Ellen Powell Tiberino

Ellen Powell Tiberino (1937–1992) was an African American visual artist, who was figurative and expressionist in her pastels, oils, pencil drawings and sculptures. Her works were infused with the experiences and history of Black people, women in particular, whom she most often painted in dark and haunting hues. She was a prolific artist, working against time as she battled cancer for the last 14 years of her life.

Early life and education Ellen Powell was born in Philadelphia in 1937 to William and Queenie Powell, sharecroppers who had moved to Philadelphia from Cape Charles, Virginia, just weeks before she was born. Her father brought his family north seeking better opportunities for his children. "We were looking for the same things as the European immigrants," Ellen said in a 1989 interview. Her father was a truckman for the railroad and her mother was a homemaker. She was the third of seven children who grew up in the Mantua section of West Philadelphia.

As a child, she drew pictures of family and friends. She also listened closely to tales of her family from such people as her great-aunt Lita who inspired her portraits and line drawings. Her parents told her that she could accomplish anything that she wanted. They were Baptists, but Ellen converted to Catholicism around age 13.

Her talent for art was acknowledged in junior and senior high school. At Sulzberger Junior High, she received a "small" check as an award for an original poster in a health contest. While a senior at Overbrook High in 1955, she returned to Sulzberger to speak to students about training courses available in senior high school. She brought along some of her paintings and collages, which featured fabric and materials on watercolor. She graduated from Overbrook in 1956. As a teenager, she worked as a nurse's aide at Wills Eye Hospital.

Tiberino received a City of Philadelphia scholarship to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and arrived there in 1956. She received honors for her work but faced resistance from some faculty and staffers, she said in a 1988 interview. They resented her awards "or (her) just being there. But I don't like to put things on the basis of color, or sex. People who have problems like that – they stem from their own insecurity," she said.

Artist Moe Brooker, also a PAFA graduate, recalled her presence at the academy. He was "dazzled" by her, he said in the catalog for Woodmere Art Museum's 2015 exhibit "We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s." "When she walked down the hall, everyone stopped! ... She was the first student of color I remember when I was at PAFA because I was a couple years behind her."

Tiberino was awarded the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship in 1959 and traveled through Europe. She was 19 years old and in her third year at PAFA. She told the Philadelphia Tribune newspaper that she planned to go to Spain; France; Naples, Italy, and other countries. She remained in that city for six years, returning to Philadelphia to marry Joseph Tiberino, whom she had met at a going-away party for her NY move back in 1961. He was a white Italian-American artist born in Philadelphia who was attending the Philadelphia College of Art. They got married in 1967. The couple had a third son, Gabriel.

Her art Tiberino was one of Philadelphia's most notable artists, a "major talent with a paintbrush or a pencil", wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer art critic in 1999. Her works were not delicate, the critic noted, but were infused with empathy and tenderness.

She was a figurative, stylized expressionistic artist who produced oils, pastels, pencil drawings and bas-relief sculptures. She also produced prints of some of her works.

Her husband Joseph noted that her earliest paintings were dark in tone, so much so that her subjects were barely distinguishable. She painted what she felt and observed, she once said, not what others wanted her to portray. She created a painting titled "The Lynching" because she felt a need to do it, she told an interviewer. She didn't expect anyone to buy it, she added, but it sold to a private collector. It is now in the collection of the Museum of African American Art in Tampa, FL. "When I am asked where I get my inspiration, I say it's all my life, my friends, everything I've seen and known. And I want to make it all come together and make sense and make people see. There's a feeling of joy that comes with it. I don't think enough credit is given to the real things in life, what I base my work on. Many people want only beauty around them, and I record life." She was told that she had six to 12 months to live. She wrote in a profile in a catalog for October Gallery: "My art and life are intertwined. I cannot divorce Ellen Powell Tiberino the artist from Ellen Powell Tiberino the wife, mother and friend. My work is my way of seeing everything. I relate best through my art. It is both a blessing and a curse. Illness is so much a part of my life with which I have had to come to terms. Respect for time has become so important to me. So many of my drawings (paintings) are in my head, and I worry that I can't get them all done. There is an urgency now that I didn't feel before. Before I finish one piece, I am ready to start another. My creative impulse continues to grow, and I know my work is better."

She said that they created the piece to express the pain they felt at watching the bombing of the MOVE compound. She speculated that it caused an uproar because Goode was still in office at the time.

Collaborations with artist-husband Joseph Tiberino In addition to the MOVE sculpture, Tiberino collaborated and exhibited often with her husband Joseph. He specialized in murals and portraits. They were considered the "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera" of West Philadelphia.

Even before the compound, Tiberino and Joseph had converted a drugstore in Powelton Village called "The Building" for workshops led by artists and for group shows. Over the years, she taught art classes in the community, at her son Raphael's school, at her home on Saturdays and at one point, at her studio.

In 1991, she exhibited with Joseph, their son Raphael and four other artists at Galerie Nadeau as members of the Rambla Group, which also included Earl Wilkie. It was a group of artists who gathered for support and to share techniques.

