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Today we highlight a single work in the collection: Rose Piper’s The Death of Bessie Smith of 1947. After graduating from Hunter College in 1940, the New York-based artist received a Rosenwald Fellowship to travel to the American South to study “the folk Negro, urban and rural, as he comments on himself in his blues.” This research resulted in a series of paintings exhibited at Manhattan’s downtown RoKo Gallery in October 1947. Among these were The Death of Bessie Smith. This abstracted work depicts the singer’s tragic death following a car crash. Writing in support of Piper’s Rosenwald application, Romare Bearden praised the power of this painting in particular: “the highly stylized blood running along her hands, I thought evidenced real imagination and stylistic inventiveness.” Other surviving works exhibited in Piper’s RoKo exhibition are shown below. For a full discussion of Piper, the series, and this work in particular, see Graham Lock’s book chapter, “Two Blues on the Brush: Rose Piper’s Blues and Negro Folk Songs Paintings of the 1940s,” in The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, Graham Lock and David Murray, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, New York, 2009), pp. 47–70.
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