Emerson Terry is an artist who made his living in advertising as a commercial Illustrator. Terry is an artist who used his paints, brushes, and canvases to call for social, political, economic change. He paints and documents African American history, specifically; the Civil Rights Marches of the 1960s, individuals, and groups like the Tuskegee Airmen and Black folks in the Old West. 

Emerson Terry was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1925 on the brink of the “Great Depression.”  By the time he reached the fifth grade, it was the 1930’s and the shared poverty of everyone; black/white, immigrant/indigenous, generational poor/generational wealth, was the only world he knew.  Poverty was ubiquitous and without moral assignment. "By this time, some of my teachers took notice of my art ability and paid me a small amount of money to draw on their blackboards in colored chalk for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.  I did not realize at the time that I was a commercial artist,” Terry.

Emerson was next to the youngest of 8 children in a family that wasn’t formally trained in art but practiced different art forms in their daily lives.  The Terry’s also used their gifts and skills to make a living.  Terry has said, “my brother Bob was a better artist than me.  I just got the opportunity to go to art school.”

In a time when “colored” or “negro” were terms used to describe an entire group of people, “Afro-American” was the ethnic identity the doctor who delivered Emerson entered on the birth certificate. The doctor was most likely a follower of Marcus Garvey. 

All of these elements, the Great Depression, US military service on the Robert Smalls naval vessel in World War II, and a vibrant black community may have contributed to what he believed and would believe about himself. His community offered diverse possibilities of what it was to be an African on American soil. Community role models ranged from Marcus Garvey to Daddy Grace. At local theatres, you could find “race films with all-black cast and crews. They featured stories that crossed genres from westerns to detectives. Church gatherings and community meetings often began with singing James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice” (the Negro National Anthem). As a young teen, once a week, Terry delivered the Ohio State Journal. He also sold ads for the weekly negro newspapers. These elements may have contributed to why Terry would use his art to tell hidden, buried, and whitewashed stories.

Watching the drive, energy, and commitment of the Civil Rights Movement, from the sidelines while struggling to break down walls of segregation that surrounded the advertising industry, Terry had made a choice. He could either maintain and expand his family’s financial stability or take part in the seismic changes of the Civil Rights Movement hailed as it transformed the world. He chose to represent the Movement with paint on canvas and continue to disrupt the actions of the “keepers” and break down the gates of exclusion that surrounded the commercial art world. That was just the beginning.

As a member of the Los Angeles Society of Illustrators, Emerson Terry produced paintings documenting the history of the U.S. Air Force.  “If I can document the history of the military, I can document the history of my people.” 

Though he had illustrated school textbooks in the 1960s, putting some black faces in the Illustration, this did not get to the issue of African or African American History.  The first series of paintings that he produced was about the history-making Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. That was when teach-ins, sit-ins, marches, and heavy voter registration took place in the U.S.A.

To extend the outreach of the paintings, Emerson enrolled in the Graduate Cinema Program at UCLA.   As a participant in the Program, Terry added the skills, techniques, and theory of cinematic storytelling to his repository of two-dimensional training at Art Center College and his years of experience in the commercial art field.  The result is “Non-Violence in a Violent Society,” a documentary film that was able to travel and be presented when and where the painting couldn’t go because of time or geography, or finances.  The film made it possible for his Civil Rights paintings to be available even after the news services of the time turned off access to information they felt was no longer “hot.” Or they believed that the story of change and self-identification was over and had gone as far as it could go.

The African Cowboys was a series of paintings that Terry was inspired to produce after one of his daughters in elementary school at the time turned in a paper about Black Cowboys. Emerson was reading a book about black cowboys by UCLA professors Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, “The Adventures of the Negro Cowboys.” He shared the book with his daughter.  She used it to write her report. The uninformed and most likely miseducated teacher told Terry’s daughter that it was a nice paper, but there was no such thing as Black Cowboys. 

There was no Internet when Terry and his daughter were engaging the book, only a few other publications on the subject, and almost no images to represent the time. Unlike Emerson’s childhood, there weren’t even “race movies” featuring black folks in the old West. He had already documented moments in the Civil Rights Movement with paintings. Representing the stories of people whose existence was dismissed and then abolished was even more demanding and commanding. At the same time, Terry found a way to tell the story of the unrepresented with paint and brushes he kept knocking and kicking at the closed doors in the advertising business.

