Wilhelmina McAlpin Godfrey

Wilhelmina Godfrey with her work Composition I, c. 1969; Image courtesy of the Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives Godfrey with her fellow Langston Hughes Institute co-founders, clockwise from left: Jim Pappas, Allie Anderson, Clarence Scott and Hal Franklin. Image courtesy of the Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives. Wilhelmina McAlpin Godfrey (August 27, 1914 – May 13, 1994) was an American painter, printmaker and textile artist, art educator and community activist in Buffalo, New York.

Biography Godfrey was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was raised and educated in Buffalo, New York. She was married to William Godfrey Jr. and they had one child together, Carol Godfrey Wing. Wilhelmina Godfrey died on May 13, 1994, in Buffalo, New York.

Education Wilhelmina Godfrey attended Fosdick Masten Park High School in Buffalo, where she took all the art classes that the school offered. Although her schooling was interrupted by the Great Depression, she was able to continue her education in the 1940s receiving scholarships from the Art Institute of Buffalo and the Albright Art School of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, from which she graduated in 1949. In 1962, Godfrey completed studies in weaving at the Rochester Institute of Technology School for American Craftsmen. which strove to use art to improve social conditions, and to teach children to express creativity through dance, drawing, painting, weaving, graphic design, and ceramics. The Institute closed in 2015.

In 1974, Godfrey received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a scholarship from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Deer Isle, Maine. In 1977, she wrote that she was exploring "the influence of Africa on the black-American craftspeople working in the United States today." In 2018, collector Mark Dabney donated an extensive archive of materials relating to Wilhelmina Godfrey's career, including 350 color slides of her paintings, weavings, and prints and a 277-page copy of her manuscript, “From These Hands: Contemporary African-American Craftspeople of the 60’s and 70’s,” copyrighted 1980. Sint Maarten, 1989; acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91.4 cm); The M&T Bank Collection at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1991