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 Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960)
Hardship fueled sculptor's dedication

  By TATIANA PINA
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet lived from 1890 to 1960, years when prejudice relegated people of color to menial jobs and limited prospects.

But this Providence woman, half Narragansett Indian and half black, never considered herself limited.

With a chisel and mallet and a steely determination, she carved her way into the art world, receiving critical acclaim in the United States and France, while winning friends such as W.E.B. Du Bois, a scholar and leader of the NAACP, and Gertrude Payne Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum.

Her family and friends tried to dissuade her from her artistic aspirations, encouraging her instead to become a servant or a teacher of her people, but Prophet enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design in 1914. She was the only person of color at the school.

While at RISD, Prophet married Francis Ford, a black man whose family had come from Maryland. Ford was the only black student to complete the classical course of study at Hope High School in Providence in 1900.

In 1922, four years after she graduated from RISD, Prophet went alone to Paris with $350 in her pocket, determined to further her mastery of sculpting.

She was immediately accepted at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, a prestigious art school, and worked in squalid studios with no heat. In her journal, which she kept from Aug. 11, 1922 to July 19, 1934, she writes of her struggles to persevere against hunger, illness and lack of sleep.

Her first entry says: "I worked away on my first piece with a dogged determination to conquer . . . with a calm assurance and savage pleasure of revenge. I remember how sure I was that it was going to be a living thing, a master stroke, how my arms felt as I swung them up to put on a piece of clay."

In that same entry Prophet admits she was so hungry that while in a studio she shared with a young French woman, she stole a piece of meat and potato from the plate of the woman's dog. "This I ate ravenously," she wrote.

Annoyed at herself for what she considered her weakness, she nevertheless invited her husband to join her in Paris. Her journal indicates she found him "helpless (and) without ambition"; the marriage did not last.

Despite her circumstances, Prophet presented herself in an elegant and dignified manner.

Recognition for her clean and bold renderings of heads in wood, metal and stone came in 1924, when she exhibited at the Paris Salons D'Autumne and the Salon des Artistes Francais.

In 1929 Henry O. Tanner, a black painter and expatriate who admired Prophet's work, nominated one of her busts, "Head of a Negro," for the Harmon Exhibition in New York. The piece is now at the RISD museum.

After about a decade in France, during which she had many successful shows both there and in the United States, she returned to the United States.

In 1932 she won the Greenough prize from the Newport Art Association. Also exhibiting at the association's show was Gertrude Payne Whitney. Whitney asked Prophet for the "honor" of purchasing the bust titled "Congolaise," now in the Whitney Museum.

At the urging of Du Bois, Prophet became an art instructor at Atlanta University in 1934. She later joined the art department at Spelman College and initiated work in sculpture there, teaching until 1944.

She died in 1960 of a heart attack at the house she inherited from her father on Benefit Street.

Sources: SAGE, A Scholarly Journal on Black Women; Crisis magazine; Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life; the journal of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet journal, an unpublished manuscript available only at Brown University's John Hay Library; Black Artists in the Rhode Island Landscape; " 'An ornament and honor to her sex': New England Women from Valley Forge to Fenway Park," a history curriculum researched and written by Jane Lancaster.

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