Works by artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet are rare and seldom exhibited because fewer than two dozen are known to exist. Nearly all of them are included in Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch, the first-ever museum survey devoted to this elusive American artist, whose important contributions to twentieth-century art, especially in the field of sculpture, have only lately been fully recognized. Opening at the Brooklyn Museum on March 14, the exhibition features twenty examples, including sculptures in wood and marble, plus polychrome wood reliefs and watercolors. Each of her works reflects a refined sensibility, meticulous attention to detail, and sensitivity to materials, color, and composition.
Having studied in Paris in the 1920s and early ’30s, Prophet employs the idealized shapes and clean lines of modernist sculpture of the period. Some of her works, such as the portrait heads Discontent and Youth (Head in Wood), with their stylized features and crisp lines, have an almost art deco feel. The extraordinary polychrome wood reliefs on view, especially Walk Among the Lilies— with its figure in shallow relief profile, schematic flowers, and a jaguar-like animal head emerging from the background—hint at Paul Gauguin’s carved and painted wood reliefs, such as the famous Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses (Be in Love and You will Be Happy) of 1889. And Prophet’s elegant marble head Silence suggests a correspondence with works by modern figurative sculptors like Aristide Maillol, who was certainly among the best-known artists in Paris at the time she lived and worked there.
Prophet’s mother was Black, and her father was Narragansett, one of the Indigenous tribes occupying what is today the state of Rhode Island, where the artist was born. Throughout her career, and despite setbacks and rejections, Prophet remained focused on an exploration of her Afro-Indigenous heritage, seeking to portray people of color as embodying a powerful sense of grace, dignity, and independence. She worked as a domestic servant to support her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design— which organized this exhibition, and where it debuted last year—and to pay for her relocation to Paris. Upon her return to the United States in 1932 Prophet was mentored to some extent by writer, scholar, and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and exhibited her work frequently. In 1934 she moved to Atlanta, taught at Atlanta University, and co-founded the art program at Spelman College. The later period of her life was tragic, however. She moved back north and struggled with poverty, loneliness, and depression, and spent four years at the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases. In her last years, she worked as a domestic for a wealthy family in Providence. All along she kept a diary in which she outlined her perseverance, and the personal struggles and sacrifices she had made for her art, which included casting heavy bronze sculptures herself to cut down on costs. The exhibition’s subtitle, I Will Not Bend an Inch is a line from her diary.
Her great endeavor was to explore the way women of color are depicted in art, and her ambition for her own work was that it would be a truthful reflection of her identity. For these reasons, Prophet is now heralded as pioneering feminist and racial themes in art, presaging the work of like-minded artists such as Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), and championed today by prominent contemporary artists like Simone Leigh. Another highlight of the exhibition is a collaborative film, Conspiracy (2022) by Leigh and artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, a tribute to the work of Black female artists that was inspired by Prophet’s pioneering life and work.
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch • Brooklyn Museum, New York • March 14 to July 13 • brooklynmuseum.org
