Black Prizes

The Harmon Foundation is a philanthropic corporation established by the late William E. Harmon (real estate) in 1922, not only to aid mankind but to impress his children with their social responsibilities by making them permanent and active directors. The Foundation has built 118 playgrounds throughout the country, made 5,000 loans to college students, produced 75 reels of religious motion pictures, established awards for Honor Men in industry, Eagle Scouts, newspaper cartoonists, South Carolina farm wives. For the fifth year last week the Harmon Foundation gave a New York exhibition and distributed prizes for the work of Negro artists.

From Cuba to California, 57 Negro artists were chosen to show 107 exhibits. Prizes were awarded by a jury that included Artist William Auerbach-Levy,

Photographer Arnold Genthe, Director Alon Bement of the National Alliance of Art & Industry. No awards were ever more welcome; most of the seven prize-winners bitterly needed the money. The $150 Robert C. Ogden prize for the "most outstanding" work went to Sargent Claude Johnson of Berkeley, Calif, for two neo-Mexican colored drawings and a porcelain figure of a praying child with a fine Persian green glaze. Artist Johnson is an old hand at Harmon honors, has won two others.

Among the most effective works exhibited was a still life Fetiche et Fleurs by Palmer C. Hayden, which won Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s $100 for excellence in painting. An appealing Head of a Girl in plaster by William E. Artis won another $100, the John Hope prize in sculpture.

Painter Hayden, war veteran and former mail carrier, was earning his living as a window washer and scrubman on Park Avenue when he won his first art prize, $400 and a gold medal, in 1926. His employer added $3,000 and sent him abroad to study. Painter Hayden managed to make the $3,400 last him five years in France, was finally sent home penniless by the American Legion last autumn. The Harmon Foundation now gives him an occasional meal, provides him with canvas and paints. His winning composition shows an African head beside a heaping vase of spotted Argus orchids (Cypripedium). Such orchids cost about $2 per bloom. Artist Hayden painted them through the plate glass of a Fifth Avenue florist's window.

Sculptor Artis, 18, is a third-year high-school boy who peddles newspapers two days a week, studies sculpture at the Museum of Natural History's free classes on Saturdays, lives chiefly on free lunches at his high school. Just before he won his $100 last week, Artis' unemployed brother with whom he has been living was forced to put him out on the streets to shift for himself.

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