Cledie Taylor, a pioneering artist, gallerist and educator whose work in amplifying Detroit’s Black artisans and fortifying the city’s scholastic art curriculum, all while cultivating a prolific, multidisciplinary career of her own, has died, according to friends and collaborators in the art world. She was 100.
Taylor’s century-long timeline traces a path that aligns with the overarching narrative of how a once-segregated Detroit became a majority Black one, a story that fewer are around to tell. As one of the last of a shrinking generation of Southern Black migrants who came to Detroit with nothing but dreams and a prayer, Taylor was one of the rare to live long enough to embody those fully realized ambitions.
Born Cledie Collins in 1926, she was born in Arkansas “near a town so little it wasn’t even on the map,” she told the Chronicle in a May 1975 profile. At three years old, her parents migrated to Detroit, where she graduated from Cass Technical High School – an institution that would remain pivotal to her trajectory long after receiving her diploma.
While at Cass, Collins was active in the youth council of Detroit’s NAACP branch. In 1944, as the Chronicle reported, Collins, alongside several other Detroit teens, were involved in a large-scale effort to recruit more youth to the NAACP, and welcomed Olympic champion Jesse Owens to Detroit as part of its registration drive.
Eleven years later at the Detroit NAACP’s second annual Fight for Freedom Week in April 1955, the Chronicle reported that Taylor – now married to Lorenzo Taylor, a fellow artist – would be exhibiting handmade silver jewelry and sculpted pottery. It’s during this decade where the early tracks of the intersection of social justice and art in Detroit started to take shape.
In a brief from an October 1951 edition of the Chronicle, the paper announced the formation of Arts Extended, “an organization of artists actively employed with painting ceramics and sculpture,” and that it would be staging its first exhibition in the coming months. Their exhibition “broke a local precedent,” the Chronicle reported in February 1952, allowing the collective as a whole to quickly ramp up in stature in the local art scene, “bent on making the city – and nation – take cognizance,” according a August piece in the weekly later that year.
Taylor, alongside artists Charles Finger, Myrtle Hall, Roderick Warren, Ernest Hardman, LaVern Flake and Roy Brooks, were among the organization’s charter members, which would later come to be associated withother would-be notables like Leroy Mitchell, LeRoy Foster, Shirley Woodson, Oliver and Alice Agee, and Marian Stephens.
“There is a trend of late to bring art back into our everyday lives,” Taylor told the Chronicle’s arts column in May 1959 during an Arts Extended show at the Northern Recreation Center. “The trend is good, for that is where art belongs.”
Throughout the 1950s, Arts Extended staged exhibitions for its local artists, brought emerging artists into its fold for mentorship, invited Black artists to Detroit for lecture and traveled across the U.S. to stage pop-ups in other cities. In 1959, at 100 E. Warren Ave., the Chronicle reported that Arts Extended had secured space for its own gallery – a footnote at the time of publication, but later realized as a milestone in the years to come as “the first Negro
“A cultural renaissance is taking place in Detroit’s Negro community,” Alma Forrest Parks, founder of the Detroit Actors’ Guild, wrote in a February 1963 feature in the Chronicle, just a few months before the Rev. C.L. Franklin of New Bethel Baptist Church would lead Martin Luther King, Jr., down a march down Woodward Avenue. “Decades of separate and frequently-better-than equal treatment on the part of the Negro community has helped produce the high level of cultural attainment in Detroit’s Negro community.
“Fifty years ago, there were no Leroy Mitchells, Ernest Hardmans or LeRoy Fosters, no Arts Extended group, nor any plans to build a $20,000 permanent gallery and studio,” Forrest Parks continued.
In those years with Arts Extended, Taylor honed her craft as a silversmith and jeweler, exhibiting her wares at Arts Extended shows across the city and other social and fundraising events – as well as her own.
The Chronicle previewed a March 1963 solo exhibition of Taylor’s craft put on by Arts Extended: “Where one would expect the shocking effects typical of the current trends in modern art, Taylor’s art, on the contrary, emanates a feeling of peacefulness and religious reference. Even in those sculptured pieces where an identity of the subject matter is less discernible, the shapes are pleasing to the eye and to the sense of touch.”
