Kindred Spirits Lilian

The Artists

Portrait of a Girl

Portrait of a Girl by Hilda Wilkinson Brown

Native Washingtonian Hilda Wilkinson Brown (b. 1894, d. 1981) created modernistic paintings of Washington, D.C.’s historic LeDroit Park neighborhood and portraits of its residents, watercolors of Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard, and linoleum block prints and lithographs of African American families. She contributed illustrations to two magazines founded by renowned scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois: The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, and The Brownies’ Book, the first magazine for African American children.

Wilkinson Brown graduated from M Street High School, the first public high school for African Americans in the U.S. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Howard University and her Master’s degree from Columbia University. She taught art at Miner Teachers College, one of the few institutions of higher education for African Americans in Washington, D.C. during segregation.

Several of Wilkinson Brown’s works are in major museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lilian

Artist Lilian Thomas Burwell

Of her aunt, Hilda Wilkinson Brown, Lilian Thomas Burwell says, “I know that I would not be who I am today if it had not been for her influence and her nurturing.” Wilkinson Brown persuaded Burwell’s parents to allow Burwell to study art at Pratt Institute. Wilkinson Brown and her husband provided Burwell with financial support while her parents recovered from the Great Depression.

Burwell is known for her nature- inspired abstract expressionist paintings and unique “sculptural paintings”: carved wooden sculptures which are covered in painted canvas. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S.

Lilian Thomas Burwell was born in Washington, D.C. in 1927. She grew up in Harlem and attended Washington, D.C.’s Dunbar High School. She taught art in the District of Columbia’s public schools, including Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

She lives and works in Highland Beach, Maryland, a historic African American resort town where her aunt Hilda summered.