0.10 Charles criner, b. 1945

Popular opinion

I never had any formal art class. My folks always told me I was good in art, and I got a few jobs in my little hometown in art. The only art I had is doing stuff for the church, and everybody told me that I was really, really good and that I should be an artist. So it was natural for me—after a while it just got to the point where that was what I wanted to do. It was just my mother, my grandmother, my sisters and brothers, the pastors, and people telling me that I should be an artist.

I’m originally from Athens, Texas, and we like to say Tyler, Texas, but Athens is thirty-something miles from Tyler. Tyler is just the biggest town close to Athens. At the time they had a good recruitment department at Texas Southern so one of the ladies came to my little town. We didn’t have any art classes there at all. There was no art program. But she came there one summer and she introduced me to Texas Southern. Before I came to TSU, I had never been no further than 50 miles from Tyler.

I came to Texas Southern University in 1964, and really what brought me here was I wanted to be an artist. That was what I wanted to do. So I came to TSU. I had never drawn a black person in my life. The first day I came and went to the student union, I saw the drawings of Dr. John Biggers—a collection of drawings that he produced as a result of a trip to Ghana, Africa, that he had taken in 1957. And when I saw those drawings, it just completely changed me. And it’s been that way ever since. That was enough information for me to draw until now…and I’m 60. These drawings, they were just so overpowering because I was wondering why the kids would be sitting up watching TV and just having fun and those drawings were there. I met him (Dr. Biggers) three or four days later, so we developed a very, very good relationship. I mean, he was kind of like a father really to me and (Earlie) Hudnall, Harvey Johnson, Kermit Oliver and Alvia Wardlaw.

Art student days

Day-to-day classes—our classes—they wasn’t like [regular] classes, the art classes. They were kind of like overtures, kind of like an opera that we would all participate in in the evenings. We did our academic classes during the day, then at 9:00 p.m. we’d go straight to the art department. For some reason, most of the artists were janitors, so we’d take our classes during the day, then we’d have our dinner, then we’d go and work—clean the buildings out. Then at 9:00 p.m., like I said, Harvey Johnson, Kermit Oliver, all of us—along with Mr. (Carroll) Simms, we would work there until five-six o’clock in the morning. It was that way all the time.

Dr. Biggers, as I remember, had his freshman class on one side of the room, and he had his sophomore, junior and senior class on the other side of the room in painting. His office was up in the front, and he had his paintings mounted on the wall in his office. I remember he was working on Jubilee at the time, you know—that the Museum of Fine Arts has—and so what he would do, he would work up a while, and then he would come in, look at our work, talk to us, maybe model for us. Sometimes he would pull a student to sit on the pedestal, and we’d be drawing; he’d come in, get his charcoal and paper, and he would draw.