Wadsworth Jarrell

Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929, Albany, GA) is an artist and founding member of AfriCOBRA, a Chicago-based col-lective of black artists who pioneered socially conscious Black aesthetics. Wadsworth’s pattern-intensive portraits, combining vibrant colors and Black Power slogans, depict his drive for political activism. Along with his wife, Jae Jarell, and the other founding members of AfriCOBRA, Wadsorth’s interest in Transnational Black Aesthetics led them to create one of the most distinctive visual voices in 20th Century American art. The founders’ vision has its roots in the streets, classrooms, studios, and living rooms of the South Side, yet its impact has extended around the world, infl uencing artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley. Throughout his career, Wadsworth has celebrated the struggles, strengths, and beauty of African Americans in his art.

Jarrell’s work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among many others. He was included in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power organized by Tate Modern, which traveled to fi ve subsequent venues. Other recent exhibitions include the AfriCOBRA: Nation Time an offi cial collateral event of the 58th Venice Biennale, AfriCO-BRA: Messages to the People at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. In 2020, Wadsworth debuted his book AFRICOBRA: Experimental Art Towards a School of Thought, a defi nitive record of the founding of AfriCOBRA. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and received his MFA from Howard University. In Spring 2026, Wadsworth Jarrell and his wife Jae Jarrell had a new retrospective organized by the Albany Museum of Art in Georgia, curated by Sidney Pettice, and he was recently featured in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, curated by Adrienne Edwards.

After serving in the Korean War, Jarrell moved to Chicago where he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began shaping both professional and personal artistic practices. His early work captured the vibrancy of the South Side of Chicago, often focusing on street scenes and jazz clubs. In this nascent stage of his career, he was already committed to valorizing daily African American life, with his colors, textures, and mark-making growing more dramatic to reflect the rich culture of the community.

As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum nationally, Jarrell also grew more attentive to a new political land-scape—alongside his peers including Jeff Donaldson, Jarrell began to seriously consider how art could serve, reflect, and appeal to a new Black America. The potential of an all-new liberated consciousness was palpable. Jarrell and his peers knew it was within their reach, they just had to determine how to grasp it.

In his piece titled Quarter to Five, he shows glimmers of the early development of the AFRICOBRA style, with a vibrant color palette standing at contrast with the more somber tones of his 1950s work. The electric colors stand at odds with the quiet mood of the bar scene. Hootenany on the other hand is a heavily abstracted rendition of a guitar player. The blending of abstraction and figuration was a key concern of the AFRICOBRA artists, seeking what they called “mimesis at midpoint.” They believed African sculpture had found the perfect midpoint between realist representation and pure abstraction, and sought to replicate that success. In the case of Hootenany, Jarrell plays with a Cubist-inspired ab-straction technique, paying mind to the long history of European Cubists appropriating the abstraction techniques of African sculpture in particular. By appropriating the Cubist style and making it his own, Jarrell seeks to take ownership of that legacy and celebrate its African roots.