Exhibition

Anna Russell Jones: The Art of Design

(re)FOCUS at the African American Museum in Philadelphia will highlight artist/designer Anna Russell Jones (1902-1995), the first African American graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, (now Moore College of Art and Design). Selections from AAMP's 2020 exhibition Anna Russell Jones: The Art of Design will be back on view in the AAMP's Jack T. Franklin auditorium space.

Anna Russell Jones was known to her contemporaries as a talented artist working in wallpaper and carpet design, as a civil service illustrator, and as a freelance artist. The entirety of Jones' archive of artwork and personal papers and photographs was acquired by AAMP in the early 1990s before the artist’s passing, and was highlighted in a 2020 retrospective exhibition that was truncated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the exhibition, a national resurgence in interest in Jones' life and work led to features in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/arts/forgotten-designers.html, the Philadelphia Inquirer https://www.inquirer.com/arts/anna-russell-jones-african-american-museum-in-philadelphia-20210505.html loans of her work to Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Designed by Women exhibition (2023) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2024).