Roy Rudolph DeCarava

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was the first African American to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship.

- 

He was born on December 9, 1919, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. DeCarava was the only child of a Jamaican mother and an American father, who separated when he was young.

In 1938, DeCarava graduated from high school in the Chelsea section of New York and studied art and architecture at the Cooper Union School of Art. However, after two years of facing hostility from white students, he left and enrolled at the Harlem Community Art Center to study painting. During this time, he worked as a sign painter for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program for artists during the Great Depression. He later served in the Army as a topographical draftsman during World War II. Upon returning to New York, he began screen printing, and his first exhibition of silkscreen prints premiered at a New York gallery in 1947.