John Biggers murals still shape Houston Black cultural identity

Across Houston’s Downtown corridors and through the heart of Third Ward, Dr. John Biggers’s art watches over the city.

Biggers’ works live on in The Return, painted across the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center, in Ghana Dancers, in which two women are seen dancing in celebration of a harvest, and in The Stream Crosses the Path, where Black women are rendered as cosmic forces.

“He [Biggers] is the most influential Black artist in the South. Most of the artists that are leading the vanguard here in Houston are descendants of him, either directly or indirectly through TSU.”

Ashura M. Bayyan, art advisor and student at the University of Houston-Downtown

Since 1949, Biggers’ murals have lined the corridors of Texas Southern University, where he founded the art department. More than two decades after his death, the stories of African heritage and Black resilience he created through his art still resonate among Houstonians.

Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1924, Biggers arrived at Hampton Institute in 1941 with plans to become a plumber. What he found instead was Viktor Lowenfeld, an Austrian Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi persecution.

The encounter was transformative as Biggers later followed Lowenfeld to Pennsylvania State University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art education in 1948 and a doctorate in education in 1954.

Rita Reyes, a graduate fellow who has spent years researching Biggers’ life, described what happened next during a panel discussion organized by Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis.

“Lowenfeld’s goal was to promote art as a tool for oppressed people to connect with their cultural identity and gain self-esteem,” Res said. “He encouraged students to record in their art the disappointments and joys of life in the Southern Black community.”

By 1949, he had moved to Houston.

His impact on the TSU campus and Houston’s broader cultural landscape remains palpable.

Kamilah Davis, an intern for the University Museum and an art major at TSU, described the experience of walking through the campus daily.

“The legacy of Dr. Biggers means for me, especially as a Black woman, to be the embodiment of strength, focus, dedication, working with the history and preserving Dr. Biggers as well as the alumni,” Davis said. “It definitely taught me a lot about my major. Walking across campus and seeing the artwork, seeing the murals, seeing the sculptures…It just makes you really appreciative of where you come from and also seeing the embodiment of the ancestors, the Black men, the Black women. It’s definitely a powerful legacy that he held.”

Biggers’ career unfolded against the backdrop of American segregation. In 1950, he won a contest at the Museum of Fine Arts for his work titled The Cradle. The museum allowed Black people in only on Thursdays and did not allow Biggers to attend the reception held in his own honor.

Africa and the artist’s awakening

The defining turning point in Biggers’ artistic life came in 1957, when a UNESCO fellowship took him to Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey (now Benin) for six months. He returned with drawings and a transformed worldview that he published in Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa (1962). 

Over time, Biggers’ murals became more abstract, featuring symbols of Black culture, such as shotgun houses and churches.

Ashura M. Bayyan, an art advisor and student at the University of Houston-Downtown, described it as Biggers’ ability to compose stories through his paintings.

“He [Biggers] is the most influential Black artist in the South,” Bayyan told the Defender. “Most of the artists that are leading the vanguard here in Houston are descendants of him, either directly or indirectly through TSU.”

Murals as monuments

Biggers’ murals are widely considered as manifestos for Black identity. Completed in 1998 at the University of Houston-Downtown with help from TSU professor Harvey Johnson, his mural Salt Marsh weaves together African cosmology, Native American imagery, ecological undertones inspired by the Buffalo Bayou that the campus overlooked, and the Houston landscape, according to curator and writer Daniel Fuller.

Biggers’ Take Family Unity (1974-1978) spans sixty feet across a wall in the TSU student center, inspired by ordinary life, with prayers and wash pots. 

“This is a mural of reverence, of weight and transcendence, of home and the universe at once,” per Fuller.

Ellis, a TSU alumnus who has a replica of a Biggers mural in his office building and hosted a celebration in Biggers’ honor this year, spoke fondly of his legacy.

“He stood up when the odds were against him,” Ellis said. “We should be inspired by his willingness to stand up in the ’50s. We ought to stand up in 2026.”

Biggers’ work at the Blue Triangle Community Center, titled The Contribution of Negro Women in American Life and Education, tells a similar story of art as a life raft for institutions. The work was damaged when water from Hurricane Harvey entered the building through its leaky roof. 

Sylvia Terry, a board member of the center, explained that the building might not still be standing without it.

“Without his painting…that building wouldn’t be standing right now,” Terry said. “That painting is what made people want to contribute to it.”

When the painting was damaged, conservators from Washington, DC, came to restore it.

Today, it still draws donors and visitors, Terry said.

He died of a heart attack in Houston on January 25, 2001, at 76. 

But his murals remain etched into the daily lives of Houstonians, adorning the sides of buildings and university hallways.

“Definitely walking across campus and seeing the artwork, seeing the murals, seeing the sculptures, it just makes you really appreciative of where you come from and also seeing the embodiment of the ancestors, the Black men, the Black women,” said Ken Jackson, a senior Art major and Museum Studies minor. “He held a powerful legacy.”

“He never in his classes showed an example of what one was supposed to do, how you are supposed to draw, and how you are supposed to paint. He would always look at what you were doing, and he encouraged you to go further on home because he brought those raw colors to life…Over a period of time, we all began to follow Biggers by the example that he set within the department.”

• Earlie Hudnall Jr., artist once mentored by Biggers