I came across the artist James M. Washington Jr. by chance.
I was searching for artwork by Philadelphia ceramicist Frances Serber among 1970s photographs of public art compiled by the Fairmount Park Art Association. That’s when I saw the first photo of a stone carving by Washington. It was a bust of African American astronomer and scientist Benjamin Banneker. Curious, I flipped over the photo to see if there was any more information on the back, and there was. The bust was made by Washington and had been located in the Progress Plaza Shopping Center.
I was very familiar with the shopping center and the man who was instrumental in its founding, the Rev. Leon Sullivan, pastor of Zion Baptist Church, civil rights activist and apartheid slayer. But I never knew that the center had once been the site of granite busts of African American heroes.
After seeing the photos at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I wondered where the busts were. They certainly were no longer on public display at the shopping center because I had never seen them. The thought of finding their whereabouts remained in the back of my mind as a mystery to be explored at a later time.
That later time came recently when Progress Plaza – now named Sullivan Progress Plaza – was feted in a ceremony unveiling a state historical marker designating its significance:
“First shopping center in the US built, owned and operated by African Americans, it was established in 1968 by Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, Zion Baptist Church members and the local black community. …”
When I began my preliminary research before the ceremony, I learned that folks associated with the James W. Jr. and Janie Washington Foundation in Seattle had also come looking a few years ago. They were trying to locate as many of Washington’s works as possible, and the Philadelphia pieces appear to be among the most prominent.
When I made the same inquiry, I was directed to Anita Chappell, who has been with the Progress Investment Associates – the for-profit company that built the center – since 1962. She was fresh out of college when her father, a deacon at Zion, told her to volunteer with this new enterprise. For the next 53 years, she served as its board secretary while working as a teacher and at other jobs.
All six sculptures – Banneker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner – are in storage, Chappell said.
All had been set on stone pedestals inside the “Rotunda of Achievement,” an open-air structure between shops and stores and a new A&P grocery store back when the shopping plaza was opened. The rotunda wall was low enough that you could see the busts from outside it, Chappell said, and several walkways led into it. The sculptures were eventually removed and placed in storage not because of damage from the weather but from people. The sculptures are 300 pounds each, and Chappell said it took two to three men to move each of them.
“They were outside and they were abused,” she says. “The kids painted the noses white and they carved a little shaving off of the faces. That’s why they had to be taken in. And the children misbehaved in the rotunda. Kids did not understand what it was about.”
The rotunda itself is no longer standing. A blog for the Washington center noted that that the sculptures were vandalized within a month after they were first installed, and again in the 1980s. “That’s the way Philadelphia was in the 60s,” Williams was quoted as saying later.
Chappell said she did not recall the exact circumstances surrounding the commissioning of the sculptures, which appear to have been created in 1969 (one site stated that they were installed circa 1971).
“Rev. Sullivan did that. He worked it out,” she said. “I don’t know how he hooked up with him (Washington) but I know when they were ready to do the plaza they wanted some artwork because it was a city requirement, and most any building you see around the city of Philadelphia has a piece of art connected with it in some way.
“When he learned that, he said, ‘OK, let’s make it relate to what it is we’re about.’ So he had the ‘Rotunda of Achievement’ – that’s what he called it – and he built it into (the plan).”
In the 1999 book “Walking on Water,” Washington described how he made them:
“When I did my first sculpture, a bust for Philadelphia, six historical figures, I hadn’t done any busts or anything. I got a book on art by some teacher back east and I looked at the book and this guy was talking and telling the pupil, this here, and that, and it was illustrated plus the information. The first thing he said, ‘No sculptor is going directly to the stone now.’ He said they first go to plaster of Paris and then they make the plaster cast. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that. I went inside. Created a spiritual environment – I did go to a photograph of King for a checkup on the anatomy. The proportion. And that was it.”
Of the King bust, Williams was quoted as saying in another interview: “By loving the stone and listening to it, I was able to strike it in such a way to bring light to the eyes and even get white in the collar.”
Washington was a self-taught artist who was born around 1909 in Mississippi. (He was born eight years before another prospective artist who decades later would overshadow him in Seattle: Jacob Lawrence.) Washington began drawing as a child of 12, challenging his friends to draw lines on the sidewalk and he’d make an image from their scribblings. He apprenticed in a shoe repair shop as a youngster, and worked in that trade for a while as an adult.
He participated in the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1938 as an art instructor in Vicksburg, MS. Through the WPA, he organized an exhibition of black artists who were excluded from white exhibitions.
Washington moved to Bremerton, WA, in 1944 with his wife Janie, a nurse, to work as a journeyman electrician at the naval shipyard. It was here that he began exhibiting some paintings he had done while living in Arkansas. A few years later, some of his works were accepted in a Seattle Art Museum exhibition. He also curated art shows at his church, Mt. Zion Baptist.
He was an admirer of Mexican artist and muralist Diego Rivera and traveled there to meet him in 1951. While there, he also met artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and spent some time surveying the area and painting. At one point, he picked up a stone that he believed he was willed to do by God. Years later, that stone would be the catalyst for his becoming a sculptor, with granite as his material of choice.
Art was a spiritual endeavor for Washington. “To me, art is a holy land,” he once said.
Washington also produced other public works, at Seattle elementary schools and his church. Here are others of his works, and a video interview with him and about him. He created a bust of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya after its independence in 1963.
Washington’s studio and home in Seattle are a historical landmark, a designation that was bestowed before his death in 2000. It is a museum that offers art classes for children and residences for professional artists.
Chappell would like to see the six sculptures in Philadelphia restored and put on public display inside the Sullivan building in Progress Plaza. The repair job, she says the board had learned earlier, was too costly an undertaking.
