The work of extraordinary artist Louis Mailou Jones (1905-1998) is on display at the Mint Museum of Art through February 27. Aptly titled "A Life in Vibrant Color," this exhibition enlivens the senses through color, texture, and the captured images of Jones’s subjects by illuminating their story and setting them historically in time and place. The exhibit also shows the progression of her life and talent spanning close to a century.

Lois Mailou Jones was an accomplished twentieth-century artist, so it’s a mystery why she has received so little exposure. I’ve heard of famed Harlem Renaissance painters such as Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Charlottean Romare Bearden, but never Jones, who is considered a late Harlem Renaissance painter. Although her paintings are not best described as modern, perhaps the postmodern umbrella fits her mix of styles. Her work is categorically described as Contemporary African, Caribbean, and African American.  In appreciating the artist and her work, it may be beneficial to see her simply as a versatile talent who illuminated the human condition with her paintings and sketches of captivating figures, landscapes, and unique faces while exploring a diversity of styles. The brushstrokes in her paintings express movement and transport the viewer into the feeling of the subject and place.

A Boston native, Lois Mailou Jones was admitted to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts as a design major at age seventeen. Many of her early textile designs hang in the exhibition. She moved to Sedalia, North Carolina in 1928 at the invitation of Charlotte Hawkins Brown to teach at Palmer Memorial Institute, a prep school for young blacks. There, she founded the school's art department. Work inspired during this period includes the watercolor Negro Shack, Sedalia NC (1930). After her stint at Palmer, two short years later she accepted an invitation to join Howard University in Washington D.C. to help build the art department where she would remain until retirement in 1977. In 1937, she went to Paris to study at the Academie Julian. The diversity of her work is seen in her impressionist style painting during this time, such as La Mere, Paris (1938). In 1952, Jones married Haitian graphic artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel. Her travels to Haiti are vibrantly evident in her work, particularly in the painting Peasant Girl (1954).

Strolling through the exhibition, Jones' work offers a history lesson through her talented and notable subjects, as well as a deep appreciation of ordinary individuals. Such is the case in portraits Brother Brown (1931), Negro Youth (1929), and Dans un Café (1939), an oil painting of Leigh Whipper, the Broadway movie actor who founded the Negro Actors Guild and was an Oscar nominee in 1943. Her work includes opera singers and Cuban radio performers, all of which capture the vibrant essence of her subjects. Psychological pieces such as Mob Victim (Meditation) (1944) and Jennie (1943) evoke deep imagery of the condition and circumstances of life during this period in America while expressing a sense of dignity.

Jones' most universal work is a landscape scenes of the Seine, Paris, or Gay Head, Massachusetts. Later work evokes both her life’s journeys to Haiti and expression through Cubism. In the 1970s she traveled extensively through Africa, leading to a timely appreciation of African-inspired art. During the 1980s, Lois Mailou Jones came full circle in her journey as she painted scenes of Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, a place she visited as a child with her parents. The last painting of the exhibit is an untitled still life of fruit and flowers Jones painted in her nineties. Her portrait hangs across from this piece. It’s a fitting close to an outstanding display of the artist Lois Mailou Jones’s vibrant life through her works of art.