The Middle Passage

“I am a storyteller in picture form, reflecting and interpreting the lives and experiences of the people who gave me life. I am an African who was born in America. Both answers connect me specifically with my past and present. Therefore, I bring to my art a quality rooted in the culture of Africa, expanded by the experience of being black in America. I use the vehicle of ‘fine art’ and ‘illustration’ as a viable expression of form, striving always to do this from an African perspective, an African world view, and above all, to tell the African story; this is my content. The struggle to create artwork, as well as to live creatively under any conditions and survive (like my ancestors), embodies my particular heritage in America.”

Born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, Tom Feelings attended the George Westinghouse Vocational High School, majoring in Art. After graduation, he received a scholarship to the Cartoonists’ and Illustrators’ School, which he attended for two years. Joining the Air Force in 1953, he was stationed in London, England, where he worked in the graphics division of the Third Air Force as a staff artist.

From 1959 until 1964, he worked as a freelance artist while attending The School of Visual Arts in New York. During this freelance period, his primary subjects were drawn from the African American people of his community. He traveled to the South in 1961 to draw the people of black rural communities; some of these drawings were published in Look magazine as part of a feature entitled “The Negro in the U.S.”

In 1964, he traveled to Ghana, where he spent two years working as an illustrator for African Review Magazine and for Ghana’s government publishing house, teaching illustration. Returning to the United States in 1966, he continued to concentrate on illustrating books with African and African-American themes. Julius Lester’s To Be A Slave, published by Dial and illustrated by Mr. Feelings, was chosen as a 1969 Newbery Honor Book, the first time a black author received this award.

From 1971 to 1974, Mr. Feelings lived in Guyana, South America, working as a teacher and consultant for the Ministry of Education, training young artists in textbook illustration.

Tom Feelings has received numerous awards for his art in books. In 1972, he was the first African American artist to win a Caldecott Honor Award for Moja Means One: A Swahili Counting Book. In 1975, he won a second Caldecott Honor Award for Jambo Means Hello: A Swahili Alphabet Book, both written by Muriel Feelings. Jambo Means Hello also won the prestigious Bienale Illustrations Bratislava Award and received a nomination for the American Book Award in 1982. Something On My Mind won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1978, and in 1994 he won his second Coretta Scott King Award for Soul Looks Back In Wonder. For Daydreamers, with poems by Eloise Greenfield, he received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. Mr. Feelings also illustrated Now Sheba Sings The Song, written by Maya Angelou.

The School of Visual Arts in New York recognized him with its Outstanding Achievement Award in 1974. He has received eight Certificates of Merit from the Society of Illustrators, and the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1982.

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