William McBride Jr.

William Thacker McBride Jr. (September 27, 1912- August 11, 2000) was an African-American artist, designer and collector. McBride began his career in the 1930s in the circles of black art collectives and artistic opportunities afforded by the Works Progress Administration. He would ultimately leave his mark in Chicago as a driving force behind the South Side Community Art Center. McBride distinguished himself as a teacher, as a cultural and political activist, and as a collector of African art and artwork by black artists of his generation.

Personal life William McBride Jr. was born in 1912 in Algiers, New Orleans. McBride later famously became inspired by African masks, and incorporated them into his screenprints, as in his series of prints featuring masks in the early 1940s. which he found in traditional African art exhibited in natural history museums and textile designs he reportedly came across in the British publication The Illustrated London News. He traveled to postcolonial nations such as Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria, and collected African art to bring back to the United States. For this he is credited with helping to raise awareness in Chicago of the art and culture of the black diaspora. McBride was also interested in documenting his own community in South Side Chicago. Commenting on McBride's collecting habits, an observer quoted in a Chicago Tribune article described McBride as having gone "to virtually every art show, live performance and play, anything that was happening in the vibrant world of the South Side from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. And he'd go to an event and pull the paper off the wall and take it home."

Early on, McBride recognized the talents of his fellow Chicago artists such as Charles White, Eldzier Cortor, William Carter, Charles Sebree, Richard Hunt, Marion Perkins, Margaret Tayler Goss Burroughs, Gordon Parks, Joseph Kersey, and over time built his own collection of their works. In 1995, McBride donated his collection of thousands of posters, playbills, exhibition catalogs and other ephemera to the Chicago Public Library's Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, a major repository of African American artists' activities in Chicago between the 1920s and the 1950s. His papers include early SSCAC organizational and publicity files, as well as extensive files of cultural and political activities, correspondence, fliers, programs, posters, playbills, art studies and photographs.

Selected exhibitions "Alone in Crowd: Prints of the 1930s and 1940s by African-American Artists From the Collection of Reba and Dave Williams" an exhibition organised and circulated by American Federation of Arts, opening at Newark Museum, N.J. and the Equitable Gallery, N.Y., Dec.10 1992-Feb.28, 1993.African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race Exhibitions, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, October 27, 2018 – March 3, 2019

Selected Collections

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY

DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, IL