Newark Evening News article
1933
The Newark (New Jersey) Evening News
highlighted Rose’s groundbreaking oil
portraits of African Americans, as well as
her desire to paint people who were
incarcerated.
Hope guest book signatures, “Colored
Citizens of Talbot”
Private collection
Memorial Day, May 30, 1930
Star Democrat, Easton, Maryland
May 23, 1925
Invitation for the Colored Citizens of Talbot
County to celebrate Memorial Day in the
Gardens at Hope.
Hope was the site of a Memorial Day party honoring
the hard work of the African American friends and
neighbors of the artist’s family. This list of guests
is included in the family’s Hope album, which also
contains signatures of presidents and international
luminaries.
Brenda Rose Collection
Nathan Kernan Collection
Baltimore Sun, Photograph of the Salisbury riots
November 1933
National Guard soldiers point guns at a white mob.
Baltimore Sun Media Group
Baltimore Sun, Photograph of the Salisbury riots
November 1933
H. L. Mencken, “Revels in Transchoptankia,”
Baltimore Sun, October 23, 1933
Appalled by a rash of unpunished lynchings on Maryland’s
Eastern Shore, H. L. Mencken published a series of articles
in the Baltimore Sun that exposed these heinous crimes.
In “Revels in Transchoptankia,” Mencken labeled Eastern
Shore residents as “Trans-Choptankians,” who seemed like
characters in a William Faulkner story.
H. L. Mencken Room, Pratt Library, and Baltimore Sun Media Group
Rose’s first solo exhibition in Baltimore opened during Thanksgiving 1933 and
coincided with the violent aftermath of the lynching of Marylander George
Armwood. Over 2,000 members of the National Guard were deployed to Salisbury
to control rioting white mobs. Undeterred by the threat of racial violence from her
white neighbors on the Shore, Rose bravely exhibited her African American
portraits in central Baltimore.
Baltimore Sun Media Group
J. R. Barnes, The Spirit of the Eastern Shore
The Garden Magazine
1933
November 1909
In addition to receiving threats of physical violence,
Mencken was the focus of counter accusations in J. R.
Barnes’s racist pamphlet The Spirit of the Eastern Shore.
The author berated Mencken for interfering in his
vigilante system, labeling him “The Bilious Baltimorean.”
Barnes wrote about the virtues of his home and how he
received black people—albeit from the back door only.
Rose’s mother worked as a correspondent for leading garden periodicals
and featured not herself but her gardener, Isaac Copper, in articles. She
commended Copper and other African American gardeners for their
profound knowledge, and praised their mysterious wisdom: “I was suddenly
transplanted among a people who had faith in things they could not see,
who sowed their seed in accord with the moon, who raised their crops by the
measure of the stars.”
H. L. Mencken Room, Pratt Library
Private collection
The Starr family with guests at the Talbot Country Club
September 1914
This photograph of the Starr family at the local white country club includes an unidentified man of color, who sits
comfortably on a rocking chair as their guest.
Nathan Kernan Collection
Hope guest book, including the signature of Dubose
Heyward
Easter 1935
(reproduction)
Writer DuBose Heyward spent Easter 1935 at Hope, the very year he and
Ira Gershwin composed the lyrics for Porgy and Bess. Alexander Smallens,
the opera’s conductor, visited Rose’s family twice in the early 1930s.
These trips coincided with the period when Smallens was directing the
Philadelphia Orchestra and working with Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in
Three Acts, an avant-garde opera featuring an all-black cast.
Nathan Kernan Collection
George Moaney and Richard
Rose in a log canoe
1933
Rose’s children befriended the African
American children of Copperville, as
seen in this photo of her son Richard
with his best friend, George Moaney,
on a luxury racing boat.
Brenda Rose Collection
Fanny Copper,
Fresco, 1941
Depicted in a fresco, Fanny Copper is a powerful, modern representation of a selfassured young African American woman.
Sarah and Lewis Dabney Collection
This is an excerpt from a list of the names and ages of all the children
who attended Rose’s Sunday school at the Copperville church in 1940.
Private collection
An excerpt from Rose’s notes for
her black-and-white lithograph
Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray
ca. 1943
“If all people were really praying for the
fine things that this man expects of prayer,
there would be no forces of evil descending
and there would be no wars anymore.”
Private collection
From Ruth Starr Rose’s notes for
Standing in the Need of Prayer
ca. 1944
Excerpt from Rose’s notes for
Pharoah’s Army Got Drownded
ca. 1941
“Carried away by the magnificent melody
and rhythm of these great songs, do the
white people remember the stark truth
and the simplicity of their words? For who
among us is not standing in the need of
prayer?”
This image was the artist’s attempt to
record the story as the congregation
described it to her: “Being a basic theme
of the release of an oppressed people
from bondage, these songs of liberation
have meaning not only for other days, but
look to more freedom now for the colored
citizens of a democracy.”
Private collection
Private collection
Pharaoh’s Army Got
Drownded
Fresco, 1941
Honoring a minister’s son who
had given his life in World War II,
this fresco was, according to the
Christian Science Monitor, the first
work of art made by a white person
for a black church (originally
intended for the church in
Copperville, Maryland, it was
moved to the St. Matthew United
Methodist Church in Longwoods,
Maryland, after the Copperville
church was deconsecrated).
