On March 9, 1965, Betty Lochrie Hoag conducted an interview with Charles White for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The tape-recorded interview was transcribed to be become an important mid 1960s record of White’s biography and development as an artist. The interview was conducted at the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles, California, the gallery with which White had such an extended and fruitful working relationship.

Extract as follows: 

[TAPE 2 – SIDE 1] 

BETTY L. HOAG: This is Betty Lochrie Hoag on March 9th, 1965, interviewing the artist, Charles White, part III. Mr. White, I think that we got a bit garbled on this last part, you were starting to tell me about this Illinois Art Project Center that was established in Chicago. And it was a different thing than the regular art center which they had, is that right? When you started out with the easel work.

CHARLES WHITE: Yeah, you mean the art club that I used to belong to?

BETTY L. HOAG: No, when you first went on the Federal Art Project didn’t they have another project center?

CHARLES WHITE: No, The Federal Art Project had only this building where they had all the activities which had to be done right on the premises, in other words, they had a Design Department; easel painting, for instance, generally was done at home. The Art Center with a community art center which was called the Southside Community Art Center. Located in the predominately Negro section of Chicago, which was southside. Generally they established art centers throughout the country, Harlem had one, New York. Several cities had them. And as I say they were staffed by the Illinois State Art Project. The only specification they had was that the community purchase the building, and at the Community Art Center was generally – they ran classes, there was a full-time staff, a Director, Assistant Director, and secretaries, again staffed by the Art Project. And all the community art activities took place at this center.

BETTY L. HOAG: I believe Mr. Peter Pollack was Supervisor of this when you were there?

CHARLES WHITE: Yes, I forgot what his position was, but he was with the American Federation of Arts, a very important executive there.

BETTY L. HOAG: Magazine of Art, in 1941, had a reproduction of your Fatigue and it was a very moving print I thought.

CHARLES WHITE: Thank you.

The magazine in question – [MAGAZINE of ART, published by the American Federation of Arts, Washington, August-September, 1941, Volume 34, Number 7] contained an important feature written by none other than Alain Locke, “Chicago’s New Southside Art Center”, and as recalled by Hoag, it contained a reproduction of Fatigue. The reproduction is important because it represents a rare illustration of this early work by an artist rapidly establishing himself as an exciting talent who so many people were talking about and referencing. The other reproduction of Fatigue seems to be as part of a portrait of White, in his studio or in a gallery, looking at the completed work, which depicts an exhausted African American man, catching some sleep while seated at a table.

Extracts as follows.

EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO, when I first saw the house which is now the Southside Community Art Center in Chicago, it was at the nadir of its career. Even those who planned its redemption could not quite visualize the transformation which culminated in its dedication May 7, by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, to the applause of hundreds of invited guests, thousands of spectators in roped-off streets, a mobile broadcasting unit linking the occasion to a national network audience, and most important of all, an enhanced sense of corporate pride, self-respect and of prospective accomplishment on the part of the mid-West’s largest Negro community.

…In a community that without such facilities and encouragements has already turned out a score of promising young Negro artists, nearly half of whom have a fighting chance of national place and importance, it is safe to predict significant future dividends. Chicago has already made a considerable contribution to that type of painting and sculpture which is coming to be recognized as distinctively native American. In that contribution the work of this young Negro group takes, on its objective merits, a definitive place. Without being out of step with contemporary modernism, it is both nationally characteristic and racially distinctive, a happy and fortunately compatible combination.