Flashback Friday: The Art of Jean Birkenstein

This is a little late, but I’m still coming up for air after a whirlwind of activities this month. Jean Birkenstein (1926–2003) was a Jewish artist who, in the 1950s and ’60s, threw herself into the Civil Rights movement with courage and creativity. Married to a Black poet and living at the only non-white household on their block, she already stood out. But she went further: she opened her home as a safe, neutral space where members of Chicago’s leading gangs—the Vice Lords and the Cobras—could meet. While a teacher at Marshall High School on the city’s west side, she became an “ambassador” to the schools for those same gangs; the Vice Lords even made her a card-carrying member. She turned her house into a community center for them, an activity noted in a 1961 Jet magazine feature illustrated with her powerful paintings of African American and Native American slaves.

As an officer for CORE and the NAACP, Jean led numerous protests and sit-ins for open housing and against de facto segregation in Chicago’s public schools. Jet described her as “an artist with a profound respect for human dignity.” She was also a passionate animal lover who, when she passed, was buried in a pet cemetery.

The artist, a peer of Joan Mitchell and Edward Gorey, was mother to journalist Robin Washington. Her work is currently on display at a Chicago arts center and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth till the end of June.

The paintings on this page were originally presented in a 2019 Jean Birkestein exhibition at the Duluth Art Institute and shared on this blog.

To fully appreciate this show, and by extension Robin Washington, Birkenstein's son and a former editor of the Duluth News Tribune, it's helpful to understand the context of Jean's work.

The1961 Jet magazine feature article about her was illustrated with her paintings of African American and Native American slaves.

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth meets at 835 W. College Street--a hop, skip and a jump from UMD.

Part of the exhibit includes clippings of Jean's activities outside the studio.

Robin Washington as a youth. (I wasn't the first artist
to paint my children.)

In some ways the DAI show was more of a love tribute to a mom who was more than a mom, a remarkable woman who sought to make a difference in the broken world she saw around her. Washington remembers being five and six years old going to sit-ins with his mother.

Jean's paintings reflect her passions, Robin himself being one of them.

Much more can be said, but I will let some of the paintings do some talking. 

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Related Links
My Mother’s Fight for Education Rights: The Story of Jean Birkenstein Washington
A brief bio As Remembered by Robin Washington