Nelson Stevens

Nelson Lowell Stevens Jr. was born on April 26, 1938 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY to Dorothy Edwards and Nelson Stevens Sr. They lived in a brownstone with his older sister Joyce Stevens, their aunt Mildred Austin and grandmother Clemencia Furey. As a young child, Nelson and his friends drew in chalk on the sidewalks in front of his home and then went up to the roof to look down on them, he said those were his first murals. To encourage his art, his mother Dorothy would buy butcher paper from their local butcher, and affix it to the walls so that he could practice. Each month he would paint on the paper, tear them down and start over again.

In elementary school, teachers noticed his gift for visual arts and suggested he take classes at the Museum of Modern Art on weekends. That is where he discovered Picasso’s Guernica. While he didn’t care for the depiction, he respected it. It taught him that art could be used to educate people on what the world was like. He was ten years old.

After graduating Boys High School in Brooklyn his parents moved him and the family up to Utica, NY where he attended Berlin Central School, a junior college. While in junior college, visited a nightclub called Wang and Jeans that played jazz on the weekends. He began painting murals on the walls in exchange for free meals. Those were his first actual murals. From there Nelson went to The Ohio University on track and art scholarships. He broke records on the 220 yard dash. He graduated in 1962 and moved to Cleveland to teach art classes in junior high school, his students would enter their art in competitions and win awards. He married his college sweetheart Rosalyn “Lynn” Jones Fairfax and they adopted a son who they named Marc Fairfax Stevens.

Nelson became involved in the world of music because of a good friend, Winston Willis, who opened a club called the Jazz Temple in Cincinnati. He worked at the door of the club and became infused with the music of some of the giants in jazz. He became friends with many of them, especially Max Roach with whom he developed a very close and special friendship.

Through his friendship with Archie Shepp at the University of Massachusetts, he received three contracts with Impulse Records to create album covers, two for Archie Shepp, “Trumpet of My Soul and “The Cry of My People” and one for Marion Brown.

In 1969, he graduated from Kent State University with his MFA in Studio Art and Art History. That same year, he met Jeff Donaldson when he was forming AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) and he joined the group. Their goal was to unite all members of the African Diaspora and eliminate the western idea of the self and embrace the progress of the community. The founding members wanted to honor the past, contextualize the present, and prepare for a bright future by creating images that defined the visual aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement. The AfriCOBRA movement shows the importance of creating spaces for African American artists to create meaningful art and social change.

In 1973, Nelson was offered a professorship at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He taught there for over thirty years. He taught Advanced Drawing and Aesthetics in African American Art. While teaching, he still felt called to provide art for Black people. In 1980, on the anniversary of the founding of Tuskegee Institute, he was commissioned to create a mural inside the Tuskegee University Administration Building. The mural is called Centennial Vision, it spans forty feet and it is still on view in the Administration Building today. Over the course of his time at UMASS, he and a group of students from the University created thirty six murals over the span of four years around the city of Springfield. On June 12th of 2021, he was honored by the Springfield City Council and representatives in State government when they declared June 12th Nelson Stevens Day in Springfield. Together with Marciana Sealey, their second child Nadya Stevens was born in 1983.

In addition to his AfriCOBRA membership, he belonged to the College Art Association and the National Conference of Artists. One of his paintings now hangs in the Smithsonian at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. His work has been featured at exhibits in New York City, The Broad in Los Angeles, The Tate Modern in London, in Venice Italy at the Biennale and various other locales. In 1993, Stevens initiated the Art in the Service of the Lord, a four-year project which produced a Black Christian Fine Arts Calendar with works from African American artists.

He often said “I am the hope and the dream of the enslaved, called to create images of the physiognomy of Black folks in a vision of our liberated future.”

Nelson Lowell Stevens Jr., prominent artist and educator passed away 84 years old on July 22, 2022 in Maryland. Nelson leaves to mourn his passing, his son Marc Fairfax Stevens, his granddaughter Mary Wheelock, his daughter Nadya Stevens, her mother Marciana Sealey, and Nadya’s husband Apostolos Masouridis. As well as his nephews Eric and Bobby White. They will miss him deeply.