Artist Joyce Owens died at her Lincoln Park home Saturday, in the same library where she married her husband 41 years ago.
She was 76.
Born in Philadelphia, Ms. Owens was a nationally and internationally recognized artist. But she also valued her roles as a professor, curator, mother and wife.
The mixed-media artist married Monroe Anderson, an award-winning Chicago journalist, after both went through divorces. Their friend, legendary journalist Renee Ferguson, essentially tricked the two into meeting.
“Renee thought we’d make a great couple,” Anderson remembers. “So she told me that Joyce really, really, really wanted to meet me. And she told Joyce that I really, really, really wanted to meet her. That was not on either of our minds.”
But it was love from the start.
Five years later, they married in the library — the couple had too many friends and wanted to save money.
Ms. Owens’ mother was an opera singer and encouraged her to be an art teacher.
Ms. Owens attended Howard University for her undergraduate studies, at the birth of the Black Power movement. It, and the Black experience as a whole, inspired her art throughout the rest of her life.
She primarily painted but she also dabbled in 3-D art forms and even jewelry-making.
Ms. Owens headed to Yale University for graduate school, where she was the only African American in her class.
The job market in art appeared bleak, so she turned to local television work. She worked in Chicago for WBBM TV -Channel 2 as a graphic arts coordinator before meeting Anderson.
After giving birth totwo sons, Scott and Kyle, she pursued her art part time. She relished being a “helicopter mom,” her husband says.
Ms. Owens applied for a prestigious art program that selected artists to show their work on loan at various embassies around the world. Her work appeared in galleries in Liberia, Ethiopia and Sweden through the Art in Embassies program of the U.S. State Department.
“I made the decision to do work that was positive; my themes are race and gender,” Ms. Owens wrote alongside her Art in the Embassies Exhibition. “I decided not to do angry Black men and angry Black women. I painted what I saw. I want people to see positive examples, and I saw many.”
After part-time teaching and a solo exhibit, she became a professor at Chicago State University and accepted a full-time tenure-track position.
Ms. Owens loved to see plays and to drag Anderson to art galleries. Even though her mother was an opera singer, she primarily loved Motown music.
Her painting “Writers on the Roof” is on display at Navy Pier, Anderson says.
She is survived by her husband and two sons.
