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Margaret Burroughs "Mother and Child" A CLOSE LOOK

Margaret Burroughs (American, 1915 - 2010) Mother and Child, 1996. Commercial reproduction on paper, based on a linoleum cut, 23 in x 17 1/2 in., Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Gift of Margaret Burroughs, 1996.46.1

Dr. Margaret Burroughs was born in St. Rose, Louisiana in 1915. At the age of five, she and her family moved to Chicago. From childhood to adulthood, Dr. Burroughs was in step with some of the most prolific artists and cultural initiatives and institutions in the city.

She helped found the South Side Community Art Center in 1940 and the DuSable Museum in 1961. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and in 1987, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the school. Although she was also a painter, many of Burroughs’s works are linoleum cuts.

Artist and writer Margaret Burroughs, left, stands with Howard Seals, during an exhibition at the South Side Community Art Center, c. 1966. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images

The title of the work is handwritten in the bottom left corner. Burroughs’ signature and the date are in the bottom right corner.

In this work, a mother wraps her arms around her child and looks down at her. The child sits on her mother’s lap and looks out at the viewer, placing one hand on her mother’s shoulder.

Both mother and child have their hair pulled on top of their heads and Burroughs has marked curved lines throughout their hair to suggest a curly texture.

The small girl wears a pleated dress with flowers all over, her stockings peek just above the border of the image.

Both mother and child have white dots--like a constellation of stars--speckled across their faces, arms, and legs.

The intricate lines and detailed black and white patterns in this image were originally created through a linocut [linoleum cut] printmaking technique. A design is cut into a linoleum surface. This is then covered with ink and impressed onto paper. Once printed, the artwork becomes the mirror image of the raised areas on the linoleum surface.

“In 1952, when I had an opportunity to take a sabbatical leave and go to Mexico, where I studied, I was a guest member of the Taller de Grafica Popular–the popular artists–Graphic Popular Artists–graphic workshop that–I began to work with Elizabeth Catlett and some of those artists and discovered the printing making media, which, in doing lino-cut [linoleum cut] prints, you could do it on the kitchen table, you know, you didn't have to have a big press or anything like that, something you could do on the kitchen table, so I started working on those things, which I continued working on.”

– Margaret Burroughs (The HistoryMakers A2000.012), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, June 12, 2000, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.

Margaret Burroughs (American, 1915 - 2010), Mexican Girl (2001) Commercial reproduction on paper, based on a linoleum cut, 23 1/16 in x 17 1/2 in Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Margaret Burroughs, 2001.44.4.

Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915 - 2012) Gossip, 2005 Color photolithograph and inkjet print on paper 15 1/2 in x 18 in Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of the Print Club of New York, 2012.4.1

Margaret Burroughs was known for being very generous with her artwork. She would frequently make copies of her artworks and bring them with her to sign and give away at speaking engagements, social events, and teaching commitments. Her dated signature becomes a marker of community, connection, and dialogue. The date a work is signed is often not the date it was created and originally printed, but rather when she gave the work to an individual or a museum.

Rather than focusing on art market value or exclusivity, Margaret Burroughs cared much more about making meaningful connections with people through her artwork. She was invested in her work not only being collected by museums and collectors, but also in it circulating widely within her community.

Burroughs at The Block

Of the 11 prints by Margaret Burroughs that the Block has in its collection, 6 are signed and dated to 1996 and 5 are dated to 2001. All were given to the museum by the artist. The Block acquired the works during two visits that Burroughs made to campus each of those years.

In October 2001, she participated in an event at the museum as part of a series titled “The Darker Muse: Black Chicago and Creative Suggestion”, where she was in conversation with Haki Madhubuti. Burroughs lectured on campus and before her talk she gave the Block the following works: Faces of My People; Three Faces; Mexican Girl; and Madonna and Child.

The Block Museum acquired Mother and Child as a gift from Burroughs in 1996. Burroughs participated in an event at the museum titled "Prints, Publics and Pulp" as a part of the exhibition Second Sight: Printmaking in Chicago 1915-1995 that was on view that fall.

Although The Block’s copy of Mother and Child is dated 1996 the original image was created and printed much earlier, in the early 1960s.

What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?

Dr. Burroughs chose Mother and Child as the powerful front cover artwork for her first published collection of poetry from 1968, What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?

The name for the poetry collection comes from the poem Margaret Burroughs wrote in 1963, titled “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black: Reflections of an African-American Mother.”

The revolutionary politics of this collection reflect intersections between the Black is Beautiful, Black Power, and Black Arts movements during the 1960s. In the book’s dedication, Margaret Burroughs presents her work as an offering to help “in the struggle for dignity, civil rights and equality for my people and for all minority peoples.”