As Terry painted, he continued to research, read, and found the connection to cattle culture was the center of many ethnic groups and societies on the continent of Africa. The relationship ran so deep that slavers targeted specific peoples for their bovine knowledge and skills. To link the people, the continents, the wealth-building ability, Terry expanded the identity of his project from the abstract name of “Black Cowboys” to the concert name of African cowboys. 

Terry’s paintings of African Cowboys and the Civil Rights Movement simmered and bubbled up from the world he came of age in. The layers of inclusionary and restrictive beliefs practiced by others marked him.  The most substantial layer of influence when he entered the marketplace of commercial art was the practice and understanding he gained from Art Center.  Audubon Tyler was one of Terry’s instructors at the Center.  Tyler taught the old school techniques, still life, and portraiture. He also practiced his skills at different film studios also located in Los Angeles and Hollywood.  Tyler said he would like to take some of Terry’s work to his Art Director at MGM to see about a job.  When he returned, he told Terry, “Some of these damn people are not ready yet.” 

 A lifetime of experiences as a black man in America weighed on how Terry received the instructor's suggestion, including and especially an incident that happened after leaving the Navy at the end of World War II. A representative at the Detroit employment department sent him for an interview with a local advertising agency. It was America at the end of the 1940s. Life and business were booming as long as you knew your place. At the interview, the person who finally came out to talk to Terry made it very clear; there was no way he would expose a black man’s artistic interpretations of the world to his clients or the public.

Audubon Tyler believed Terry’s work and work ethic would be just what the studios were looking for. Terry’s unvoiced experience and vision of his world proved 20/20 while Tyler, his supportive instructor experience and vision were too limited to comprehend the narrowness of the Art field. 

Terry and his friend Bill Moffet were two of the first students of African descent at Art College Center of Design. Moffet once told Emerson that when he, Moffet, applied for entrance to the College, the President of the institution, Tink Adams, said he could admit the black GI to his fledgling institution, but what would he do with the training? Moffett, Terry, and a few Mexican and Japanese students with GI Bills in hand were admitted into the school. The question that Tink Addams raised was still waiting outside the walls of the idealistic program.  Whether in Detroit or Los Angeles, the answer for Terry and his fellow students was, NO, they would not be hired.   

Terry had learned when he and his brother were very young children during the depression when you got to survive; you find a way. The Terry boys collected leftover fruit from train boxcars and sold it dirt cheap to their neighbors in Columbus, Ohio.  As GI’s in post-war Los Angeles, the Terry brothers carried a ladder and painted signs on the windows of local businesses. There was and is to this day for Emerson Terry, always another way. 

Jered Gold wrote about Emerson Terry in the February 15, 2012 blog post for Art Center’s “Dotted Line” online magazine,

 “(Terry) is particularly proud that both his daughters have successful careers in art and design. ‘I was able to guide both of my daughters through some of the doors that I had to break down on my way up. Of course, I didn’t realize I was breaking down doors at the time. I just wanted to find a job as an artist.’” 

Even as a commercial artist, Terry pushed at the doors of inclusion by using family members as models for his work and including other people of color in his commercial artwork. 

At the most mature moment in Emerson Terry’s career, he became a member of the Black Male Form in his home community. These men of diverse vocation, economic and regional backgrounds came together to support and influence the standing of the African American community in the city of Pasadena.  That support and influence included Terry becoming a member of the Pasadena Arts Commission.  His goal with this appointment was to ensure his community would receive its fair share of opportunities and resources from the philanthropic world.   Versie Mae Richardson was also an arts commissioner at that time.  Together Terry and Richardson, joined by educator Dr. Marie Battle established the Alkebulan Cultural Center that continues to be the only institution of its nature in the entire San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County.   Terry also served on the Luckman Fine Arts Complex board at California State University, Los Angeles. 

Using decades of professional experience, artistic training, and a lifetime of observation, Terry held space open for the multiple truths we accept and know exist today.   By bridging and crossing the artificial chasms that appear to separate fine and commercial art, Terry recognizes his goal to expand the public knowledge of the contributions made by ordinary and extraordinary Africans throughout the world and especially in the Americas.