In the larger context of Taylor’s trajectory of not just an artist, but a Black woman artist, it’s worth noting that the headline – and the time period it was written — of this particular write-up is “Homemaker – Teacher Has Art Exhibited.” On one hand, the piece checkpoints Taylor’s work and home life at this stage of her life; by 1963, she had graduated from Wayne State University, pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, taught art in Detroit Public Schools for 14 years, and she and Lorenzo had started a family within the same time frame. On another, today’s reader would wince at an accomplished artist being branded as a “homemaker.” It would be, however, the last time the Chronicle would frame Taylor’s profile in this style.
How soon that change was on the horizon: Taylor herself had a Chronicle byline in 1965, where she penned a feature describing her international travels in search of the world’s art. Her words here more than 60 years ago could be reflective of any modern-day backpacker or influencer.
“Along with our papers, fresh new luggage, and a favorite hand mirror or some other fine talisman-like trinket, we take ourselves in all of our quirks and all of our ways. If we could manage to take a built-in ability to enjoy the present, the being here now, the city where we are stopping by mistake, the main dish that we can’t pronounce and certainly never ordered, the bland spice and the non-sweet sweet, a good time is assured,” Taylor wrote.
Throughout the years, Taylor and her family had voyages to Japan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, France and Italy, but in 1965 – now teaching at Southeastern High School, “where she endeared herself to students and faculty who appreciate her for herself and her talents,” the Chronicle reported in a February issue from that year – she’d travel alone to the latter country to begin studies in Roman antiquities, Etruscology – the study of an ancient Black civilization in Italy — and Italian at the University for Foreigners at Perugia, following additional studies at New York University. A later Chronicle profile in 1975 note that Cledie and Lorenzo’s teenage children, Paul and Pamela, are both “fluent in Italian.”
Taylor assumed an art instructor position at Cass Technical High School in 1969, where there were several white art teachers but no Black ones; she clarified in a 1975 Chronicle profile that the staff was “integrated” because she “desegregated.”
“I love teaching,” Taylor told the Chronicle in an August 1973 profile. “I teach strongly. I direct students toward practical solutions to problems. I try to influence them to choose a direction, to go to school. Black children must get a degree to be recognized as capable in any field.”
Taylor’s artistic output outside the classroom only multiplied by this time. While continuing her work with Arts Extended, she’d also booked commissioners for her sculpting work with galleries, her jewelry work with jewelry retailers, and custom works for the likes of New Detroit and Broadside Press. Among the collectors of her craft: Lena Horne.
“I would be most unhappy if I had to choose between art and teaching,” Taylor, who by the 1980s became director of arts education at Detroit Public Schools and earned a doctorate at the Union Graduate School in Yellow Springs, Ohio, officially earning the title “doctor.” Dubbed the “First Lady of the City’s Art Colony” by the Chronicle in 1983 — twenty years after “Homemaker – Teacher” – Taylor’s balance between art practitioner and art educator remained steady, culminating in being an art director of the Children’s Museum while being instrumental in planning the Detroit’s first major arts festival in 1987.
The first half of Taylor’s life was marked by building a platform for Black artists at a time where none existed. The second half was maintaining it – particularly throughout Detroit’s numerous financial challenges that forced cuts to arts curation and education in her final 50 years. More than once in conversation, Taylor was asked about her unwavering commitment to the city.
“The art climate has always been good in Detroit,” Taylor said in 1989. “Go some other places and then you will see how much our city has to offer,” she said in 1975. “Every time I come back to Detroit, I see something better.”
She leaves behind a city – and its people — made better.
“The importance of art appreciation is that art is part of one’s life,” she told the Chronicle in 1989 – forty years after telling this publication that art in everyday life was a growing trend. “Art is a civilizer and tenderizer. Without it, there is no culture, and life becomes very mechanical.”
