1949-2008
Tina Allen was an artist who produced more than a dozen bronze sculptures of nationally known African American activists as well as smaller abstract sculptures and bronzes. Her monumental sculptures fill numerous public spaces in the United States.
Allen lived in Grenada, West Indies until her early teens. She received her B.F.A. from the University of South Alabama in 1978. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and received her M.A. at Pratt Institute.
Her first major commission was a 9-foot bronze sculpture of labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who organized a union for sleeping car porters in the 1920s. Her early realistic sculptures were of prominent African American men. Later she sculpted likeness of African American women. Her sculptures included likenesses of George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth, and the Rev. Martin Luther King. According to her, her works were her way of “writing our history in bronze.”
Some of her works are in the permanent collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the African-American Museum in Long Island, New York.
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