User:Margaretckd/Haywood “Bill” Rivers: he/him, American, 1922-2001/Bibliography

Haywood "Bill" Rivers (1922-2002) was an African American contemporary artist.

Early Life and Education
Rivers was born in Morwen, North Carolina on May 8, 1922 and moved to Baltimore at age sixteen. While living in Baltimore, he worked in a barber and as a street painter. He applied to art school at the Maryland Institute College of Art and while he was accepted and given a scholarship, when he arrived at the school, he was told that he would not be able to attend. The NAACP defended Rivers’s right to attend the college and while their attempt ultimately failed, Maryland’s government offered to fund his education at a school in another state. A year after accepting the scholarship from the state of Maryland, Rivers moved to Manhattan and began attending the Art Students League of New York in 1946.

Time spent in Paris and the Huit Gallery
After studying at the school for three years, Rivers was a recipient of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a foundation that provided African American "artists, writers, researchers and intellectuals" with fellowship grants throughout the years of 1928 to 1948. Rivers used the $2,000 that he was given from the fellowship to move to Paris. It was during his years spent in France that allowed for him to develop his "fully abstract voice." While living in Paris, he continued his education in art at the the École du Louvre and from there, Rivers became director of the Huit Gallery.

Huit Gallery
The Huit Gallery was founded by American artists living in Paris in 1950. The contributors paid a fee of 100 francs and in turn they were provided with “a place that can accommodate young artists who [were] struggling to find an exhibition space in Paris” as well as to introduce the work of the new-coming artists to the general public. The gallery was run by the artists and decisions were made and voted upon in meetings. Exhibitions and their themes were changed every six months and were chosen, organized and promoted by a committee of a few artists. Additionally, new members were voted upon by the contributors. The gallery was very successful and had 60 members by the end of the first year. The exhibition that the gallery opened with offered a “snapshot” of young Americans artists who lived in Paris in the 1940s and the environment. Overall, the gallery as a whole was "reminiscent of the happy bohemian life where nothing really matters but creativity and happiness." Rivers managed the gallery for five years along with fellow American artists, Al Held and Jules Olitski. After sixty exhibitions, the gallery closed due to financial reasons.

1946 - 1949
Within his three years at the Art Students League, Rivers already had work displayed in multiple galleries including the Knoedler Gallery, Carnegie International, and had sold pieces to the Baltimore Museum of Art where he had also had a solo exhibition.

The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800 to 1850 (1967)

In 1967, a Rivers painting was featured in The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800 to 1950, an exhibiting by the Harlem Cultural Council and the New York Urban League.

The Search For Freedom: African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975 (1991)
In 1991, Rivers had work displayed in New York's Kenkeleba Gallery. The exhibition featured works from 35 African American artists and " sought to demonstrate the extent to which ‘African American’ artists were at the forefront of experiments and commitment to abstraction in the visual arts, in the mid 20th century." Slow Art: Painting in New York Now (1992)

It took Rivers an incredibly long time to finish pieces, spanning from weeks to months even. One of his works from 20 years before the exhibition was included in a show centering around art that had taken a long time to finish and The New York Times referred to Rivers' work as having "quiltlike precision" as well as being "one of the standouts."

No Greater Love: Abstraction (2002)
In 2002 - the year after Rivers' death - one of his paintings from the early 1970s was featured in the No Greater Love: Abstraction exhibition at the Jack Tilton (formerly Anna Kustera) Gallery in SoHo. The work that was displayed was titled Study for a Painting and he was once again mentioned in The New York Times in their write up of the gallery, saying "Like Mr. Haywood's painting, the show itself is a study for something, for an important revision of 20th-century American art history still to be written. What on earth are the institutions that have the resources to do this waiting for?"

Awards
Throughout his career, Rivers won several awards for his work. Some of these included the Gretchen H. Hutzler Award, the Baltimore Museum Annual Prize, a 1948 Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, and the 1952 John Hay Whitney Fellowship.

Work on Display
Works by Rivers can still be seen on display in the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou.

Artistic Style
Rivers was "inspired and captivated by abstract expressionism, a movement in which he felt he could participate, and that has national and international impact." His works often featured "unique color sensibility and characteristic geometry." There are also many pieces of inspiration taken from Rivers' childhood in North Carolina, such as quilting patterns. In a 1998 interview, Rivers stated that "Everything I've ever done comes from the quilts."

Personal Life
While residing in Paris, Rivers met Betty Robirda. The two were married in 1951 and had to go to England in order to have their wedding due to the fact that Betty was white and interracial marriage was illegal in France at the time. In 1953, Haywood and Betty moved to Brooklyn, New York and had two children, Cezanne and Maya. Betty was pregnant with their third child, Paul Brian, when the two divorced. Rivers stayed in New York and continued his career. His work was featured in more galleries and in 1971, he became an art professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Rivers slowly stopped creating pieces of art and by the 1990s, he no longer painted at all. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in 1997 and went into a nursing home. While residing there, he slowly began painting and drawing for the first time in 15 years. Rivers passed away on December 27 of 2001 at the age of 79.

Rivers in Other Media
Although Rivers is not a directly present character within Dylan Landis’ essay, 16 Minetta Lane, he is a very important part of the work. The essay was published as a chapter of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, an essay collection published in 2020. Landis’s piece focuses on her mother, Erica Landis and often discusses her mother’s relationship with Rivers. They met while Rivers was studying at the Art Students League in New York where Erica was working as a model for paintings. While it is apparent that they were good friends, the exact nature of their relationship is not completely clear which is one of the essay’s main points. One painting by Rivers is particularly important to the narrative. Erica mentions that she used to own one of Haywood’s paintings and that after losing touch with Rivers, she attempted to sell a painting that Rivers had given her to Harry Abrams, a collector of African American art. Erica claimed was not offered enough money for the painting and did not go through with the sale but did not have the painting anymore because it was damaged in a move. Later, however, Dylan Landis’s husband found that  the painting had been auctioned with the estate of Mrs. Harry N. Abrams and was sold for $5,625. The painting is not named directly within the essay but is described as “an early figurative work of a country church with a detailed choir in the loft,” which matches the description of an untitled and undated painting by Rivers.