WILLIAM S. CARTER

William Sylvester Carter (1909 – 1996) Barred from attending the racially segregated art schools in his native Missouri, William Sylvester Carter arrived in Chicago in 1930 with a scholarship to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He later enrolled in the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1935. Carter eventually earned both a BA and a BFA there in the 1950s. He also studied art at the South Side Settlement House (Ada S. McKinley Community Services). The federal Depression relief programs known as the WPA were a boon to Carter’s career. He was hired for the Easel Division of the WPA’s Illinois Art Project, and exhibited at the WPA Gallery on Michigan Avenue.

Carter showed his work at the commercial Benjamin Gallery, the Hull-House settlement house, and the art show of the 1940 American Negro Exposition at the Chicago Coliseum.
Carter was part of a vibrant creative cohort present at the birth of the South Side Community Art Center in 1940; the only community art center founded in Illinois as part of a dedicated WPA program to nurture art in underserved communities, it survives today. Carter would continue to teach at the Center for the rest of his life.

He was included in Alain Locke’s book The Negro in Art, a survey of African American artists, and the following year he was represented in an important exhibition of African American art held at the Downtown Gallery in New York.

Using watercolor, tempera paint, oils, and ink, Carter explored a variety of styles and subjects that ranged from landscapes, figural images, and abstract compositions to the floral still-life arrangements and images of ballerinas that became his signature themes. Prolifically and perennially creative, Carter taught at the South Side Community Art Center.

From M. Christine Schwartz Collection website
Wendy Greenhouse, PhD