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Benjamin Leroy Wigfall

African-American printmaker Benjamin Wigfall studied at Yale with Gabor Peterdi. He got his M.A. and spent many years teaching at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

Wigfall cut this plate into the heart-like shape and used various intaglio techniques to create a universe within the form, including adding elements to the surface of the plate to create three dimensional areas. He printed this proof in yellow, others were printed in colors. He did not edition this image.

At Armstrong High School in Richmond, Virginia in the 1940s, Wigfall pestered the principal to hire an art teacher. One arrived just in time -- the spring semester of Wigfall's senior year. The teacher helped Wigfall secure private lessons at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. "I didn't even know there was a museum in my city," Wigfall said. "It was a segregated city, and I was in a very segregated part of a segregated city." His exposure to the museum's collection, coupled with advice from African-American community leaders who respected his talent, led him to study art in college.

He enrolled in Hampton Institute, now Hampton University,a private historically black university located in Hampton, Virginia, where he received a VMFA student fellowship one year. He graduated in 1953 and received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to pursue graduate study.

Wigfall would later earn a master's degree in art from Yale University. In the meantime, he taught art at Hampton Institute and married Mary Carter, a Richmond native and Hampton graduate. He finished his degree work at Yale in the late 1950s and continued to teach at Hampton until 1963, when he was hired to teach art at the State University of New York at New Paltz, New York. He retired as an Art Professor at SUNY after teaching for over 30 years.