The Chicago artist’s work is the subject of three exhibitions examining his life’s work to bring dignity to his community

In the 1930s, African American artist Charles White, a teenager in Chicago, raised his hand in high school. He stood up to his white teacher and asked why black history wasn’t in the school curriculum, curious as to why figures like Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass were being ignored. It got him scoffed at, ridiculed and deemed an embarrassment by his fellow black classmates.

“When I spoke up about these ignored great figures,” he said, “I would be told to sit down and shut up.”

Charles White's powerful portraits of black America – in pictures Read more

This Chicago Black Renaissance artist, who worked through to the 1970s, tasked himself with shining a light on the everyday lives of African Americans as well as underexamined issues of social justice, civil rights and dignity.

Three exhibitions in Los Angeles are now celebrating the artist’s legacy – Charles White: A Retrospective is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until 9 June, showcasing 100 of his portrait drawings, prints and paintings. Life Model: Charles White and His Students traces the artist’s influence as the first black faculty member at the Otis Art Institute, which is on view at the Charles White elementary school until 15 September. Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary opens at the California African American Museum, showing roughly 40 black artists who honor the artist in their own way, opening on 8 March.

“Charles White is ubiquitous in black art because of the work he did,” said Essence Harden, the co-curator of the CAAM exhibit. “The world looked different for him; it just did for black artists. His influence was so profound. He’s everywhere and that’s one of the most wonderful things about Charles White.”

White was born in 1918 to a father who was Creek Indian, employed as a railroad worker, and his mother, a domestic worker from Mississippi. His grandmother was the daughter of a slave who had an affair with her white master. “I am not proud of this one white man who was one of my great-grandfathers,” White said. “A typical slave master, he did not regard the product of his seduction of a slave as his offspring. She was just another slave chattel.”

White made art as a child growing up on the South Side of Chicago, his passion was painting. After being deemed a rebel by his teachers, for asking questions such as the one he posed in the earlier anecdote, he dropped out of high school. White would go on to be awarded various scholarships that were then taken away when his race was discovered and was admitted to two art schools, both of which pulled his acceptance for the same reason. He was ultimately accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago, working as a cook then as an art teacher to pay for his materials, and was later jailed for forming a union with other black artists to fight for equal wages. White worked to paint portraits of under-painted historic figures like Sojourner Truth, Booker T Washington, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass throughout the 1950s.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles White – General Moses (Harriet Tubman), 1965. Photograph: Photo courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries

It was going against the grain of what he saw growing up. “It was in the books, as well as in the motion pictures, cartoons, newspapers, ‘jokes’ and advertisements,” said White. “The Negro people were portrayed as grotesque stereotypes.”

He was an encyclopedia of black history, eager to share his thirst for knowledge with the public. He painted one mural, Five Great American Negroes – which depicts Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, George Washington Carver and Marian Anderson – as part of a fundraiser for Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, when he was just 21 years old.

His most notable mural remains The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, featuring historic black figures like Nat Turner, a 19th-century slave who led a rebellion, Anderson, an opera singer who performed at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, and Peter Salem, a soldier who served in the American Revolutionary war of the 18th century.

Sarah Kelly Oehler, co-curator of the Lacma exhibit said White looked to the past to reflect on the present. “He returned to the past again and again for aesthetic inspiration,” she said, “to educate his fellow citizens and promote social equality by producing and displaying inspiring images of historical figures.”

White may be known for his black portraits, but that’s not where his art ends. “His practice included portraiture, a celebration of everyday black life, his engagement with political urgencies and his move towards abstraction at the end of his career,” said Leigh Raiford, the co-curator of the CAAM exhibit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles White – Wanted Poster Series #11, 1970. Photograph: Museum Associates/Lacma

He was also an enthusiastic purveyor of pop culture. From portraits of Harry Belafonte to album covers for the jazz label Vanguard Records (including a Grammy-nominated album cover for composer Morton Gould), White painted celebrated gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson and Bessie Smith, and had his art published on the cover of Life magazine.

He lived in New Orleans, briefly served in the army, traveled through Europe in the 1950s and painted the political activist Angela Davis as a plea and protest after her arrest in 1970 as part of the Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners campaign.

The Lacma retrospective, a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, traces his path as a civil rights activist in New York and LA, while the Life Model exhibit features the works of his former students, including Kerry James Marshall, whose $21.1m sale of his 1997 painting Past Times was a record high for a black artist. Marshall recalls that despite having a scholarship from another school, he paid to study with White.

The Plumb Line exhibit looks at the young black artists continuing White’s legacy, including Sadie Barnette, Greg Breda and Toyin Ojih Odutola. They are shown alongside the drawings of the LA artist Lava Thomas’s series Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, mugshots of black women prosecuted after protesting against racial segregation on the Alabama city’s public transport in the 1950s. Thomas calls the series “in dialogue with the current political and social climate of the country; the resurgence of white nationalism, the rise of racial hostility and lethal violence”.

“Lava’s work speaks to White’s contention that art should be political and address questions of liberation and freedom,” said Raiford of Thomas’s work. “They’re historical figures who haven’t gotten the attention they deserve for their participation in the advancement of black social movements.”

Also on view are Breda’s portraits based on Depression-era photographs, one titled Untitled (Salt, Woman w/ big hat’) from 2013.

“He made that piece in tribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rural black folks and the elevation of black labor,” said Raiford. “Images of dignity are really a cornerstone for us, a vision of what we’re after.”