Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art

Bringing focus to African-American art and its essential place in the history of American art.

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Herman Kofi Bailey

Alias Kofi X

1931-1981

Works in the Collection

PFF196-Herman Kofi Bailey, Young Woman From Yoruba, Charcoal, 1970-1975. Portrait of a woman with a head wrap.
Young Woman From Yoruba
1970

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PFF220-Herman Kofi Bailey, African Trader, Charcoal, 1970. Drawing of African trader in traditional dress and turban.
African Trader
1970

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Biography

Herman “Kofi” Bailey was born in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois and studied at Alabama State College, later earning his master’s degree from the University of Southern California. He is best known for his exquisite, highly structured, and deeply emotive representations of black figures in America and continental Africa. He also spent time studying at Howard University under master African American artists like Alain Locke and James A. Porter. Bailey was a fine example of a brilliantly trained artist and self-styled bohemian who was committed to marrying figuration and abstraction as representation. A committed Civil Rights activist and Pan-Africanist, Bailey used his work to bridge and shape an aesthetic that looked towards Africa and portrayed a more global perspective of blackness. The power of his work is not just in his descriptive elegance. His structural geometry, whether figurative, abstract or sometimes painterly, produced an iconic power of expression that is uniquely his.

Bailey’s work is included in such notable collection as the California African American Museum, Hampton University, National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Civil Rights Museum, Spelman College and the University Museums at the University of Delaware. He died in 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia.

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