Over the course of fifteen poems Margaret Burroughs’s writing becomes a rallying cry for Black pride and diasporic solidarity between African and African American people. This is demonstrated across poems like “The Beauty of Black”; “Beautiful, Black and Beloved”; “Poem on Africa”; “Message to Soul Sisters”; “Homage to Black Madonnas”; and “The Drum Major of the Freedom Parade”.

The introduction for the collection was written by Don L. Lee. Lee, who later became Haki R. Madhubuti, was a central leader of the Black Arts Movement and one of the founders of Third World Press, the largest independent black-owned press in the United States. In his introduction to What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?, Lee celebrates Burroughs for speaking directly to Black women and young people through her poetry.

“The prose and poetry of this book, beautiful black words and images, is contagious and if read seriously will infect the reader with a black disease: black pride…. Burroughs paints beautiful black pictures with the same alphabet that is so often used against black people. - Haki R. Madhubuti
Margaret Burroughs, "What Shall I Tell My Children Who are Black" from What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?. Copyright © 1968, 1992 by Margaret Burroughs. Reprinted by permission of the Margaret Burroughs Estate.

The poem centers an African-American mother’s voice coming to terms with how anti-Blackness prevents her child from finding joy and pride in his Black skin and heritage. The mother realizes that she may be the only person in her child’s life who affirms that being Black is a source of pride and power.

Listen to Dr. Burroughs read her poem “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?”

When we read the poem and the image together we can see powerful connections between the two. It is possible they were directly inspired by one another.

“What shall I tell my children who are black
Of what it means to be a captive in this dark skin
What shall I tell my dear one, fruit of my womb
Of how beautiful they are when everywhere they turn They are faced with abhorrence of everything that is black.”
If we zoom in on the face of the mother in "Mother and Child," we notice that she looks down contemplatively at her child as if she is asking these questions that Burroughs’s poses in the poem.
We see the mother fully embracing her daughter in "Mother and Child," perhaps reflecting the mother figure in the poem’s desire to protect her child from forces of anti-blackness and white supremacy that stand in the way of her child’s self-pride, success, and survival.

In the third section of the poem, the mother figure asks:

“What can I say therefore, when my child
Comes home in tears because a playmate
Has called him black, big lipped, flatnosed and nappy headed?”

.

Here in the poem, Burroughs highlights features that have been stereotypically associated with Black people. However, in "Mother and Child," instead of representing shame around these features, Burroughs’ visualizes them with care. Each small curved line in the figures’ hair and Burroughs’ attention to the facial features of each subject is reflective of the pride that the mother teaches the child to have in their heritage.

The mother figure asserts herself as someone dedicated to learning all that she can about her own heritage so that she can inspire her child to also find pride in the beauty of Black people.

“I have drunk deeply of late from the fountain
Of my black culture, sat at the knee and learned
From Mother Africa, discovered the truth of my heritage
The truth, so often obscured and omitted.
And I find I have much to say to my black children.
I will lift up their heads in proud blackness
With the story of their fathers and their fathers Fathers.

Although the mother gazes at the child, the child stares boldly out at the viewer. She doesn’t appear to be afraid or ashamed, but rather reflects the pride that her mother has instilled in her.

Mother and Child is about the joys and hardships of parenting a Black child in the United States.

Themes such as these around racial healing, Black youth and community, are consistent across Burroughs’s works including prints in The Block’s collection, such as Two Worlds and Faces of My People.

Burroughs was not concerned with the art market or the monetary value of her artwork. Instead much of her art and community work focused on ensuring that Black history was preserved. Her work also reflects common subjects in art history. Mother and Child echoes art history’s preoccupation with Madonna and child figures that were popularized in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. From then onward, many works titled Madonna and Child feature a woman gazing upon her child, who is typically figured below her (sitting on her lap, leaning across her lap, or being held). Burroughs, familiar with this common theme, even created a work titled Madonna and Child, which is in The Block’s collection.

“I've tried everything, abstracts and representational things, but I've always been mainly interested in making statements that are meaningful to people. I think I could have gone along the abstract pathway and made a whole lot of money, but–that was not my main interest–but I was more interested in doing things that people could understand.”
Dr. Margaret Burroughs during an arts conference at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, 1971. Active in the Chicago arts community, Dr. Burroughs founded the South Side Community Art Center in 1941, and later co-founded the DuSable Museum of African American History. (Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images)

Developed by Rikki Byrd and Bethany Hill, 2020‒21 Block Museum Graduate Fellows. Thanks to Block Museum staff, including Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Lindsay Bosch, Corinne Granof, and Melanie Garcia Sympson; to Faheem Majeed for consulting and sharing his memories of Burroughs, which greatly informed this project; and to Northwestern University Libraries.