{
"data": {
"id": 118123,
"accession_number": "1939.240",
"share_license_status": "Copyrighted",
"tombstone": "Ol' Peckerwood, 1939. Elmer William Brown (American, 1909\u20131971). Linocut; image: 18.4 x 25 cm (7 1/4 x 9 13/16 in.); sheet: 21.8 x 33 cm (8 9/16 x 13 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland, 1939.240",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Ol' Peckerwood",
"creation_date": "1939",
"creation_date_earliest": 1939,
"creation_date_latest": 1939,
"artists_tags": [
"Black American Artists",
"May Show",
"male"
],
"culture": [
"America, Ohio, Cleveland"
],
"technique": "linocut",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Prints",
"collection": "PR - Linocut",
"type": "Print",
"measurements": "Image: 18.4 x 25 cm (7 1/4 x 9 13/16 in.); Sheet: 21.8 x 33 cm (8 9/16 x 13 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"image": {
"height": 0.184,
"width": 0.25
},
"sheet": {
"height": 0.218,
"width": 0.33
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": "40",
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "signed, lower right, in block: EWB; inscribed, lower left margin, in graphite: Ol' Peckerwood 1/40; lower right margin, in graphite: E.W. Brown '39; watermark: RIVES",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 382030,
"title": "The May Show: 21st Annual Exhibition of Works by Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen",
"description": "The May Show: 21st Annual Exhibition of Works by Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 3-June 11, 1939).",
"opening_date": "1939-05-03T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 667699,
"title": "Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community",
"description": "Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 23-August 17, 2025).",
"opening_date": "2025-03-23T04:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": [
{
"description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art (1/26/2014 - 5/18/2014); \"Our Stories: African American Prints and Drawings\"",
"opening_date": "2014-01-26T00:00:00"
}
]
},
"provenance": [],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "Although he worked in a wide variety of media, Elmer William Brown is best known for the murals that he created for public spaces as part of the Works Progress Administration during the 1940s.",
"description": "This composition centers on the White overseer of a chain gang composed of incarcerated Black men. To create the print, Elmer W. Brown drew on his own experiences in the Missouri state-prison system after having been caught riding a freight train illegally. While the men labor in the background, Ol\u2019 Peckerwood\u2014an insulting nickname for the lead guard\u2014stands imposingly in the foreground, his hand poised near his weapon, as shadows from the clouds above darken his form.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q80012868"
],
"internet_archive": []
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Elmer William Brown Entry Card to 1939 May Show. Cleveland Museum of Art May Show Records, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.",
"page_number": null,
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAMS04968"
},
{
"citation": "Kraynak, Scott, Henry Adams, Douglas Max Utter, William G. Scheele, R. A. Washington, and Mike Hudson. The Heart of Cleveland. Shaker Hts, OH: Red Giant Books, 2018.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: P. 29, fig. 28",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Benay, Erin. \"Peripheral Prints: Karamu House and the Rise of African American Art in the Midwest.\" Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 1 (Spring 2024).",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: fig. 6",
"url": "https://journalpanorama.org/article/peripheral-prints/"
},
{
"citation": "Francis, Jacqueline. \"Modernism(s): Karamu Artists Inc and Modernist Art.\" In Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community, Britany Salsbury and Erin Benay, 80-91. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2025.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: p. 84-85, no. 41",
"url": ""
}
],
"catalogue_raisonne": "Salsbury, Benay, and Kruse 8",
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1939.240",
"images": {},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 118123,
"creators": [
{
"id": 7838,
"description": "Elmer William Brown (American, 1909\u20131971)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "Painter and printmaker Elmer Brown was a leading Karamu artist of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Pittsburgh, Brown moved to Columbus, Ohio, at an early age. After a series of family disruptions, the teenaged Brown became a vagrant. During his wanderings, he began to draw thing, with a piece of coal, a pencil stub, or chalk, on sidewalks, walls, or freight car doors. In 1924 he was put on a chain gang for illegally riding freight trains, an experience that gave him a \u201csudden and harsh maturing\u201d. After moving to Cleveland in 1929, he associated with the art and theater departments of Karamu House, working as an actor and stage designer. He attended the Huntington Polytechnic Institute in Cleveland, 1933\u201334, on a Gilpin Players scholarship supplied by Karamu. Brown exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1934\u201343). In 1936 he joined the Cleveland theater project of the Works Progress Administration, working in scenic design. He later worked in the departments of graphic arts and sculpture-ceramics of the WPA. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, under the auspices of the WPA Ohio Art Project, Brown painted three murals for Valleyview Homes in Cleveland, a federal housing project. He exhibited with other Karamu House artists in New York City and Philadelphia (1942). Also that year he received two major commissions: one from the Men\u2019 s City Club of Cleveland to paint a mural on the subject \u201cfreedom of expression\u201d and the other from the U.S. Army to create patriotic illustrations to be displayed in segregated accommodations for African-American soldiers serving in World War II. In the late 1940s he taught at the Cooper School of Art, a commercial art school under private operation in Cleveland. In 1953 the American Greetings Corporation hired Brown as the first African-American illustrator on the staff, and he worked there until his death.
Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 224",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1909",
"death_year": "1971",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "1939-05-29T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1939,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "1939",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-03-27 00:01:12.387000"
}
}