MARGARET BURROUGHS (1917 - 2010) Untitled (Portrait of a Young Woman).
Watercolor on cream wove paper, circa 1940. 425x305 mm; 16 3/4x12 inches. Signed "Margaret Taylor" in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection.
This watercolor is a scarce and early work by this important artist--few works from her WPA period are known outside museum collections. Margaret Taylor married the artist Bernard Goss in 1939. They divorced in 1947, and in 1949, she married Charles Gordon Burroughs.
Margaret Burroughs was a pioneering female artist in Chicago from the WPA era until her recent passsing--a leader and founder of the South Side Community Art Center, the Du Sable Museum and the National Conference of Artists. The South Side Community Art Center was made part of the Federal Art Project, and formally dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941. Its purpose was to make art and culture available to minority groups and to provide jobs for artists and other cultural workers. Burroughs's contemporaries at the center included Charles White, Bernard Goss, George Neal, Eldzier Cortor, Gordon Parks, Charles Sebree and Archibald Motley.
Margaret Burroughs's works are in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African-American Art, Savannah, GA and the Paul R. Jones Collection, University of Delaware.
