The Middle Passage

Tom Feelings described himself as a storyteller in picture form, reflecting and interpreting the lives and experiences of the people who gave him life. He identified as an African who was born in America, bringing to his art a quality rooted in African culture and expanded by the experience of being black in America. He used fine art and illustration to express form from an African perspective, an African worldview, and to tell the African story. The struggle to create artwork and to live creatively under any conditions and survive embodies his particular heritage in America.

Born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, Tom Feelings attended the George Westinghouse Vocational High School where he majored 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, and 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 both as an illustrator for the 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, illustrated by Mr. Feelings, was chosen as a 1969 Newbery Honor Book. 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 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, and 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 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 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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