Walter Ellison’s energetic scene of travelers departing a terminal for numerous destinations foregrounds the harsh realities of racial injustice under Jim Crow in the 1930s. On the left, white passengers, assisted by black porters, embark on vacations to Florida on southbound trains. On the right, black passengers board train cars heading north to Chicago, Detroit, and New York in search of work and opportunities for better lives.
By inscribing his initials, W. W. E., on a suitcase at lower right, the artist personalized this symbolic vision of relocation, loss, and hope. Born in Georgia, he was among the more than six million African Americans who joined the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North, moving to Chicago by 1926. Ellison studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1930s.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Signed lower right: Walter W. Ellison
Signed lower right (vertically on suitcase): W W E
Dimensions
20 × 36 cm (8 × 14 in.)
Credit Line
Charles M. Kurtz Charitable Trust and Barbara Neff Smith and Solomon Byron Smith funds; through prior gifts of Florence Jane Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, and the estate of Celia Schmidt
Reference Number
1990.134
Extended information about this artwork
Derrick Joshua Beard Fine Arts, Opening Exhibition, November 30–December 2, 1990, fig. 9. [This is an exhibition catalogue, but Train Station was not shown.]
Blair Kamin, “Inviting, by Design: Tigerman Helps Make Art Institute’s Children’s Exhibition Something to See,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 16, 1997, 4.
Andrea D. Barnwell and Kirsten P. Buick, “A Portfolio of Works by African American Artists Continuing the Dialogue: A Work in Progress,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, 2 (1999), 186, 193–94, cat 5, ill.
Judith A. Barter et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), cat. 103.
Sarah Kelly Oehler, They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 72, 74–75, cat. 64 (ill.).
Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago: Highlights of the Collection, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2017), 122.
Chicago, 1418 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago No–Jury Society of Artists, Inc., Twelfth Annual Exhibition, June 13–27, 1936, cat. 98, as R. R. Station, Macon, Ga.
Art Institute of Chicago, New Acquisitions: Early American Modernist Painting, June 25–Nov. 25, 1990, no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, Telling Images: Stories in Art, Sept. 1996–June 1999, ill. p. 38.
Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Collecting: African American Art in the Art Institute of Chicago, Feb. 15–May 18, 2003, no cat.
Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, July 17–Oct. 31, 2004, cat. 30.
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