Jessie Housley (1905–1984)

Jessie Housley was a successful Missouri artist and educator in the mid-twentieth century. She was born on March 27, 1905, in St. Louis to John and Mary Housley, who had moved there from Mississippi during the early stages of the Great Migration, in which thousands of African Americans left the South in search of better opportunities. Her father was a teamster, while her mother apparently was a homemaker. Jessie and her two older siblings, Belle and James, grew up in the St. Louis area, and Jessie and her brother remained there for most of their lives.

Housley graduated from Sumner High School in 1925 during an era when schools in St. Louis were segregated. She studied art with Sumner’s Frederick C. Alston, a nationally exhibited St. Louis artist and educator. After graduation, she attended Sumner Teachers College, a forerunner to the present-day Harris-Stowe State University. Housley also modeled for art classes at Washington University’s segregated Art School, and through this work she likely gained informal access to art instruction at the school. These experiences paved the way for her to enter the Chicago Art Institute in 1932, paid for with the assistance of a scholarship from the state of Missouri. Under the US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine, Missouri and fifteen other southern or border states kept their public colleges and universities segregated by offering financial support to go out of state for courses of study unavailable within the state to African Americans. 

In the 1930s, Housley’s desire to broaden her artistic horizons led her to travel to New York, where she took classes at Columbia University and the Art Students League. By the end of the decade she had returned to St. Louis to work as an art teacher at Divoll Elementary School, where she continued to teach for almost forty years. Her teaching job allowed her to finance her career as an artist.

Due to her education and accomplishments, Housley was seen as a leader in St. Louis’s Black cultural community. Throughout her working life, she was involved in the Negro Art League, which was formed in September 1929 to foster interest in art within the St. Louis Black community. At the organization’s first meeting, she was unanimously chosen to be the organization’s secretary. Housley won a gold award and $25 at the League’s first exhibit in 1929. In 1934 she was involved in the “Evening with Negro Artists” at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church, where she interpreted art in the exhibit for attendees. Housley was also actively involved in the Black community as treasurer for the Bonny Sunbeams Club, which provided toys for five hundred children in 1935. She was a member of the Funmakers Club, the Sisters of Ruth Guild, the Urban League’s Aldridge Players, and the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.

During this period, Housley’s artwork was exhibited in St. Louis and nationally. She showcased her work in the Art Alliance of St. Louis in 1929, the St. Louis Black and White Exhibits in 1930, the Art Students’ League in Chicago in 1931, and the New York Harmon Exhibits (which toured nationally) in 1929 and 1933. In the 1929 exhibition with the Art Alliance, she won the prize for the best black-and-white artwork. Another black-and-white piece titled Snow won first prize at the Urban League’s 1937 show and was also selected to be shown at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. She was apparently the only Black artist from St. Louis chosen in this round of selections. In 1949, another of Housley’s works was displayed at the St. Louis Art Museum as part of the sixth annual campaign for the United Negro College Fund.

One of Housley’s most celebrated artworks was the black-and-white drawing Left-Handed Ironer, which she submitted to the St. Louis Urban League’s annual Exhibition of Negro Art in January 1936. This artwork won the exhibition’s grand prize, sponsored by E. Simms Campbell, a prominent magazine illustrator and nationally syndicated cartoonist from St. Louis. (Housley would win the Campbell Prize again in 1938.) Housley’s works from the 1936 exhibition were displayed at St. Louis’s Stix, Baer and Fuller department store, and four of the pictures received national recognition in a two-page illustrated story in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life during the spring of 1936.

In 1937, Housley was appointed as the head of the Department of Art in St. Louis’s Vogue School of Expression at the city’s short-lived Douglass University. She continued to balance art education and art creation throughout her career. In 1938 she held a one-woman show at the St. Louis Urban League, leading the St. Louis Argus to laud her as “a prominent St. Louis art teacher and artist of wide recognition.” In 1940, Housley was commissioned by the Urban League to create a mural at its art gallery. She worked in the challenging fresco medium, painting the colors directly into the wet plaster of the wall. The St. Louis Star and Times described the mural as depicting “Industry (a white man) shaking hands with Labor (a Negro) with the Eads Bridge and the Old Courthouse in the background.” This mural was lost when the building was demolished, but Housley completed another large fresco mural a year later that still survives in the Masonic Temple in midtown St. Louis. Titled The Origin of Freemasonry, the 80 x 38–foot work is painted on the wall of a vestibule. The mural was dedicated by US Senator Harry S. Truman, a member of the Masonic order, after it was unveiled in the autumn of 1941. The artwork was later restored after the temple became a luxury apartment building known as “B on Lindell” in the twenty-first century.

Housley lived with her parents until the 1960s and served as the family breadwinner. She continued to support the St. Louis Black community, and in 1961 she designed the bookplate for the Julia Davis Fund collection at the St. Louis Public Library. Davis had established a fund in that year to preserve African American culture through a public collection of books and other educational material.

At the age of fifty-seven, Housley married Herman Holliman, a union contractor and decorator. After retirement she remained in St. Louis. Following a long illness, she died on August 10, 1984, at the age of seventy-nine in St. Ann’s nursing home. She is buried in Washington Park Cemetery in Berkeley, Missouri. Her tombstone was inscribed with her maiden name “Jessie M Housley,” the name by which she was known for most of her life.