Carole Byard

Carole Byard (1941–2017) was an American visual artist, illustrator, and photographer. She was an award-winning illustrator of children’s books. Byard illustrated more than sixteen children’s books over the course of her career. Her work often focused on the African American experience and on stories of African heritage. She was concerned with increasing the representation of people of color in American children’s books, and her illustrations reflect that interest in centering Black stories.

Byard had a lifelong fine-art practice in painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed-media art. She was part of the Black Arts Movement, a founding member of the Black Artists Guild, and an early member of Where We At: Black Women Artists Inc. (WWA), a collective that grew out of a groundbreaking 1971 show called Where We At: Black Women Artists, 1971. Her work was exhibited in the group show Chaney, Goodwin and Schwerner, the Mississippi Three: The Struggle Continues at the SoHo 20 Gallery in New York City. In 1992, she collaborated with Clarissa Sligh on an environmental, mixed media “portrait” of Malcolm X for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Byard was a participant in the 1998 Smithsonian exhibit Resonant Forms: Contemporary African American Women Sculptors, curated by Deborah Willis. The work she showed, Imani, the Seventh Day (1993), was an installation piece.

Byard also taught art at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Foundation for the Arts, Baltimore School for the Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Parsons School of Design.