30 Facts About Claude Clark

Claude Clark was an American painter, printmaker and art educator.

Claude Clark was born on a tenant farm in Rockingham, Georgia November 11,1915.

In early August 1923, Claude Clark's parents left the south for a better life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the Great Migration.

Claude Clark attended Roxborough High School where he wrote poetry but discovered a talent for painting.

Claude Clark applied to and was eventually accepted to the Barnes Foundation in 1939.

In 1941, Claude Clark met the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, Effie May Lockhart from California.

Claude Clark continued his paint studies at The Barnes Foundation while teaching art in the Philadelphia Public School system during the early years of their marriage.

Claude Clark worked with the WPA from 1939 to 1942.

Claude Clark joined the graphics art shop where he worked with Raymond Steth and Dox Thrash.

Claude Clark was the author of A Black Art Perspective, a Black Teachers Guide to a Black Visual Arts Curriculum, Merritt Press 1970.

Claude Clark mentored and supported many young emerging scholars and artists.

Claude Clark attended high school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduating from Roxborough High School.

From 1935 to 1939, Claude Clark studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art on full scholarship.

In 1939 Claude Clark applied to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania and was accepted.

Claude Clark moved his family to Talladega, Alabama and subsequently Sacramento, California.

Claude Clark received a BA from Sacramento State University in 1958 and a Master of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962.

Claude Clark matured in art by recognizing his opportunity to develop without being constrained by the racism, poverty and inherent inequality of circumstance prejudice and labels bring.

Claude Clark's work exhibited social realism, modern and abstract styles.

Claude Clark painted and exhibited from a very early age and sold his first works in his early twenties.

Claude Clark became interested in working for a Black college as his interest in African and African American history developed further.

Claude Clark accepted a position at Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama, as an associate professor of art.

In 1955, while teaching at Talladega, Claude Clark began feeling the financial pressures and made the decision to move his family to his wife's native state of California to seek greater opportunity.

Claude Clark enrolled in Sacramento State University and taught art classes to other undergraduate students while simultaneously obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree.

Claude Clark helped curate the first national African American exhibition at the Oakland Museum in 1967.

Claude Clark continued to paint, research and exhibit throughout this period.

Claude Clark worked from his studio in Oakland, California following his Merritt College retirement from 1981 to 1998.

Claude Clark has exhibited in the United States, Africa, Caribbean, Europe and South America.

Claude Clark died in Oakland, California, on April 21,2001, after a long illness.

Claude Clark's work was included in the 1985 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum and the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.

Claude Clark's work is in the collection of Howard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the de Young Museum.