By Alice J. Bernstein
Part 2 of 2 part series
I’m excited to look further at the long, surprising, and deeply encouraging life of Inge Hardison (1914-2016), because she represents history as always new. Her family’s journey from slavery to so-called “freedom” in Portsmouth, Virginia, enabled her parents to barely survive. Her father, a chicken farmer, and mother, a teacher of black children, were dedicated to learning from books wherever they could find them. In their studies they found a path to new lives in Brooklyn, NY.
In Part 1, I told of Inge’s early work acting on Broadway with distinguished actors, black and white, including Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee; and how it was there that her love for sculpting in all forms: clay, bronze, silver, and stone, began. Now, I tell a little more of her rich history.
Inge Hardison’s passion for education was deep and evident in her study at many schools and colleges, including Vassar and the renowned Arts Student’s League in New York. She also taught with Victor Lowenfeld at Hampton University. And dear readers of The Tennessee Tribune, you may not know that she was a graduate of Tennessee State Agricultural and Industrial College, the current Tennessee State University (TSU).
TSU’s list of most distinguished alumni, states:
Ruth Inge Hardison was an American sculptor, artist, and photographer, known particularly for her 1960s busts (or sculpted portraits) entitled “Negro Giants in History.” Her 1983 collection called “Our Folks,” which features sculpted portraits of everyday people, is also of note. Hardison’s artistic productions largely surround historical black portraiture, and she is especially interested in creatively representing the unspoken voices of the African American past. She was the only female in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (BAAL), a group that encourages awareness of black artistic accomplishments, when this organization was founded in 1969.
Some of the works of Inge Hardison can be seen in public venues, institutions and collections. Her bronze bust of Frederick Douglass is at the Princeton University Art Museum; her abstract sculpture Jubilee is on the Brooklyn campus of Medgar Evers College, and in 1990 then New York Governor Mario Cuomo presented her original sculpture of the great abolitionist Sojourner Truth as a gift from New York State to Nelson Mandela. A cast of this majestic work can be seen in the New York State Harlem Art Collection.
I came to know Inge Hardison by interviewing her at her home in Harlem for “The Force of Ethics in Civil Rights” Oral History Project. Our friendship began then and we took pleasure in learning from each other. I became friends with her daughter Yolande, who is the subject of some of Inge’s important works. I’m grateful now to be working with her daughter Yolande to have her work known “Newly” widely, deeply. I look forward to drawing on her many letters and documents. I want to learn about the world from her, and to see that history is always new.
Alice J. Bernstein, journalist, Aesthetic Realism associate, civil rights historian.
