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Following Fulton Ross
The Summer of Baldwin's Centennial
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the birthday of the profound and prolific writer, James Baldwin. To celebrate, Fulton Ross has produced a series of portraits of Baldwin and his contemporaries.
During her early years as an artist in New York City, Fulton Ross had the extraordinary opportunity to meet Baldwin. Their meeting had an outsize influence on the younger artist, setting her on a career of independent thought and creativity. She gives that influence expression in the scale of a double portrait of Baldwin, shown above. Each is image is 6 x 8 feet, rendered as mixed-media silk screen on canvas.
This commemorative portrait of Baldwin is part of the series Baldwin and Friends, a collection of images of the groundbreaking Black artists who socialized in the same circles and knew the writer as "Jimmy". Each portrait in this series is mixed-media oil and acrylic on stretched canvas.
A sampling of the friends of Baldwin is shown below.
