African-American artist Eldzier Cortor studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute of Design, Chicago. In 1944, Cortor painted the people of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, and in 1949, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, he travelled to the West Indies to paint in Jamaica and Cuba. He went on to settle in Haiti for two years, where he taught classes at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. Since the 1940s West African culture and its survival in diaspora have consistently informed Cortor’s practice. A major retrospective of his work was organised by the Indiana University Art Museum in 2006.
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