Early and prominent exhibitions While still at the academy, Tiberino exhibited at small venues and homes in the Philadelphia area. In 1960, the Citizens Service Committee sponsored an exhibit at a home to show off the city's young Black artists and their contributions to the art world. She was joined by artist/illustrator Robert Jefferson, Arthur Morgan, Gene Reynolds, Bernard Harmon, Eugene Solomon, Irma Wilson, Sandy Moon, Alonzo Perrin, Robert Forrest and sculptor Tony Barber.

When she moved to New York in 1961, she painted and exhibited in the city. She participated in a show at the Lynn Kottler Gallery in 1963 that featured oil paintings titled "Two Figures" and "Poochie," which "are attracting much comment", the New York Amsterdam News reported.

She had a solo show in Goldstein Gallery in Philadelphia in 1963 where she exhibited 16 oils and 19 drawings. Three years later, she was among young Black artists and students chosen to exhibit at William Penn Memorial Museum in Harrisburg by the mayor's Committee on Human Relations. Others included Moe Brooker, Barbara Bullock, Walter Edmonds, Charles Pridgen, Percy Ricks, Leroy Johnson, John Simpson, Maurice Thompkins, Gwendolyn Joyce Daniels and Tina Lloyd King.

In 1963, she was selected to exhibit in PAFA's Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpturing, joining Louis B. Sloan and Raymond Saunders.

In 1969, Tiberino was among 100 Black artists from across the country to participate in the exhibit "Afro-American Artists 1800-1969" sponsored by the School District of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum. It included works by some of the country's top artists, including Horace Pippin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Roland Ayers, Romare Bearden, Avel de Knight, Barkley Hendricks, Paul Keene, Raymond Saunders, Louis B. Sloan, Ed Wilson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joshua Johnson.

That same year, she exhibited in Lincoln University's first Black Arts Festival, a major exhibit of Black artists in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The show included works by Sam Gilliam, Romare Bearden, James Gadson, John Cook, John Wade, John Simpson, Walter Edmonds, Moe Brooker, Simmie L. Knox and Percy Ricks.

In 1971, she participated in Percy Rick's "Afro American Images 1971" show at the State Armory in Wilmington, DE. The show by Rick's Aesthetic Dynamics Inc. featured 75 artists from New York to Washington, D.C., with 150 pieces of artwork. The artists included Randall Craig, an organizer of the 1969 exhibition in Philadelphia; Lois Mailou Jones, James L. Wells, Charles W. White, Norman Lewis, Samella Lewis and Edward Loper Sr. The exhibit was re-created in 2021 at the Delaware Art Museum in partnership with Aesthetic Dynamics.

In 1977, Tiberino was the first artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, showing more than 40 paintings and drawings. The museum described her work as "infused with great emotion and passion. Her paintings and drawings with their soft, dark blustery lines strike the viewer with an immediate sense of the subject's physical and spiritual integrity."

In 1992, she was represented in an exhibit of 19th and 20th-century African American artists at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which featured works from its collection and on loan. Included was her portrait of Sister Geneva, a Black missionary who worked in Tanzania. Titled "Works by African Americans," the museum exhibit also included Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Paul Keene, Howardena Pindell, Betty Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Bill Traylor, William Hawkins, William Edmondson, Rev. William Gayles, Ned Cheadham and Furman Humphrey.

A few weeks before she died on February 28, 1992, her works were on exhibit in five spaces: October Gallery, Lucien Crump Art Gallery, Heritage Art Gallery, Hahn Gallery and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Posthumous exhibitions Since her death, Tiberino's works have been exhibited in several solo and group shows. In 2000, the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a group show of prints and drawings by African Americans. Two of her works, which had never been exhibited, were shown: "Ethiopian Dancer" and "Farewell to Uncle Cliff." Other artists represented included Samuel J. Brown Jr., Charles Burwell, Quentin Morris, Howardena Pindell, Charles Searles, Humbert Howard, Raymond Steth and Dox Thrash.

Tiberino's works were presented in two exhibits encompassing her family. In 2007, Sande Webster Gallery produced "The Tiberino Family: A Legacy of Art," which included Joseph, and children, Raphael, Ellen and Gabriel.

In 2015, she was represented in the Woodmere Art Museum's "We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia 1920s to 1970s." State Armory (Wilmington, DE), 1971 Acts of Arts Gallery (NY), 1973 Ile-Ife Museum of Afro-American culture, 1975, 1981 African American Museum in Philadelphia, 1977, 2004 Philomathean Society Art Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, 1978 Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1980 Alfred O. Deshong Museum (Widener University), 1981 Painted Bride Art Center, 1983 Off The Wall Gallery, 1985 Free Library of Philadelphia, 1988, 1992 Uptown Visual Arts Complex, 1988 Uptown Theater, 1989 623 Gallery at Try Arts, 1990 October Gallery, 1990, 1991, 1992 Woodmere Art Museum, 2009, 2015, 2017, 2022 Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie (NJ), 2015 Twenty Two Gallery, 2018 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NY), 2019 Delaware Art Museum, 2021 Delaware Art Museum Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture