Barbara Bullock

Barbara J. Bullock (Nov. 4, 1938) is an African American painter, collagist, printmaker, soft sculptor and arts instructor.

Her works capture African motifs, African and African American culture, spirits, dancing and jazz in abstract and figural forms.

She creates three-dimensional collages, portraits, altars and masks in vibrant colors, patterns and shapes.

Bullock produces artworks in series with a common theme and style.

Bullock was born in Philadelphia on Nov. 24, 1938, after her father James Bullock moved his family from North Carolina to Philadelphia in the 1930s.

They were part of the Great Migration of Black people to the North in search of better opportunities.

Her mother Janie McFarland Bullock looked for work at the local armory and her father was a truck driver.

The couple separated and Bullock's mother died when she was 12 years old.

She, her brother Jack and sister Delores moved in with her father and stepmother Gertrude, who became her second mother.

Both of Bullock's paternal grandparents, Rev. Oscar and Mattie Bullock, who visited often from North Carolina, were storytellers, and she grew up listening to their tales.

She attended Roosevelt Junior High School and graduated from Germantown High School in 1958.

She was headed to Moore Institute (now Moore College of Art and Design) to study fashion illustration.

For three years, she took Saturday-morning painting and drawing classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia.

In the 1960s, she became acquainted with other African American artists in Philadelphia.

Several had attended or were attending the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA): Charles Pridgen, Cranston Walker, Richard Watson.

Pridgen, Walter Edmonds and sculptor John Simpson were among those who had their own studios.

She hung out with Joe Bailey, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles and Ellen Powell Tiberino to talk about their craft, the lack of exhibition opportunities and other issues.

The seasoned artists offered advice and critiques of her work.

Bullock, Tiberino, Reba Dickerson Hill, and Fern Stanford were among the few working Black female artists at the time.

Noting that many male artists were supported by their wives and married females were not readily accepted, Bullock decided not to get married.

“I married my art,” she stated in the catalog for the Swarthmore College exhibit “Ubiquitous Presence” in 2022.

In 1963, she began taking night classes at Hussian School of Art, which taught commercial art classes.

She remained at Hussian until 1966.

Bullock initially painted portraits of famous Americans, friends, and family members.

Most of her early works were watercolors. She sought to show the humanity of Black people, she told an interviewer in 1966, but finally decided to paint what she felt.

In 1971, Bullock was named art director of the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, now the Village of Arts and Humanities, founded by dancer and choreographer Arthur Hall, where she stayed until 1975.

She taught art techniques to children and young adults.

Hall incorporated Yoruba culture, philosophy and spirit entities into the core of the center, which attracted artists, dancers and musicians from all over the world.

Funded by the Model Cities Program, the center offered arts, African-inspired dance and music.

(She would later create an abstract painting titled “Stories My Grandmother Told Me” in 2012.)

I realized early on that art was going to be that language,” she told interviewers for a 2015 exhibit of Black artists at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia.

Bullock also took dancing lessons.

She was asked to leave a dance class when she showed up one day with a stray dog and refused to remove it.

She quit the class but never gave up on the concept.

She participated in the School Art League, an arts program in the public schools.

She attended Saturday-morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art School (now the University of the Arts) and participated in programs at community centers.

She became interested in Africa after learning about it in National Geographic magazine and wanted to understand her connection to it.

Bullock always felt a need to make things and was always in her parents’ basement doing that, she told artist Najee Dorsey in a 2017 interview.

“I’ve always been creative.

When I was growing up, I needed a language.