SFMOMA, Part 57: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Peasants at Kenscoff (Lois Mailou Jones, 1955).
The hills do the first talking. Behind the market crowd — the vendors, the baskets, the dense human business of a rural Haitian market — the land rises in rolling green swells, and everything in front of them has gone angular: flattened patterns, bright hard color, shapes locked together like cut paper. This is not the Lois Mailou Jones of the 1930s, the careful impressionist of Ascent of Ethiopia. Something happened between Boston and Kenscoff, and the painting is the evidence. Oil on Masonite, 1955, painted the year after her first trip to Haiti — the trip that broke her style open and remade it in brighter, flatter, more defiant colors. The wall label gives you the facts. The colors give you the rest.
Boston, 1905
Loïs Mailou Jones was born in Boston in 1905, to a beautician mother who nurtured her daughter's art by taking her into the homes of wealthy white clients — the doors that opened, the rooms she got to see. At seventeen she showed on Martha's Vineyard; in 1923 she won a four-year scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and went on to Harvard and Columbia. Then came the sentence that rerouted her life: when she applied for a teaching position at the Museum of Fine Arts, she was told there were no positions for a Black woman, and advised to "go down South and help your people." She went south. She helped her people for the next half century — and then some.
Howard, 1930–1977
Jones taught at Howard University for forty-seven years, 1930 to 1977 — one of the great teaching careers in American art, the mentor of generations of Black artists who passed through Washington, D.C. She built the art department into a serious place while painting on the side of a full teaching load, which is to say she did two full-time jobs for most of her adult life. The classroom was not a consolation prize. It was a base — financial, institutional, communal — from which she could travel, paint, and come back. Every major phase of her work was launched from Howard: the early impressionism, the African masks of the 1930s, the Paris years, and finally Haiti.
Paris
In the late 1930s a fellowship took her to Paris, and Paris gave her what Boston wouldn't: a place to be an artist first. She fell in with the expatriate circles, studied, painted, and absorbed the lesson the European modernists were all working through — that African forms could be the engine of a new visual language. The difference was that Jones didn't have to borrow the engine. It was hers by inheritance. Les Fétiches (1938), her mask painting now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the thesis stated early: African forms, modernist method, no apology. Paris taught her that the combination was legitimate. Haiti would teach her it was alive.
Haiti, 1954
The invitation came from the top: in the summer of 1954, Haitian president Paul E. Magloire invited Jones to Haiti to paint its landscape and people — a state commission for a Black American woman artist, the kind of thing Boston had told her didn't exist. She had married the Haitian artist Louis Verginaud Pierre-Noël the year before, in 1953, and the marriage braided her life to the island. She served as guest professor at the Centre d'Art and the Foyer des Arts Plastiques in Port-au-Prince, met the Haitian painters, and worked at a furious pace: forty-two paintings from the trips, exhibited in a show sponsored by Haiti's First Lady. For the work she received the Diplôme et Décoration de l'Ordre National "Honneur et Mérite" at the grade of Chevalier. A Black woman from Boston, decorated by Haiti, for painting Haiti back to itself.
The breakthrough
The style break is total. Before Haiti: impressionist technique, muted palettes, the careful Boston training visible in every brushstroke. After: flattened areas of pattern and color, angular shapes, brightness turned all the way up. The label puts it precisely — "the rolling hills in the background recall the artist's earlier impressionist style," but "the angular, flattened patterns and bright colors reveal a new approach energized by her experiences of Haiti and its culture." She was fifty years old, with thirty years of professional practice behind her, and she threw the method out and started over. Most artists get one style. Jones had at least four, and the Haitian one is the one that made her famous.
"The art of Africa is lived in the daily life of Haiti"
That's Jones's own sentence, and it's the key to the whole Haitian period. She was, the label notes, "keenly aware of European modernists' appropriation of African art" — Picasso's masks, Modigliani's elongations, the whole primitivist borrowing — and she was interested in "studying and reclaiming its forms as the basis for a distinctly Black American visual expression." Reclaiming is the operative word. The Europeans took African forms to Paris and called it modernism. Jones went to Haiti and found the forms still living — in the markets, the hills, the daily life — and built her modernism out of the living source instead of the museum vitrine. Peasants at Kenscoff is the reclamation made visible: not African art quoted, but Haitian life painted, by someone who understood the difference.
Kenscoff
Kenscoff is a market town in the mountains above Port-au-Prince — cool air, steep roads, farmers coming down from the hills with produce. The painting gives you the market as pattern: figures as angular shapes, baskets as geometry, the whole scene flattened into interlocking color. But look past the stylization and it's documentary — this is what the market looked like, the crowd, the goods, the hills behind. Jones's Haitian breakthrough was never abstraction for its own sake. The flattening serves the seeing: strip out the impressionist atmosphere and what remains is structure — the structure of the crowd, the structure of the hills, the structure of a visual culture that the Europeans had been mining for fifty years without ever visiting the mine.
