Carole Byard

Carole Marie Byard (July 22, 1941 – January 11, 2017) was an American visual artist, illustrator, and photographer. She was an award-winning illustrator of children's books, and the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, as well as multiple Coretta Scott King Awards.

Early life and education Byard was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to parents William "Bunny" Byard and Viola London-Byard. She had one sibling, an older brother, Michael Byard, who among other jobs, was a passionate gardener.

In 1943, Byard's mother died when she was very young, and her large extended family became very important to her. Around that same time, her father was drafted in World War II.

Byard's father's family came from a Southern African-American tradition, and her paternal grandmother lived with them. Her father took over the role as head of the family when Byard's grandfather died. Her mother's family was from the Caribbean, from Barbados and Grenada – her mother was born on an island called Balboa in Panama while her grandfather worked building the Panama Canal.

Byard attended New Jersey Avenue School, then Central Junior High and then graduated from Atlantic City High School. At Westbeth, there was a Black Artists Guild that Byard said was formative. The Black Artists Guild that was initially a theater group founded in 1970. Byard went to see a production of Slave Ship, a play written by Amiri Baraka produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music. The play involved audience participation and singing. She was inspired by a character in the play and did a large painting based on the play. It turned out that many cast members also lived in Westbeth, and were part of this organization, based on Malcolm X's material left from Organization of Afro-American Unity, using the seven principles. Byard joined the group and participated in writing and making art.

Illustration After finishing art school, Byard found work as a magazine illustration artist before shifting her focus to children's books. Her interest in performing arts led to one of her first book projects, a biography of ballet dancer Arthur Mitchell, who founded the Dance Theater of Harlem. Byard returned to Nigeria as a delegate to the second Black and African Festival of Art and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos in 1977. Her travel experiences informed the charcoal illustrations for her next children's book, Three African Tales by Adjai Robinson. In The Black Snowman (1991), Byard used pastels to illustrate a fantastical story in which a boy brings a black snowman to life using city snow and a magical kente cloth. She was a contributing artist for the children's anthology Jump Back, Honey: The Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1999), which also featured artwork by Jerry Pinkney and Faith Ringgold.

Her earth art installations had reference points in vernacular front-yard decorations and traditional African-American burial sites. One example of such outdoor installations is Praisesong for Charles (1988), which was originally shown in Baltimore. In 1992 she collaborated with Clarissa Sligh on an environmental, mixed-media "portrait" of Malcolm X for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The piece she showed, titled "Imani, the Seventh Day" (1993), was an installation featuring a chair with a ladderlike back and gourds (which she had grown herself) hanging off it, standing in a tray filled with black eyed peas and pennies. On the chair's seat were corn kernels and red and green candles.

Other work During the 1970s, Byard also designed album covers for Strata-East Records, a New York City jazz label. Her drawings and collages were featured on album jackets for Stanley Cowell, Charles Sullivan, Sonny Fortune, Milton Marsh, The Piano Choir, and the Heath Brothers.

Honors and awards 1972: Ford Foundation travel grant for three months of travel in Africa 1980: Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Cornrows 1981: Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor for Grandma's Joy 1986: National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship for drawing 1993: Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor for Working Cotton 1993: Caldecott Honor for Working Cotton 1994: National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship for sculpture 1978: Migrations: A National Exhibition of African-American Printmakers, Gallery of Art, College of Fine Arts, Howard University (Washington, D.C.) – Aug. 28 – September 23, 1978 1980: The Child: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, Gallery 62 (New York, NY) 1989: War, Peace and Victory: A Sculpture Exhibition in Memorial Arch, Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Prospect Park Alliance (New York, NY) – April 29 – June 17, 1989 1998: Resonant Forms: Contemporary African American Women Sculptors, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) – Traveling exhibition held at Art in General, New York, February 1990; Islip Art Museum, March 1991; Barnes-Blackman Gallery Community Artists' Collective and The Firehouse Gallery, Houston, April 1991; Wooster College Museum, Sept. 1991; Kean College, October 1991; Women and their work, Austin, June 1992 1992–1993: Malcolm X: Man, Ideal, Icon, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) – December 1992–April 1993 1993: Through Sisters' Eyes: Children's Books Illustrated by African-American Women Artists, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Newark Museum (Newark, NJ) 2017: We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY)

Selected solo exhibitions 1993: Sculpture Installation by Carole Byard, Dana Gallery at the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA) – January 21–February 14, 1993 2015: Rent Series, New York Public Library (New York, NY)

Selected works and publications

– Catalog of an exhibition held at Gallery 62 from December 3, 1979, to January 11, 1980

– Traveling exhibition from February 1990 to June 1992