MANET HARRISON FOWLER (1895 - 1976) Untitled (Still Life with Roses).
Watercolor and graphite on cream wove paper, 1967. 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed and dated "Sept - 1967" in red pencil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Soprano, artist and educator Manet Harrison Fowler is best known as the founder of the Mwalimu Center for African Culture in Harlem. Born "Minnia" and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Manet Fowler graduated from the Tuskegee Institute in 1913. Fowler later studied visual art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and music at the Chicago College of Music and the American Conservatory of Music. She and her husband Stephen Fowler rose to prominence in Fort Worth as dynamic educators and administrators for the black public schools and YMCA. She co-founded the Texas Association of Negro Musicians.
Fowler then became an important figure in New York with the 1933 opening of her Mwalimu School of Music and Creative Art (Mwalimu is Swahili for "noble or distinguished teacher") which offered both instruction in the arts and vocational training to Harlem residents. Under the direction of Fowler, the Mwalimu School's choir regularly performed publicly and recorded.
Manet Harrison Fowler's papers and several paintings are in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.