1955
The year of the painting was a summit year. In 1955 Jones unveiled portraits of the Haitian president and his wife — commissioned by none other than U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower — the Boston girl turned away by her hometown museum, painting heads of state on commission from the American president. The same year she was making market scenes like Peasants at Kenscoff: state portraits and peasant markets, the official and the everyday, both in the new Haitian style. She contained both registers without strain. The portraitist's discipline and the colorist's freedom turned out to be the same hand.
The Joyner/Giuffrida gift, 2020
SFMOMA's Peasants at Kenscoff arrived as a gift of the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection in 2020 — the landmark private collection of African American art assembled by Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida — and its placement of Jones at SFMOMA is part of the broader institutional reckoning with who got left out of the modernist story. Jones died in 1998, at ninety-three, having outlived nearly every movement she participated in. The 2020 gift put her Haitian breakthrough on Floor 2, in the permanent hang, where the Boston museum that turned her away can no longer pretend she was ever marginal.
American artist
Her godson said it plainly: "She didn't want to be known as an African or Black artist. She wanted to be an American artist. She knew that one day it would come out that she was one of the great artists — whether she was Black, purple or green." Read Peasants at Kenscoff with that sentence and the painting sharpens. It's not a Haitian painting by an American visitor. It's an American painting — by an artist who understood that America includes Haiti, includes Africa, includes the markets in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, includes everything the Boston museum meant by "down South" and everything it didn't. She painted until the last day. The last day was June 9, 1998. The market is still there.
The masks, earlier
The Haitian breakthrough had a rehearsal. In 1938 Jones painted Les Fétiches — African masks arranged as still life, modernist method, no apology — now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And Ascent of Ethiopia (1932), at the Milwaukee Art Museum, already reached for the African source. What's striking is the gap: she found the African forms in the 1930s, through the Paris lesson, but painted them as objects — masks on a table, heritage in a frame. Haiti, sixteen years later, turned the objects into a world. The masks became markets. The still life became a crowd. The difference between Les Fétiches and Peasants at Kenscoff is the difference between quoting a language and living in the country where it's spoken.
The teacher
Forty-seven years at Howard. It's hard to overstate what that means — generations of Black artists trained by a woman who had been told to go south and help her people, and did, at the highest level, for nearly half a century. She ran the department, led the first Howard student art tour of France in 1962, and kept painting through all of it. The teaching stories accumulate: the rigor, the travel, the insistence that her students see the world. When people write about Jones the mentor, the word that recurs is generosity — with ideas, with memories, with time. The market in Peasants at Kenscoff is crowded. So was her classroom, in the best way.
The late style
She didn't stop at Haiti. Through the 1980s and 1990s Jones kept pushing toward geometric abstraction — the flattened patterns of the market paintings distilled further, into pure structure — while continuing the watercolor landscapes of France and Martha's Vineyard on the side. Four styles, maybe five, across seventy years of working. Most artists narrow. Jones widened: impressionism, African modernism, Haitian pattern, geometric abstraction, and the quiet watercolors underneath it all. Peasants at Kenscoff sits at the center of the arc — the moment the widening became a breakthrough, the market where all the earlier styles met and reorganized into something new.
So here's the thesis: Peasants at Kenscoff is the painting of a fifty-year-old artist throwing out thirty years of method and starting over — impressionism flattened into pattern, Boston muted into Haitian brightness, European primitivism reclaimed at the living source. Jones went to Haiti on a president's invitation, married into it, taught in it, and came home with forty-two paintings and a new visual language. The hills remember the old style. The market announces the new one. "The art of Africa is lived in the daily life of Haiti" — and for one brilliant decade, it was lived in her brushwork too. An American artist, whether Boston liked it or not. 🌁
Timeline — Loïs Mailou Jones
1905 — born in Boston; mother nurtures her art through clients' doors
1923 — four-year scholarship, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1930 — begins teaching at Howard University; stays forty-seven years
1932 — paints Ascent of Ethiopia
1938 — Les Fétiches; the African forms enter the work
Late 1930s — fellowship to Paris; the expatriate years
1953 — marries Haitian artist Louis Verginaud Pierre-Noël
1954 — first trip to Haiti, on President Magloire's invitation; guest professor in Port-au-Prince; the style breaks open
1955 — paints Peasants at Kenscoff; unveils the Eisenhower-commissioned Haitian presidential portraits; named Chevalier of the Ordre National Honneur et Mérite
1954–69 — annual summer trips to Haiti; forty-two paintings; the Haitian period
1960s on — the market paintings: flattened pattern, bright color, the mature style
1977 — retires from Howard
1998 — dies June 9, Washington, D.C., age 93
2020 — Joyner/Giuffrida gift brings Peasants at Kenscoff to SFMOMA