Celebrate Life with Color!
“If you put art into the world, you get beauty in return.”
Ashley Bryan was the first African American to write and illustrate a picture book for children. He has won numerous awards including at least five Coretta Scott King Medals. His first autobiography is a glorious celebration of his life as a supremely gifted Renaissance man. It was awarded the prestigious Golden Kite award, the only children’s book prize in America voted on by professional peers. He is a writer, poet, storyteller, fine artist, and an illustrator of more than 45 books for children. His memoir celebrates a remarkable lifetime that began as a child during the Great Depression and continued as a young Black soldier in World War II. His second memoir, Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace (Atheneum, 2019), won the Boston Globe Horn Book award for nonfiction in 2020 and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor in 2020. Now, at the age of 98 years, he lives on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.
Bryan was born and raised in the Bronx, New York City, of parents who were both immigrants to the United States from the island of Antigua in the British West Indies. His childhood was relatively free of racial prejudice. He attended public schools that were fully integrated and populated with students from a wide array of multicultural backgrounds. His artistic talent was recognized early in his life and both his parents and his teachers encouraged him to be creative. He notes in this memoir that he never remembers a time in his life when he did not love to draw. Although far from wealthy, his parents supplied art supplies and gave him a special desk in their crowded apartment where he constantly created art.
The first encounter with racism occurred when Bryan graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and tried to enter art schools in New York City. He was turned away from most colleges because of his race. His high school mentors suggested that he enter an application portfolio to the Cooper Union School of Art and Engineering which accepted scholarship students in a blind review process.
He was welcomed to Cooper Union where he studied sculpture, calligraphy, design, book illustration, and painting. During his third year at Cooper Union, he was drafted into the U. S. Army during the height of World War II. After serving three years as a Black soldier in the European Theatre of the global war, he completed his studies at Cooper Union and also received a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University. Next, he took advantage of the GI Bill from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs to further his art education in France. He then continued his studies in art in Germany with two consecutive Fulbright scholarships.
Back in the United States, several teaching assignments culminating in his professorship at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. During this time, he continued his passion for painting and entered the world of publishing, especially creating books for children about African fables and folktales and African-American heroes, verse, and spirituals. He is also well known for his retelling of Bible stories and religious art.
Using multiple types of media and vastly different artistic styles, Bryan became especially lauded for his signature lush and luxuriant use of color. In addition to painting and book illustration, Bryan began creating sea glass panels and puppets from found materials discovered in his daily walks on the beaches of Little Cranberry Island. Many of his oil paintings are of brilliantly colorful flowers that grow profusely on the sun-kissed Atlantic island that has been his home for well over fifty years.
The design of Ashley Bryan: Words to My Life’s Song is very much like a bright and finely pieced quilt or a glorious collage. It is filled with works of art, book covers, photographs, bold splashes of words in rainbows of color and a narrative that bespeaks a joyfully affirmative view of life. It is also filled with tributes that honor a man who has created so much beauty in his lifetime.
Gifted readers will discover that this memoir is also a case study of a profoundly gifted life lived to its fullest. Even in the harsh time of the horrors of war on the beaches of Normandy in northern France during the Allied invasion of June, 1944, Bryan could not refrain from his burning need to draw. He kept art supplies in his gas mask and created art in his few spare moments of rest from the nightmare of war. Seventy years after his World War II experiences as an American Black soldier, the artist, author, poet, and storyteller was finally able to use his somber drawings of his own war-time experiences and convert them to buoyant and radiant paintings of his fellow Black soldiers.
Throughout his life, this gifted man has also shared his love of art with the legions of children and youth. Generations of artists will follow in his creative pathways not unlike the ripple effect of ocean waves that grace the shores of his island home. In addition to narrating his life story, Bryan gives readers a tour of Little Cranberry Island, emphasizing its exceptional beauty told in brightly colored fonts superimposed upon stunning photographs of land and sea.
Older students, investigating the terrible prejudice against Black soldiers in World War II, should consider reading Ashley Bryan’s second autobiography, Infinite Hope.
Dr. Jerry Flack is Professor Emeritus and President’s Teaching Scholar Emeritus at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
Home Activities
Ashley Bryan published his first book in kindergarten. As he and his fellow students learned the alphabet they drew pictures for each letter. When they reached the letter Z, their teacher gave students colored paper to make covers for their first-ever book creations. They sewed the pages together and joined them to brightly colored covers. From that time forward, Bryan has made hundreds of one-of-a-kind books for both his own enjoyment and as exquisite personal gifts. Encourage students to select subject matter from alphabet and number books to poetry anthologies, creating every single page with unique words and luxuriant illustrations, fashioning bright covers and stitching them together. The finished books will become treasured keepsake gifts.
A worthy component of Ashley Bryan’s first memoir is his visual and verbal travelogue of his home, Little Cranberry Island, Maine. Encourage students to photograph their own neighborhoods and provide insightful and entertaining stories about everyday life and special events that make their communities unique and welcoming. What landmarks stand out?
Introduce children to personalized verse, also called acrostic poems. A name is written on paper or in a journal, vertically, one letter per line. Next, descriptions of the person beginning with the corresponding letters of the first and last names are written on each line, horizontally, to complete the poem. Ask children to summarize what they have learned about Ashley Bryan from reading his memoir with the use of a personalized or acrostic poem. The letters “A” and “B” suggest beginning points.
Always drawing Blue sea glass
S R
H Y
L A
E N
Y
The illustrations that complement Bryan’s account of his life include examples of the diverse media he has used in his works of art that includes watercolors, tempera or poster paints, pastel crayons, cut paper collages, oil paints, block prints, and even stained glass. Ask students to recall at least one significant moment in their lives and to select a unique medium to illustrate their retelling of that special passage in time. Urge students to employ Ashley Bryan’s love for exuberant colors.
Internet searches for Ashley Bryan reveal many sites including the Home Page of the Ashley Bryan Center located in Islesford, Maine. The Center is featured on Facebook. Ashley Bryan’s primary publisher, Simon & Schuster has created a special Internet web site tribute to his life and his many, many beautiful books. Numerous web pages include links to recorded interviews and documentaries that are enlightening. Using new knowledge, children may be encouraged to write and illustrate a biographical portrait of this super gifted man.
Students who do not have access to electronic resources can create beautiful paintings, puppets, and sea-glass (facsimiles) panels or mosaics that are inspired by Ashley Bryan’s own words: There are so many ways in which we learn about life and self. If you put art into the world, you will get beauty in return. Parents and teachers can urge students to view many of his 45 picture books that particularly feature the brilliant and luminous colors of flowers that grow so seemingly peacefully and joyfully on his beloved Cranberry Island. Students can create their own glorious floral paintings or lavishly colorful puppets made from found items.
For older students: Ashley Bryan has written two remarkable memoirs, Ashley Bryan: Words to My Life Song (Atheneum Books, 2009) and Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace (Atheneum Books, 2019). There are both similarities and profound differences between these books that were written ten years apart. Encourage students to immerse themselves in both books and then use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two different life stories.
Ashley Bryan and his work are more than a national treasure; they are one of the great treasures of the world. His astonishing mind and gentle heart bring back our natural optimism about life, without which we can’t actually grow together. He is a gift to us all.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Bryan, Ashley. Ashley Bryan: Words to My Life’s Song. New York: Atheneum, 2009. Golden Kite Award.
