No one African American artist charmed, fascinated and interested popular culture, left leaning and mainstream Black magazines than Charles White. White even interested an ‘Adults Only’ men’s magazine, Sweetie, which ran a feature on the artist in a 1969 issue. A sense of the magazines that ran features on Charles White over the course of several decades included, the just-mentioned Sweetie, Masses & Mainstream, New Foundations, Jewish Life, Ebony, Negro Digest, Freedomways, Black World, Negro History Bulletin, and of course, many peer review and academic journals. Some of these publications are relatively available/accessible, but others are more of a challenge to access and read. 

One such publication, with a substantial feature on White, was the relatively short-lived Soul Illustrated magazine. We can now regard the 60s and 70s as a golden heyday of magazine publishing on Black music, this being in addition to the ways in which Black singers frequently featured in mainstream Black magazines such as Ebony. The issue of Soul Illustrated in question was Vol. 1, No. 3, Winter 1968. The feature was titled “The Soul of an Artist” and occupied five pages of the magazine. 

One thing that made this such a fascinating and important feature is that it was in essence an autobiographical piece, in which White recounted his upbringing, his influences, his practice as an artist and so on. Given that pretty much all other magazine texts on White were written by journalists, writers and critics, this Soul Illustrated feature gave its readers a chance to hear about White, in his own words. The piece was illustrated by details of White’s work, intriguing details of objects used by White, such as his coffee cup, photographs of the artist at work in his studio, and photographs of the artist’s family life. Of particular importance was a charming photograph of White tenderly embracing his son Ian, as another child stands in close proximity.  The images were “Photographed by S.I.’s picture editor Win Muldrow.”  Muldrow has been described by his son as “a highly respected and talented pro photographer in Los Angeles.” One of the most dramatic photographs in the feature was the largest image, a fisheye lens portrait of a contemplative White, in his studio, his drawing ‘The Wall’ dominantly placed behind him. [Incidentally, ‘The Wall’ was one of six Charles White works reproduced in a folio of prints by the artist, I have a dream, produced in honour of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, slain in 1968. ’The Wall’ was also reproduced on the cover of Freedomways Vol. 9, No. 2 Spring 1969 (Second Quarter)

The feature began as follows: “There is pleasure obtained from both music and art. S.I. delves into the latter and exposes… “THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST”. Katie Anania, in her wonderful book, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America [Yale University Press, 2024], made reference to the Soul Illustrated piece, including a reproduction of the first two pages of the text, which included the previous mentioned fisheye lens portrait. Anania’s reference to the feature was as follows: 

Media coverage of White’s drawings, too, depicted paper as part of the general ecology of creativity. The artist’s studio was an important nucleus of the ecology, a place for processing the outside world to survive. An interview spread in Soul Illustrated magazine from 1968 shows White sitting on a chair in front of a wall of sample pages and paste ups, hands supporting his chin in thought, as a rounded fish-eye lens captures a curved panoramic view of the studio. Photographs of the artist’s hands at work and another of his coffee cup appears below the caption: “A man’s real signature is his works and the artifacts he chooses to do his thing with.” (9/10).

“THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST” is an extraordinarily engaging, educative text, every paragraph of which was both engrossing and informative. An example as follows:

My own black consciousness hit home when I was about 14. I always had a tremendous appetite for books. I would read everything at the library indiscriminately – it didn’t matter what subject it was. One day I accidentally came upon a book that was to have a tremendous influence in my life. The book was “The New Negro” by Dr. Alain Locke, a classic that dealt with the contribution of the Negro to the arts as well as to the social sciences. It was an analysis of the Negro cultural figures, the Negro intellectuals like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes. I never knew these people existed; I never knew Negroes wrote novels, that they wrote poetry, that they were outstanding leaders in terms of government. It was a whole new scene. I figured if they had one book on this, there must be others so I began to hunt things and suddenly, I discovered Negro history and guys like Frederick Douglass, Deborah Ganin, etc. and man, it just blew my mind!

Elsewhere in the narrative, White sorrowfully but stoically recalls being told to “shut up and sit down”, when he had the temerity to question why his staple high school U.S. history text book “devoted only one line to the 400 years of black history.”

This was a wonderful text by/about White.

Download the PDF on the image link below: