Wadsworth Jarrell

Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929, Albany, GA) is a painter, photographer, and founding member of AFRICOBRA, the groundbreaking Chicago-based collective of Black artists who developed a distinct visual aesthetic to empower Black communities. Along with his wife, Jae Jarrell, and other founding members, Jarrell helped establish one of the most influential visual languages in 20th-century American art. Their signature AFRICOBRA style characterized by vibrant “Cool-Ade” colors, bold text, and affirming imagery of Black life, emerged from the cultural energy of Chicago’s South Side and has since influenced generations of artists, including Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley.

Jarrell’s own pattern-intensive portraits, often incorporating Black Power slogans, reflect his deep commitment to political activism and Transnational Black Aesthetics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Jarrell documented Chicago’s thriving musical and cultural scene and contributed to the landmark Wall of Respect mural as a member of the Organization of Black American Culture. His work continues to explore past and present dimensions of Blackness, celebrating the struggles, strengths, and beauty of African American life while pushing the boundaries of socially engaged abstraction.

Jarrell’s work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. He was featured in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, organized by Tate Modern and traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, the de Young Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additional notable exhibitions include AfriCOBRA: Nation Time, an official collateral event of the 58th Venice Biennale; AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side 1960–1980 at the Smart Museum of Art; Heritage: Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now at MCA Chicago, ICA Philadelphia, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2020, Jarrell published AFRICOBRA: Experimental Art Towards a School of Thought, a definitive account of the collective’s founding, and was interviewed alongside Jae Jarrell by Hans Ulrich Obrist for his Interview Project. Recently, he was featured in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Adrienne Edwards. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, received his MFA from Howard University, and later taught painting at Howard University and the University of Georgia. In 2026, the Albany Museum of Art in Georgia will present a new retrospective of the work of Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, curated by Sidney Pettice, and Jenkins Johnson Gallery will host a new solo show of Wadsworth Jarrell in their Tribeca gallery space. Jarrell will also be included in a forthcoming MoMA exhibition about the history of FESTAC’77, curated by Smooth Nzewi.