Palmer Cole Hayden took his inspiration from the world around him, focusing on the Black American experience in both the rural South and the urban scenes of New York City. While many of his urban paintings were centered in Harlem, this historic site, New York City Hall, is located in Lower Manhattan.
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Born Peyton Cole Hedgeman in Widewater, Virginia, Hayden moved to Washington, D.C. when he was a teenager. His first formal training came from a drawing correspondence course. He worked odd jobs before joining the Ringling Brothers Circus, where he drew portraits of performers for publicity purposes. Hayden moved about the country until he enlisted in the United States Army in 1912. In 1920, he was discharged and went to New York City in the hopes of becoming a commercial artist. He moved to the Boothbay Art Colony in 1925 under a working fellowship, and in 1926 won the first Harmon Foundation Gold Medal Award, an award for distinguished achievement by a Black American in the fine arts. With the prize money and patron support, Hayden traveled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts. After a solo show in 1928 and several group shows, he returned to New York in 1932 and worked at a variety of part-time jobs while pursuing his art. Hayden even worked as a janitor in the Harmon Foundation’s offices, while regularly participating in their exhibitions. He also worked for the U.S. Treasury Art Project and for the Depression-era government-funded Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Hayden developed during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s but did not embrace the movement’s preferences for abstraction and African subject matter. One of his best-known works, Fetiche et Fleurs, did however incorporate African objects and textiles. Hayden’s early work was of marine subjects, but in New York he returned to a consciously naïve style and captured the day-to-day lives of Black Americans in urban and rural settings. His penchant for including unflattering, even stereotypical, images of blacks often placed him at odds with his peers who accused him of caricaturing Blacks for the amusement of whites. Despite such criticisms, Hayden brought a distinctive Black American presence to American art.