Shirley Woodson

Shirley Woodson (born 1936) is an American visual artist, educator, mentor, and art collector who is most known for her spectacular figurative paintings depicting African American history. Her work that spans a career of 60 years and counting can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. Woodson was named the 2021 Kresge Eminent Artist. The Detroit Institute of Arts exhibited 11 of her pieces in "Shirley Woodson: Shield of the Nile" Dec. 18, 2021 through June 12, 2022, the museum's first solo exhibition of Ms. Woodson's work. A painting by Ms. Woodson is featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit exhibition "Ground Up: Reflections on Black Abstraction" April 8-August 16, 2022.

To the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition "Detroit Collects" (2019), which featured 60 works of all mediums from 19 Detroit-area art collectors, Woodson and her husband Edsel Reid, an art collector and arts administrator, loaned from their collection “After Manet, from May Days Long Forgotten,” 2002, Carrie Mae Weems, American, digital chromogenic print. Woodson's husband Edsel was known throughout Detroit for his passionate promotion of African American art including jazz.

Woodson is also the recipient of the Detroit Council or the Arts and the New Initiatives for the Arts Exhibition Grant, NCA Award for Artistic Excellence (1977), the DIA Alain Locke Award, (1998), and the Delta Sigma Theta sorority Lillian Benbow Award, among other awards.

In 1974, Woodson co-founded the Michigan chapter of the National Conference of Artists (NCA), the longest-running national arts organization dedicated to nurturing and promoting opportunities for Black visual artists. She is an executive board member with the national organization and is the president of the Michigan chapter. Woodson is also a member of the Detroit Art Teachers Association, the College Art Association, the National Art Education Association and the Michigan Art Education Association.

During her MacDowell Colony Fellowship (1966-1967), Woodson explored new ideas and techniques including collage, a medium that she continues to use as a counterpoint and complement to her paintings.

Woodson taught at Highland Park Community College in Highland Park, Michigan from 1966 to 1978. From 1979 until 1992, Woodson worked as an art specialist in Highland Park Schools. Woodson returned to Detroit Public Schools as supervisor of fine arts from 1992 to 2008.

Woodson received a prestigious MacDowell Fellowship in 1966. She was named the Kresge Eminent Artist of 2021. Administered by the College for Creative Studies, this award honors one Detroit artist each year for professional achievements, cultural contributions, and commitment to the local arts community.

Woodson debuted her work in a show of Michigan artists at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1960, the same year she started teaching in the Detroit Public Schools. She has participated exhibitions at institutions including the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Oakland Museum in California, and other venues as far away as Dakar, Senegal, and Lagos, Nigeria, featuring in over 30 solo exhibitions.

She earned her B.F.A. degree from Wayne State University in 1958 and her M.A. from there in 1966. Between earning her B.F.A. and M.A., Woodson did graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1960) and pursued independent study in Rome, Paris, and Stockholm (1962).

Woodson has influenced generations of Detroit artists. She is recognized in Detroit as "having lived a life dedicated to uplifting the beauty of Black art and breaking barriers of exclusion along the way," as written by Nichole Christian in the Kresge Eminent Artist monograph. Painter, College of Creative Studies professor, and inaugural Kresge Artist Fellow Gilda Snowden (1954-2014) is one of many who benefitted from her mentorship and advocacy. The 28-piece exhibition at the Detroit Artists Market in fall 2021, "Shirley Woodson: Why Do I Delight" (its name from a poem Woodson wrote in tribute to her husband, who died in 2000) included six pieces by her proteges including Elizabeth Youngblood, Dwight Smith, and Kimberly Harden. An exhibit that opened at Michigan State University in 2021, "Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 through the Black Arts Movement," featured Woodson's painting, "Martha’s Vandellas" (1969).

Woodson is one of 10 Black artists and the only female profiled in "Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists, 1945 Through the Black Arts Movement," by art historian Julia R. Myers. Woodson is also featured in “The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century” (McFarland Publishing, 1993) and “Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists” (Midmarch Arts Press, 1995), among other books and publications.

Born in 1936 in Pulaski, Tennessee, Woodson has lived in Detroit since she was three months old, when her parents moved their family of four. In seventh grade, she was selected to participate in a weekly special arts training at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she would go on to take classes each Saturday, through high school. "It was sort of my most favorite place to be. Whenever I left home, I wanted to go to the museum," Woodson recalls in the 2021 Kresge Foundation Eminent Artist monograph.