Moe Brooker

Brooker was also influenced by Morris Blackburn, who had attended the academy in the 1920s, who introduced him to the works of Dox Thrash and artist Charles Pridgen.

Moe Albert Brooker (September 24, 1940 – January 9, 2022) was an African American painter, educator and printmaker.

An abstract artist, he used vivid colors, lines, stripes, squares and circles to infuse a feeling of improvisational jazz in his works.

Brooker was an internationally known artist whose paintings are in the collections of major museums and other institutions.

Brooker was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 24, 1940, to the Rev. Mack Henry Brooker Sr., an AME minister, and Lumisher E. Brooker, a community leader and political activist.

He was named after a family friend who died in World War II.

His father was from South Carolina, moved to Philadelphia and got a theology degree from Temple University.

He also worked as a mechanic to support his family of seven children.

Brooker grew up in South Philadelphia and stuttered as a child (an impediment he overcame when he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).

He graduated from South Philadelphia High School and received a scholarship to attend the academy.

The Pennsylvania Academy had not been a welcoming place for Sloan and Raymond Saunders, two Black students who preceded Brooker in the 1950s, Brooker said.

They advised him and the new Black students on ways to survive: work hard and don't mess around, win the school's traveling scholarships and make their place in the art world.

Both of them had received traveling scholarships to Europe.

Saunders also insisted that he go to graduate school so he could teach, earn a living and paint every day.

Pridgen used Cubism in his works, which is exemplified in his 1950 painting “The Blues,” in the collection of the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

Among his classmates at the academy was Ellen Powell Tiberino, who was few years ahead of him.

While at PAFA, Brooker often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art where he encountered Julius Bloch’s “Stevedore.” It was the first positive depiction of a Black man he had ever seen.

He was influenced by it, just as he was by Rembrandt’s realistic images of Africans that Brooker later saw in his trips to the Netherlands.

He enrolled in 1959 – two years after artist Louis B. Sloan graduated – and was there until 1963, earning a certificate in painting.

Brooker was awarded the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship in 1962, just as Saunders had in 1956.

After receiving a certificate from PAFA in 1963, he was drafted into the Army and spent a year in Korea, from 1964 to 1965.

It was there where he saw vivid colors in a funeral procession that left a deep impression on him.

He spent a year at Tyler's program in Rome in 1968–1969.

Brooker was the youngest in a family of children who could all draw.

He didn't draw Lollipop trees like the other children in his elementary classes.

His trees had branches, and his people had arms, fingers and faces.

He always wanted to be an artist, although his father tried to dissuade him.

As a child, he used chalk to draw Batman, Captain Marvel and Green Hornet figures on the pavement streets.

After school, when he was about 11 or 12, he spent time at St. Martha's House, a community center, where he gravitated toward art classes.

Among his influencers were members of his family: He imitated the drawings of his older siblings, was enamored with the stylings of his jazz pianist brother Mitch Avery (who was named after his father but chose a stage name so he wouldn't embarrass him), and marveled at the patterns and colors in his grandmother's hand-sewn quilts.

Brooker's earliest works were figurative, and his subjects were taken from the church: parishioners in the pews, men nodding off to sleep, young couples and grandmothers, a woman shouting in the back, the women's hats.

He wasn't taught color in his art classes, so he decided to seek it out on his own.

He found the books of Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky and started experimenting.

Brooker enrolled at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, obtaining bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts in 1970 and 1972, respectively.

As a graduate student, he taught silkscreen printing at the Brandywine Workshop, a stint that improved his skills as a printmaker and teacher.

He would return to Brandywine years later to produce prints.

He was painting semi-abstract works while teaching at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in the mid-1970s.

He hit a dry spell, but was re-energized on a trip back to Philadelphia.

He commuted from Chapel Hill to Philadelphia where his family lived.

Driving through the city, he saw graffiti on the buildings – abstract drawings of shapes, colors, letters that seemed to pulsate with energy.