Paul Jones honored by National Conference of Artists

National Conference of Artists President Kwame Brathwaite (left) presents the Pioneer Award to Paul R. Jones.

10:12 a.m., Feb. 9, 2005--UD benefactor Paul R. Jones received the Pioneer in Art award from the National Conference of Artists (NCA) on Friday, Feb. 4, during a ceremony to celebrate “Black History Makers in Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Paul R. Jones Collection is among the world’s oldest, largest and most complete holdings of works by 20th-Century African American artists. Jones donated his collection to the University of Delaware in February 2001, and UD renovated an historic building, Mechanical Hall, on its campus to house it.

Jones, who was honored “for raising the bar on how donations to institutions are made to gain maximum benefit for artists, scholars and the art-loving public,” was among eight recipients of NCA’s first-ever Black History Makers Awards.

“There is more being done today, thank God, because black art now is getting its best exposure, even more so than the Harlem renaissance, because of the work that has been done by organizations,” Kwame Brathwaite, president of NCA, who presented the award to Jones, said. “It could not happen unless the University of Delaware was willing to do it, and they were very good. This is very important, and this is not just black art history, this is art history. Period.”

In his presentation, Brathwaite said Jones, an Atlanta businessman, early became aware that African American art was vastly underrepresented in public collections. Jones identified a number of artists whose work he wanted to support, purposefully sought them and later selected UD as the best possible home for the collection.

“We have not been able to put money behind these things,” Brathwaite said of African American art. “The talent is there, the art is there, but the backing has not been. When you get strong institutions like the University of Delaware and the University of Maryland [involved], then things can really happen.”

Jones said he was honored to receive the award from NCA, which he described as one of the oldest, most prestigious national organizations of artists.

“As a result of that, it’s delightful to have them give a stamp of approval to me as a collector and as a friend of artists, whom I hold foremost in all that I have done,” Jones said. “I have been out there muscling the bar up. I hope I have raised it to a point where the art world will never be the same. We’ve made it more inclusive; we’ve brought about a greater equity in art.

“I’ve said since the beginning of my collection that there are good, sound, solid, mature artists of color who belong in museums and major collections and whose work deserves the same price when they go to the Sotheby’s and Christie’s of the world as other artists of comparable talent,” Jones said.

The first major exhibition drawn from the Paul R. Jones Collection, titled The Paul R. Jones Collection: A Century of African American Art, is on view through June 1, in Mechanical Hall, and adjacent Old College, on UD’s Newark campus.

Article by Martin Mbugua
Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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