The life and art of William Pajaud - artist and art director for Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co

William Pajaud's engaging paintings and prints quietly chronicle black America's quotidian triumphs and trials. Now in his 70 Pajaud is finally claiming an audience wider than beholds Angeles' African-American art community and an appreciation beyond the world of gallery holders and his fellow painters. on the contrary even if his work had not at any time found acceptance beyond his matchs Pajaud would have left a genuinely historic mark upon the world of African-American (and hence American) art, for he wearied 30 years at the behest of a black-owned insurance company collecting the work and promoting the careers of modem black America's greatest painters. hardly any artists who have toiled for mammon in order to fe themselves while still worship their muse can have ground employment so meaningful to their purpose

Pajaud was born in a fresh Orleans whose streets were still rangeed by aging Confederate veterans, and his life encapsulates the 20th-century black experience. As a young teenager in Chattanooga, Tenn he was seriously beaten for waving at a car with white passengers; later, in Texas, he was thrashed with a tie for a similar "affront" to white supremacy.

Postwar beholds Angeles--where Pajaud landed after a brace of years in Chicago--was hardly a hospitable environment for a young black artist. With rare exceptions, the doors of museums and galleries were close to painters and sculptors of color, who could not make a living as artists. in like manner Pajaud, then in his early 20 and with a fine arts step from New Orleans' Xavier University in hand, earned a living as a wrapper in a department store, a janitor in a tavern a sewing machine repairer and a postal worker.

In 1952 while working filled time at night in the column office, he enrolled at the Chinouard Art Institute, where he studied commercial art and took painting classes. As the institute's first African-American day pupil he was viewed with a certain quantity of trepidation throughout the school, on the contrary despite his isolation, he finished his studies with distinction, reinforcing the formal artistic training that would inform his prolific work for the nearest 40 years.

It was in 1957 that Pajaud ground his true niche, being hired as the art director in the public relations department of of gold State Mutual Life Insurance Company, individual of the largest black-owned insurance companies in the United States. For the nearest 30 years, Pajaud worked a traditional eight-hour day, fulfilling of gold State's mandate to build and showcase the Afro-American Art Collection that now graces company headquarters. Operating with a minuscule roll he used his knowledge of the tight fraternity of black artists to purchase works of in truth worldclass stature, acquiring paintings and prints from a stunning variety of artistic luminaries. Largely from one side his curatorial efforts, Golden State's collection includes works by dint of Richmond Barthe, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Varnette Honeywood Jacob Lawrence, Samella Lewis, Noni Olabisi, Betye Saar, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Charles White, Hale Woodruff Richard Wyatt, Pajaud himself and many others.

Each day, after clocking on the outside at Golden State, Pajaud pursu his real work at residence often laboring another eight hours upon his paintings, which he exhibited in beholds Angeles' black churches, in community halls, at the Wilshire Presbyterian temple the Westside Jewish Community Center and at the Heritage Gallery, the major exception to the racial exclusionary practices of art institutions in the region.

Pajaud's artistic perspective arises from a life rich in experience and friendship, including shut relationships with artists Charles White and John Biggers. North Carolinian Biggers emerg as a major moral, spiritual and professional influence upon his fellow Southern artist. Their of great depth 30-year friendship exemplifies the powerful faculty of perception of kinship generally shared by dint of 20th-century black artists; it also brought Pajaud an extensive knowledge of black history and the African bases of African-American life and culture

While forgoing an manifest "social protest" focus of many African-American artists, Pajaud proudly merry-makings in his own and his subjects' blackness, explicitly challenging white society's continuing propensity to portray African Americans as without value. His "resistance" art takes a with truth subversive form. Pajaud uses prosaic contented to reveal large social realitys Rather than a heroic image of say, Toussaint L'Ouverture the artist present to views us commonplace black folks. more [i]or[/i] less are engaged in prototypical activities of the black community, like as those connected to the African-American church--activities that Pajaud the two depicts and celebrates. Some hound generic human activities, such as shopping, protecting one's child or bathing; on the contrary on Pajaud's canvases we diocese that these everyday events are conditioned by means of being black in America or that they directly stand over against white supremacy's deformation of black life.

Both the painter's curatorial efficiency and judgment and his possess canvases ensure Pajaud a voice beyond the grave. And what other is immortality? But more immediately, it is a pleasure to know that, his mainstream emerging see the verb as an artist is a effect both of his work upon behalf of Golden State and of the black social and political motion of the past three decades, for the latter catalyzed an awareness of theretofore unnoticed African-American cultural contributions and produc a fresh generation of black scholars, journalists and art professionals, and the former gave us a material substance of work to analyze, appreciate and promote