The St. Matthew United Methodist Church,
Longwoods, Maryland
Howard University Gallery of Art, A Retrospective Exhibition
of Paintings and Prints by Ruth Starr Rose
April 4–May 4, 1956
In 1956 Professor James A. Porter invited Rose to give a solo exhibition at
Howard University, where her work on African American spirituals was so
compelling that everyone assumed she was a black woman. Prior to the opening,
a dedication ceremony was held on April 4, 1956, where Rose made the following
remarks: “These spirituals I have given to the students of Howard and to the
faculty, with the knowledge that these great uplifting truths, which guide us, will
be a light and inspiration to you all, always to me and to you, together.”
Peace, color serigraph
From a simple holiday card
featuring a black and a white angel
to her portraits, frescoes, and
lithographs, Rose found many ways
to support the cause of integration
and peace between the races.
Private collection
Invitation to A Sacred Outing, at the
home of Mrs. Ruth Starr Rose
June 22, 1941
Just a few weeks after Rose presented Paul
Robeson with her lithographs at his Newark
concert, she hosted an evening of African
American spirituals at her farm with over fifty
singers. At the bottom of the event’s invitation, she
made a special request that “both races” attend.
Brenda Rose Collection
Private collection
New York Times Book Review
Alain Locke, The Negro in Art
November, 1940
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is
used to illustrate a book review.
Locke included two of Rose’s lithographs, Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot and Gospel Train, in his seminal treatise
on African Americans in art.
Private collection
Private collection
March 9, 1952
Ruth Starr Rose’s unpublished mock-up for her book on
African American spirituals (second version)
ca. 1951
Private collection
Rose firmly believed that her studies of African American spirituals
served as valuable documentation of an underrepresented American
art form. She envisioned a hybrid book featuring lithographs inspired
by spirituals, with a design of words and musical notes arranged on
each page. The expense of printing her artwork was always a stumbling
block, and the project was ultimately abandoned by two publishers.
Celebrated American Negro Spirituals
Gift to Ruth Star Rose from Carl Zigrosser.
Private collection
Montclair Times, “Paul Robeson
Receives Lithographs,”
June 6, 1941
Paul Robeson was one of Rose’s personal
heroes. This photograph was taken before
the concert when she presented Robeson
with two of her lithographs, Little David
Play Upon Your Harp and Ezekiel Saw the
Wheel.
Untitled,
1941
Private collection
Private collection
From her front row seat at Robeson’s Newark concert on
June 2, 1941, Rose sketched Robeson in profile, with a large
American flag proudly displayed as a backdrop.
A card announcing the
publication of Mary Cabot
Wheelwright’s Myths and Prayers
of the Great Star Chant and Myths
of the Coyote Chant
1956
Private collection
Excerpt from a letter from LaVerne Madigan,
the director of the Association on American
Indian Affairs, to Rose, thanking Rose for her
donation of a color print of Seminole Woman
September 14, 1960
“Built right into the bones of those Florida Indians is
stateliness. Their dignified esteem for themselves as human
beings and Seminoles has so far remained impervious to the
historical forces that made Indians of so many other tribes
doubt their own worth. Their utter lack of fear and illusion
shows in their calm, direct glance. But why do I go on? What
I am trying to say in words you have already said in line and
color.”
Private collection
Loïs Mailou Jones, inscription in
Ruth Starr Rose’s guest book
January 4, 1953
Study of a veve to Erzulie Freda Dahome
In a second study of a vodoun ceremony, a young man
draws a veve of a heart, paying homage to Erzulie Freda
Dahome, the Haitian loa of love.
This inscription in French highlights a
visit during the New Year holiday from
Rose’s good friend, the noted artist Loïs
Mailou Jones and her husband, Louis
Vergnaud Pierre-Noël, a famous Haitian
artist.
Private collection
Nathan Kernan Collection
April/May 1956
Upper: Fragment from Rose’s
Mexican sketch journal, Black
Christ of Mexico
ca. 1948
Lower left: Artist’s notes
ca. 1948.
Lower right: Excerpt from a letter
from Ruth Starr Rose to Professor
Raymond Piper of Syracuse
University
1953
Black Christ of Mexico was the
culminating work Rose made
after spending two years in the
village of Ajijic, Mexico, where
she observed many religious
ceremonies of the Tarascan
Indians, or Purhepechas, of west
central Mexico.
Private collection
Art Afrique Noir, exhibition
catalogue,
Musée Reattu, Arles, France
1954
Le Nouvelliste, Haiti
April 23, 1956
“I am now on my artistic jaunt with Mary
Cabot Wheelwright, driving thru France in
a small Fiat…. While in Arles we saw the
very best exhibition of African Sculpture
that I have ever seen.” Ruth Starr Rose,
in a letter to her friend, the Harlem
Renaissance artist Prentiss Taylor.
Haiti’s oldest newspaper chronicled the
activities of Ruth Starr Rose, including
her extended trip to Europe with Mary
Cabot Wheelwright in search of symbolic
connections between early African
and Native American art, her exhibit at
Howard University, and her interview with
Voice of America.
Private collection
Private collection