became her second mother. Both of Bullock's paternal grandparents, Rev. Oscar and Mattie Bullock, (She would later create an abstract painting titled “Stories My Grandmother Told Me” in 2012.)

Bullock always felt a need to make things and was always in her parents’ basement doing that, she told artist Najee Dorsey in a 2017 interview. “I’ve always been creative. When I was growing up, I needed a language. I realized early on that art was going to be that language,” she told interviewers for a 2015 exhibit of Black artists at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia.

Bullock also took dancing lessons. She was asked to leave a dance class when she showed up one day with a stray dog and refused to remove it. She quit the class but never gave up on the concept. She participated in the School Art League, an arts program in the public schools. She attended Saturday-morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art School (now the University of the Arts) and participated in programs at community centers. She became interested in Africa after learning about it in National Geographic magazine and wanted to understand her connection to it.

She attended Roosevelt Junior High School and graduated from Germantown High School in 1958. She was headed to Moore Institute (now Moore College of Art and Design) to study fashion illustration. For three years, she took Saturday-morning painting and drawing classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. In 1963, she began taking night classes at Hussian School of Art, which taught commercial art classes. She remained at Hussian until 1966. Hall incorporated Yoruba culture, philosophy and spirit entities into the core of the center, which attracted artists, dancers and musicians from all over the world. Funded by the Model Cities Program, the center offered arts, African-inspired dance and music. Bullock met musicians Odean Pope and Max Roach, who also taught there. At one point, Bullock painted an image of an African spirit in a mural on the side of a building, which eventually collapsed. The mural and images – one was of Hall – were recreated by artist Lily Yeh in 2018 on another wall.

Bullock's spirit-based abstract works were dominated by vibrant colors, patterns, rhythmic movement and a cacophony of shapes. She worked in acrylic and gouache on paper, pen and ink, textured sculptures, figural collages - which she called “shaped paintings”- and three-dimensional wall collages made of heavy paper.

While at Ile Ife, she visited Haiti to learn about its religious practices. She also visited Jamaica and Mexico. She incorporated into her collages the images she saw and the techniques she observed on her visits to Africa: the land, the black night sky, textiles and masks, and observed ceremonies and other events.

Bullock participated in printmaking programs, including the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College. In 2017, PAFA held an exhibit titled “A Collaborative Language” of artists who made prints at the institute, and she was included. In 2008, she was also represented in a show at the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta of works from the program. The institute donated Bullock's print “Seeing is Believing (2011)” to Woodmere Art Museum.

Academia Over four decades, Bullock taught art classes in schools, colleges, community centers and for nonprofits. She trained teachers on integrating art in their school-district curriculums and led classes for inmates in prisons.

As an artist-in residence, she spent time with elementary and high schools students in several districts, including Shippensburg and York in Pennsylvania, and Sussex in Delaware (where she taught students to paint murals). In Philadelphia, she worked at Prints in Progress, an afterschool printmaking workshop. She also held a residency at Perkins Center for the Arts in New Jersey.

In 1966, Bullock joined John Simpson, Walter Edmonds and Percy Ricks in an exhibit titled “Four Negro Artists” at the Philadelphia Gallery. She showed five works, including a portrait titled “The Staple Singers,” along with “Strange Spring” “Mother and Child,” “Father and Child” and “A Dancer’s World.”

The same year she was in an exhibit of works by young Black artists at the William Penn Memorial Museum in Harrisburg. The artists included Moe Brooker, Walter Edmonds, Ellen Powell Tiberino, Leroy Johnson, Charles Pridgen, Percy Ricks, Walter Gill, John Simpson, Maurice Thompkins, Gwendolyn Joyce Daniels, and Tina Lloyd King. Bullock participated in a benefit show at a lawn party for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in 1975. Others included Pridgen, Simpson and Robert Moore.

In 1969, she was among 200 Black artists in a premier show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and the Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum. The show featured some of the top names in the country, including Ellen Powell Tiberino, Horace Pippin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Columbus Knox, Roland Ayers, Romare Bearden, Avel de Knight, Barkley Hendricks, Paul Keene, Raymond Saunders, Louis B. Sloan, Ed Wilson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joshua Johnson.

Earlier that year, she was represented in the Afro-American Arts Festival that featured 28 Black artists at the Black Student Union at La Salle College. The artists included Janette E. Banks, Turner Battle, Toni Beavers, Benjamin Britt, Harold Carter, Marilyn Coleman, Quetta Consuella, Eugene Fleming, Roy Gibbs, Humbert Howard, Paul Keene, Louis B. Sloan and Howard N. Watson.

While at Ile Ife, Bullock was included in a show with Ellen Powell Tiberino in 1975. The exhibit consisted of 20 paintings, drawings and soft sculpture by the artists. It was their first joint exhibit.

In 1988, the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum held a retrospective of Bullock's works. In 2002, she won a $35,000 Leeway Foundation Award and was represented in a 2003 exhibit of award winners at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

In 2010, Sande Webster Gallery featured her works in a group show of women artists titled "Women's Work: A Group Show" that included artists Martina Johnson-Allen, Maya Freelon, Betsy Casanas, Nannette Acker Clark, Alice Oh, Heather Pieters, Doris Nogueira-Rogers, Marta Sanchez and Kathleen Spicer.

In 2022, the List Gallery at Swarthmore College held an exhibit of selected works in “Ubiquitous Presence,” which included oil paintings, sculptures, book arts, prints, altars and mixed media.

Commissions In 1990, Bullock was commissioned by Philadelphia International Airport to produce artwork. She created three-dimensional collages of dancers titled "Releasing the Energy, Balancing the Spirit."

She created “Journey Series #4, Ethiopia” in 1999 for the African American Museum in Philadelphia, commissioned by Chivas Regal as part of its Perspectives program.

Selected exhibitions Philadelphia Gallery, 1966

La Salle University, Black Student Union, 1969

Ile-Ife Humanitarian Center, 1975

Off the Wall Gallery, Dirty Frank's Bar, 1980, 1981

Cheltenham Art Center, 1983

Villanova University, 1983

Shippensburg University, 1985

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1986, 2005, 2017

Uptown Theater, 1987

Sande Webster Gallery, 1989, 2010

Bomani Gallery (San Francisco), 1992

Bucks County Community College, 1996

Rowan University, 1997

Painted Bride Art Center, 1992, 1998

Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1998

Walt Whitman Cultural Center (NJ), 2000

Mercer County Community College, 2001

African American Museum in Philadelphia, 1988, 2002

Noyes Museum of Art (NJ), 2007

Woodmere Art Museum, 2008, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2020, 2023

Pierro Gallery (NJ), 2010

Seraphin Gallery, 2012, 2013

Atrium gallery, Morris County Administration and Records Building (NJ), 2015

Morris Museum (NJ), 2017

Portland Art Museum, 2017

Collections African American Museum in Philadelphia

Robert Wood Johnson

Philadelphia International Airport

Commissions Philadelphia International Airport

SEPTA, Art in Transit

Odunde Festival

Chivas Regal's Perspectives program (collage for African American Museum in Philadelphia)