This painting by Wadsworth Jarrell is an homage to Billie Holiday, who was always known to perform with a gardenia in her hair. About this work, Jarrell says, "I wanted to have photographs of her. I cut out a variety of photographs from jazz books I had. I wanted that to be realistic. So then I went to the florist and got artificial flowers. That was her signature. Gardenias she wore in her hair. That's why they're there. I wanted an image of her in three dimensions."

This work is also emblematic of Jarrell's long effort to, as he says, make a "marriage of [his] sculptures and paintings." To that end, in the 2000s, he started adding tops to his paintings in wood. This work also contains a common gestural mark that has become a motif in Jarrell's work—a repeating loop—which Jarrell has described as abstract "writing."

Artist Biography
Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929, United States) is a painter, sculptor, and co-founder of the Black Arts collective AFRICOBRA. Recent exhibitions include AFRICOBRA: Nation Time, an official collateral exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale, and AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, and Soul of a Nation, which originated at the Tate Modern.

Born in Albany, Georgia, Jarrell was raised on a working farm. Inspired by the art in the Saturday Evening Post, he hoped to become an illustrator. He joined the US Army after high school and became the company artist for his unit. After the army, Jarrell moved to Chicago. While working at the International Paint factory, he enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Initially focused on design and illustration, he switched his attention to fine art after visiting various Chicago art museums. Back in Georgia, blacks had not been allowed inside museums. Seeing masterpieces for the first time in person inspired Jarrell. He enrolled full time at SAIC in 1954, and earned his BA in 1958.

Wadsworth has developed many distinct bodies of work, including sculptures inspired by the African cultural traditions, and a series of paintings dedicated to jazz musicians. A distinctive tool Wadsworth has used in some paintings is a brick laying trowel—something he learned to utilize in 1982, while creating a 300 foot mural at the headquarters of Westinghouse Electric Company. His work is widely collected, and is included in several important institutional collections, including that of the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of Africa American History and Culture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.