Vivian Ayers Allen, a poet, playwright and cultural activist "who vigorously promoted minority artists and had three children who had consequential careers in the arts," died August 18, the New York Times reported. She was 102. Her death was confirmed by her daughter, the actress Phylicia Rashad.
In 2002, the Times described Ayers Allen as "a Renaissance woman" for her wide-ranging expertise--from Greek classical drama to African American folk art. She also "had a direct influence" on the artistic lives of three of her children: Rashad, a Tony Award-winning Broadway actress; Debbie Allen, a Broadway actress, director and choreographer; and Andrew "Tex" Allen, a jazz trumpeter, pianist, and composer.
"As children, we were privy to great intellectual and artistic debates," Rashad told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. "My mother included us in everything that she did, and I mean everything. I remember as a child collating pages for her second book. It was wonderful."
Ayers Allen "forged a career in the arts at a time when Black women such as herself were largely invisible to mainstream cultural institutions," the New York Times wrote. Her debut poetry collection, Spice of Dawns, was published in 1953, and four years later saw the release of her verse novel Hawk, which explored racial freedom from the perspective of a hawk that ventures into outer space. In an interview, she called the book a "documentation of the process of transcendence." Her first play, Bow Boly, was "structurally up and out of the Greek drama," she told the Houston Post in 1962.
Ayers Allen became a fixture in the Houston arts scene, and her work "grew in its urgency and activism as the civil rights movement expanded across the South," the Times wrote, adding that in 1964, with help from the young novelist Larry McMurtry, she launched Adept, a short-lived literary quarterly that published verse by Vassar Miller, the future poet laureate of Texas, and paintings by the Trinidadian-American actor and artist Geoffrey Holder. She later founded the Adept Gallery for New American Folk Art, focusing on mixed-media works by Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americans.
In 1984, she moved to Mount Vernon, N.Y., to serve as director-curator of the Adept New American Museum. "When my heart gets tired of the intellectual work," she told the Mount Vernon Argus, "I can go out and dig in the garden and plant flowers."
Born in 1923 in Chester, S.C., Ayers Allen attended the Brainerd Institute, a boarding school founded in the late 19th century for the children of formerly enslaved people, and was part of its last graduating high school class in 1939.
In 1999, Phylicia Rashad bought the Brainerd Institute property and Ayers Allen converted it into the Brainerd Institute Heritage, which "has since been the site of Workshops in Open Fields, a program based on an initiative that Ms. Ayers Allen had started in Houston to promote the literacy and the arts among low-income minority youth," the Times noted.
From her poem "On Status" (read by Rashad):
So they've got no
tall skyscrapers!
--clowns and nightclubs
cutting capers--
Its home--
the Folk are warm;
And most important--
I belong!