As part of Black History Month, NewsNation is celebrating artful and creative pioneers within the Black community who have left an indelible mark on the arts and shattered barriers for other minority artists in the U.S. and in the world. Read about more impactful artists here.  

(NewsNation) — When Loïs Mailou Jones first started drawing and painting as a child, she never imagined how her travels and the people she encountered would affect her life’s work.

Like many influential Black artists of her time, however, the prejudice she experienced helped define the legacy she left for generations of aspiring artists.

Jones was born in 1905 in Boston, the daughter of an attorney and a cosmetologist. Like Jones, her father, Thomas Vreeland Jones, was a trailblazer, becoming the first African American to earn a law degree from Boston’s Suffolk Law School.

Encouraged to draw and paint in colors from a young age, Jones’ passion took her to the School of Practical Arts in Boston before taking night classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Jones hosted her first solo exhibition at her parents’ home on Martha’s Vineyard at the age of 17, the first of countless displays of her art that only grew in depth and meaning as her life and career developed.

After graduating from Howard University, Jones began working as a textile designer before shifting to the fine arts. She supported herself as an artist through teaching.

Hoping to land a professorship at her alma mater, Jones instead began teaching at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina. But not long after, she was hired to join the faculty at Howard, where she taught between 1930-77.

Jones received a fellowship in 1937 to study in Paris, where she discovered the importance of African tribal art. Her art captured scenes from the French countryside and cultural aspects of Paris living. But her work soon began to find deeper meaning as she began to capture the social struggles of people of color through her work.

Jones’ art developed during summer trips to New York at the start of the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequent trips to Haiti influenced Jones’ life and her art, and her study of masks from diverse non-Western civilizations infused her paintings with her ancestry’s spirit and meaning.

In Haiti, Jones was inspired by the colors and culture of the Caribbean and the people and the environments she discovered. She thrived and succeeded as an artist despite heavy opposition and prejudices she faced for both her gender and her race.

Jones often chose to submit her work to museum exhibits anonymously so that museum curators would not know the works were created by a Black woman, according to reports.

At the time, Black artists were physically excluded from visiting Washington, D.C., galleries, and Jones had one of her art awards withdrawn from a gallery when it was discovered she was Black.

The biases she faced for both her race and gender prompted Jones to move abroad, first to Paris when she was awarded the fellowship and then later to Haiti. Jones married Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel in 1953, which provided her with even more exposure to island life and the customs of the people there.

“She was encouraged by people who she met on the Island to go abroad because she would have more freedom as a Black artist to exhibit and be accepted as everyone else would be,” Martha’s Vineyard Museum curator Anna Carringer told the Vineyard Gazette in 2015.

Among her most important works were “Les Fetiches”, which she created in oil colors in 1938, “Peasant Girl”, which she painted in Haiti in 1954 and “Moon Mosque,” a signature acrylic collage she finished in 1971.

In 1973, Jones became the first African American to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She was honored by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 for her outstanding achievements in the arts.

She was named a “Living Legend” by the National Black Arts Festival in 1990, inspired by her message of finding meaning both in a life well lived and a legacy left behind.

“You have to find something in life you love doing,” Jones told the Washington Post in 1995. “You have to feel you have contributed to life and grow with it.”

Jones died at the age of 93 on June 9, 1998, in Washington, D.C. She is buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.