Rosenwald School Spotlight: The Bigelow Rosenwald School, Arkansas

Abandoned Arkansas, a photography website, has published a gallery of images of a neglected Arkansas Rosenwald school. Members of the community are attempting to restore the school, which also served as a community center after the end of its life as a school building in 1964. It’s fascinating to see these images of the deteriorating building – hopefully they will inspire people to bring the school back to its former glory.

The Bigelow Rosenwald School, Perry County, Arkansas, 2012
Photo credit: Jimmy Emerson, flickr

Click here for a historical image of the school from Fisk University’s Rosenwald School database.

By Michael Rose

Swann Galleries to auction work by Rosenwald fellows

On February 14th, Swann Galleries in New York City is holding another auction of African American Fine Art – this blog reported on a similar auction at Swann Galleries last October 18th. Beautiful artworks by many Rosenwald fellows are up for auction, including Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, William Edouard Scott, Charles White and Hale Woodruff. Prints, lithographs and sculptures by a Rosenwald fellow who died last year, Elizabeth Catlett, are prominently featured, including an excellent print of her famous Sharecropper.

Augusta Savage, who received three consecutive Rosenwald fellowships, created a monumental sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” While the original sculpture was destroyed, lot 24 of this auction is a smaller version of the sculpture that was offered at the World’s Fair, a haunting memento of the great lost work.

By Michael Rose