Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art

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

Leroy Allen

1951-2007

Works in the Collection

PFF190-Leroy Allen, Winds of Change, Lithograph, 2003. Depiction of baseball player from the Kansas City Monarchs in stadium with geese flying overhead.
Winds of Change
2003

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Biography

Leroy Allen was born in Kansas City, Kansas. Throughout his childhood, his parents encouraged him to develop his innate talent for art. After high school, Allen worked as a cartoonist for the Progressive Shopper News, a small black-owned monthly newspaper. He earned a bachelor’s degree in design from the University of Kansas in 1977 and worked at Hallmark in Kansas City, Missouri. There he met a group of black artists known as “The Kansas City 6” who inspired him to enroll in painting classes at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1990.

Allen had solo exhibitions at the Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans and the Robert Frazier Gallery in Kansas City and participated in group exhibitions at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Hearne Fine Art in Little Rock, AR, and the Black Creativity Art Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry. His work was also included in the American Watercolor Society’s 133rd Annual Exhibition and the National Watercolor Society’s 78th Annual Exhibition. In 2002, Allen was part of the “Black Romantic”  exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He was an active member of The Light In The Other Room, a collaborative of 22 African American Kansas City-based artists. Leroy Allen died in 2007.